Which Side of History? by James P. Steyer

Author:James P. Steyer [James P. Steyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2020-08-16T05:19:58+00:00

Adapted from A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

Part 4

Where Big Tech Went Wrong

The Thief in Our Pockets: The Dark Side of Smart Tech

Laurie Santos

Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology, head of Silliman College at Yale University, and host of The Happiness Lab podcast.

It’s January 9, 2007, and Steve Jobs is addressing a huge crowd at the MacWorld trade show conference. After an update about Apple’s ongoing work with Intel processors and Apple TV, Jobs looks away from the crowd and pauses. He takes a long sip of water and seems almost as though he is bracing himself for something big. “Every once in a while,” he softly tells the crowd, “a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. . . . Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.”

That fateful afternoon, Apple introduced the world to the first iPhone — an entirely new kind of invention that combined mobile phone technology with a pocket-sized internet communications device. The iPhone also had the same kind of operating system and software as the best Mac computers, all the amazing music capabilities of the iPod, a state-of-the-art camera, and easy-to-use touchscreen controls. Each person on the planet could now have one of the most powerful technologies most human societies had ever known inside their pockets. Every song, video, news article, and fact on the internet was now — quite literally — at our swiping fingertips.

Jobs’s announcement boasted that the iPhone would reinvent the phone, but just over a decade later, it’s clear that his invention changed much more. We don’t just use our smartphones to call a friend. Nowadays our phones are our photo albums, banks, cameras, newspapers, social clubs, camcorders, weather reports, alarm clocks, marketing departments, music libraries, televisions, movie theaters, travel agents, calendars, flashlights, video conferencing services, inboxes, magazines, maps, traffic reports, calculators, stock market experts, video game consoles, shopping carts, grocery stores, take-out counters, taxi services, step trackers, workout buddies, and porn collections. The smartphones of today have become the most captivating stimulus the human species has ever known. But what effect are these unprecedentedly huge bundles of information, entertainment, and services inside our pockets having on our real-life interactions?

A surprising hint comes from a rather unlikely economic indicator — chewing gum sales. In the decade since the iPhone hit our pockets in 2007, global gum sales have declined about 15 percent. To see why that’s relevant, consider the last time you waited in line at the grocery store. If you’re like most people, you probably spent at least some of that time staring at your smartphone. In fact, one recent study found that 62 percent of people pulled out a device while waiting in line, and more than 80 percent of those people whipped that device out in less than twenty seconds. Just a few years earlier, standing in line felt very different. Back then, we felt bored — so bored, in fact, that we wound up noticing the world around us.

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