Paul Greenberg - Goodbye Phone, Hello World

Text copyright 2020 by Paul Greenberg.
Illustrations copyright 2020 by Emiliano Ponzi.

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-8452-4 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-7972-0029-3 (epub, mobi)

Design by Lizzie Vaughan.
Typeset in Brandon Text and Sentinel.

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Life is available only in the present moment.

THICH NHAT HANH

My son was born in 2006.

The iPhone was born in 2007.

They have been competing for my attention ever since.

I always knew it was wrong to steal a moment to look at my phone instead of my son.

But I thought I had plenty of moments...

REALITY CHECK

Secure attachment begins in infancy, when children take visual cues from their parents gaze. In a 2017 study of children aged seven to twenty-four months, it was found that infants and toddlers had higher levels of distress and were less likely to investigate their surroundings when their parents were on their mobile devices.

And then my son was twelve.

My time as the father of a small child had come to an end.

What had I given my device that I could have given my son?

Like the average American, just under 4 hours a day.

Every day.

Two months out of every year.

Two years out of the dozen my son had been alive.

Gone.

REALITY CHECK

How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?
Sean Parker, first president of Facebook

And now my son was twelve.

He told me it was time he got his own phone.

Most of his friends already had one.

Eighty-nine percent of the 40 million American adolescents already do.

Was there anything I could say?

Is every child now required to forfeit those same hours, months, and years?

More, actually.

Teens now spend on average more than 7 hours out of every day on their devices.

Nearly the sum of their entire time outside of school.

I researched, I reflected, I despaired...

I learned that my phone is not there for my amusement or my sons education.

Its there for our marketable distraction.

Its purpose and our purposes are at odds.

I learned that the bank account of my time, which my device had drained over the last decade, was the currency of something that had recently come to be called The Attention Economy.

A system of commerce that draws its profits by laying claim to our focus and selling it on the open market.

Of course, people have always been trying to use our time for their profit.

The first newspapers that sold advertising took a few minutes a day away from the people of the 1800s.

Radio in the 1920s and 30s took a few more.

Television in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s took still more.

Our minds and media have always been a little like host and virus.

The host tries to resist invasion.

The virus adapts to penetrate the hosts defenses.

The host adapts again and resists the new infection.

The virus adapts again and penetrates...

Theres something new now.

The virus wants to take over the host entirely.

Today a smartphone brings the moment-merchants past all our defenses into every second of our waking lives.

Every tick of the clock can be sold.

Every minute can be bundled and shopped to a third party.

And the power of the moment-merchants has grown apace.

The CEOs of the largest Attention Economy companies have amassed fortunes comparable to those of the pharaohs of Egypt.

Pyramids of unfathomable wealth built out of the bricks of our consciousness.

The next time my son asked me about getting his own phone, I tried to tell him all this.

I wanted him to see his thoughts as precious, private.

I wanted him to keep his time for himself.

If the phone is so bad, he asked, why are you always on it?

I wanted to tell him that it wasnt my fault.

I wanted to tell him what Cal Newport had said in Digital Minimalism, that people dont succumb to screens because theyre lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.

I wanted to tell him that when you look into your phone, you think its just your two eyes looking at a screen.

Whats really happening is that 10,000 programmers eyes are looking back at you, following you, tailoring your environment so that youll keep looking.

But nothing I said meant anything to my son.

I had to do something.

What if I quit? I asked him.

Youll never quit.

I think Ill quit.

No you wont.

If I quit, will you stop asking to start?

He didnt answer.

So I quit.

At the phone store, the saleswoman keyed in the codes to switch me to a flip phone.

A dumb phone, some people call it.

Did anyone ever ask you to do this? Go backward instead of forward? I asked.

Nope.

Do you think its a good idea?

I mean, maybe. But how are you gonna get places?

I thought of all the places I once got to...

One July day, long before the smartphone, I asked my friend Molly to meet me

at 11:00 a.m.

on the ninth of September in the Piazza Margana in Rome.

She was there.

And I thought of all the wanderings of my friends and lovers during my teens and twenties. All the places theyd disappeared to and all the magical ways Id found them again. When Laura D., with the long blond hair and the operatic voice, who never capitalized her is, was heading to Florence, I wrote a letter addressed to her at the central post office like this:

And she wrote back!

Before smartphones,

when you thought of the people you loved,

you thought of their faces.

And you thought of their handwriting.

My son and I left the store with my new dumb phone.

A minute later, I reached in my pocket to check something.

There was nothing to check.

There was only my son.

Now what are you going to do? he asked.

I have to think about it.

And I thought about it.