The Phone Is Addicted to You
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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The Question Concerning Technology
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Heidegger's essay is directly quoted and central to the article's thesis about technology revealing the world as 'standing reserve' - readers would benefit from understanding the full philosophical framework being referenced
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Attention economy
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The article's core argument that 'your attention is the raw material that keeps this economy alive' directly engages with attention economy theory - understanding its origins and mechanisms deepens the philosophical reframing
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Commodity fetishism
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The article explicitly invokes 'commodity in the Marxist sense' when describing how users become the product - this foundational concept from Marx's Capital explains the theoretical underpinning of the user-as-commodity argument
We’ve been told that we’re addicted to our phones. We can’t stop scrolling, can’t stand silence, can’t go a few minutes without checking the six hundred and sixteen apps we carry around. We can’t read or relate, or rest. We can’t escape the curse of abundant entertainment. We are, in short, little more than human remains. For a long time, I’ve believed this to be unquestionably true.
But lately I’ve been thinking—yes, it’s still legal not to outsource it to AI—and I’ve concluded that this story doesn’t make any sense: what addicts try to do is get closer to what feeds them, and yet, most people I know are trying, however clumsily, to get away.
Consider my example: I hide the phone when I’m working (I don’t remember where it is right now, I’m on my laptop), I delete one new app every week (last week it was ChatGPT; Gemini 3 Pro is better), I have no social media except Substack and Twitter, arguably the least invasive (never had TikTok, deleted Instagram in 2014). This is not the standard behavior of an addict, right? And it’s not just me; young people build rituals of resistance, like digital sabbaths, grayscale screens, bedtime bans, and those brick thingies that I don’t really understand (and, at this point, I’m too afraid to ask).
What I see is this: We hope to reclaim a fraction of peace against an overwhelming force, like navigating a tsunami or flying through a hurricane; it doesn’t look like addiction to me, but escape.
Meanwhile, technology moves in the opposite direction. It’s constantly learning to close the distance—from the dumb algorithmic feed that Facebook engineers built in the company’s early days, ranking posts by likes and shares, to TikTok’s behavioral engine that decides what to show you based on subtler cues, like how long your eyes linger on a clip, to the LLMs that power Twitter or Sora, OpenAI’s new social media app for AI-generated short-form video.
The phone watches us pull away and grows hungrier, adapting to our defense mechanisms. As we evolve to resist it, it evolves to stay nearer: from social media to chatbots, to pendants and glasses, and, eventually—if we let it get away with it—inside our brains.
In clinical terms, the phone adjusts its “internal state” (and external shape) to increase
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