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On this week’s episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with his Atlantic colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany about what our phones are doing to us. Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her iPhone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely. Warzel and Tiffany talk about the growing smartphone backlash, legal cases against “big tech,” and how, even if many people are convinced that their phones are a problem, the science remains far from conclusive regarding direct harm.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Kaitlyn Tiffany: There’s been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn’t really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like: Social media and smartphones are really bad for us, and I should be trying to use mine less.
[Music]
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about what our phones are and aren’t doing to us.
“It’s Obviously the Phones.” That was the title of a viral Substack essay that came out in March of 2024. Magdalene Taylor, a writer who focuses on sexuality and culture, was trying to articulate why fewer Americans were having sex or going out with friends. There were, she argued, all kinds of factors at play here for increased isolation and alienation in American life. But all of them, she argued, felt abstract compared to the one that was staring her in the face: “The problem,” she wrote, “is obviously our phones.”
“It’s Obviously the Phones” is less an argument that cites endless empirical evidence as much as it says: Look around. Look how everyone is behaving. How could these devices that we carry around with us every moment of the day not be changing us? Now, about a week after Taylor’s essay, Jonathan Haidt, a contributor who is here at The Atlantic, published an essay that had the title “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” It came out just before he published The Anxious Generation, in which he argues that a new childhood around screens and devices has unleashed a mental-health epidemic among teens and young adults.
The book was an instant best seller, and it acted as an accelerant for this debate, between the Haidt camp and those who argued that Haidt’s claims are not quite supported by science. According to one criticism of Haidt in the journal Nature, “Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”
Now, I’ve found this debate endlessly fascinating, and also really frustrating. Studying the effects of phones or social media are often quite difficult to do at scale, because you can get stuck in this chicken-egg situation, where it’s unclear if social media is causing a behavior or exploiting people who are more susceptible to it, or if none of that matters at all and the end result is just “this causes harm to people.”
Here’s one recent example of the dynamic. Just this week, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a large study on the effects of phone bans inside schools. And the results are … honestly complex. Schools that made students keep their devices in locked pouches during the day obviously saw phone use decline significantly. But in the first year, according to the study, student suspensions increased by an average of 16 percent. Now, after an adjustment period, students did, however, report a better sense of personal well-being. But the survey—which tracked more than 40,000 schools since 2019—also showed that strict phone bans had “close to zero” effect on average test scores. The bans also did not improve student attendance or online bullying.
See what I mean? This is far from tidy.
And as a journalist who covers technology, I’m really wary of theories that take this complex and messy social behavior of humans at internet scale and just try to tie it all up in a bow. As a human who uses technology and has a tortured relationship with his own phone, I’m constantly feeling some personal version of “of course it’s the phones.” In my own life, I’ve found that heavy screen-time use outside of my job definitely tracks with periods where I’m feeling anxious. And it’s very clear to me that extended time on my phone and on social-media apps has profound short-term effects on my attention span and the way that I feel—both physically and about the world around me. Like a lot of people, I experiment with phone-free time, and I daydream about what it would be like to just get rid of the device forever.
Now, recently, my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany did just that. Kaitlyn’s been covering the internet and social media for years. And over the last decade or so, she’s been chronicling these debates—about social media, phones, screens, and the really messy, not-always-conclusive research about what they’re doing to us all. In that tradition, she recently traded her iPhone for a flip phone to report on a burgeoning tech movement called “Month Offline.”
What I’ve always appreciated about Kaitlyn’s work is that she is not afraid to eschew easy answers for nuance. And she’s also somebody whose own relationship to technology honestly just seems a lot less tortured than my own. So I brought her on today to talk about what she learned ditching her smartphone, and where she stands now on the great phones debate.
[Music]
Warzel: Kaitlyn, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Kaitlyn Tiffany: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.
Warzel: Okay, so I want to start with this. You have been writing about technology for a long time. We’ve known each other and worked together for a while. I wanted to start, before we get into anything: What is your relationship to your phone as it exists in 2026?
Tiffany: My relationship to my phone … I think my phone is very beautiful. I have this, since we’re doing video I can show.
Warzel: Oh, yeah.
Tiffany: My sister made me this Mets glittery phone case. I think an iPhone is very satisfying to hold. It’s wonderful what it can do. I love using it. And then other times—which I think is a very relatable experience that many people talk about—at other times, I feel sort of like I don’t really know what I’m doing with my phone. Like, I’m just doing phone. You know, you can kind of sit down and be like, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee and stand up in 10 minutes and go about my day. And then 45 minutes later, be like, Oh, I was just doing phone. You know, I don’t really know what occurred during that time. But most of the time, I think of my phone as just like this lovely, useful device that once in a while causes me to enter a time warp, if that makes sense.
Warzel: Yeah, I also find talking about how, like, they’re beautiful is … I think it’s underdiscussed. Like sometimes my case will get all like messed up, and I’ll take it out of the case for the first time and experience the phone just, you know, without any of the stuff on it. And I’m just like, this is just so … I marvel at it again for the first time. Like: This is lovely; let me clean off the screen and really get to, you know, play with this thing.
Tiffany: Yeah, totally.
Warzel: And it feels like this, yeah. And I also, I very much feel the time-warp thing. I like the idea of having a name for it, of just doing phone. I find I do that the most on weekend mornings, when I like have the whole world in front of me, and I don’t have to be working. And I’m like, I just lost this period of time. I don’t know what happened. Mine is definitely very tortured. Yours is sort of less of that. It’s more just like, you’re wary of those moments when you get sucked in, and you try to not have that happen. How would you describe the quality of that relationship? Like, what adjectives would you use to describe it?
Tiffany: I feel like it’s not tortured most of the time. There are times where I realize in a startling way that I need to recalibrate. Which is like, for instance, when I’m trying to look at my phone while I’m brushing my teeth or something. That’s when I’m like, Okay, this isn’t how I want things to be. I need to deliberately not do this.
Warzel: The reason why I wanted to kind of set that baseline is you recently wrote about undergoing a sort of detox experience, or dry January, for your phones. Tell me about Month Offline. What is Month Offline? How did you become aware of it? What’s the deal?
Tiffany: Yeah, it started last year in D.C. as basically literally what it sounds like: a group of people who would do a month offline. But in this case, offline is referring to the iPhones or smartphones specifically. Which is sort of interesting, because I think that’s kind of a cultural thing we’ve started doing too, saying “the internet” and meaning “Instagram, on my phone.” But in any case, it started with a group of people who switched fully to dumb phones, flip phones, for a month. And committed to doing that and meeting up once a week to talk about what was good about it, and what was hard about it, and et cetera.
And it’s evolved since then. So now it’s in D.C. and New York, but it’s also kind of a phone company. So the flip phones that you get now, if you participate, have this pretty interesting—I think, like, technologically intriguing—custom operating system. So that your iMessages, your WhatsApp messages, your regular texts and phone calls will be forwarded from your smartphone to this dumb phone, more or less seamlessly. I had like a few issues with it. And then it also has Google Maps, Uber, which I never used, Microsoft authenticator. Like a couple of other things that people were saying, “Oh, you know, I could really use this, and then I would be willing to switch to a dumb phone.”
It’s $25 a month for the phone plan, and they’re starting to build up this sort of company that treats a flip phone like an accessory to an iPhone. Almost like an Apple watch. And the idea is that you would be able to leave your smartphone at home for extended periods of time. They did tell us to always leave our phones plugged in and charging and on, because the forwarding didn’t work as well, I suppose, if they were off.
But yeah; that’s the general idea. So I signed up to do the March cohort and went to these meetings in Bushwick [Brooklyn] with about 30 other people, I would say. And used a flip phone.
Warzel: Could a person just go and get the phone and not have the experience of … like, are they just straight up selling phones for people who want them? And you could subscribe to this plan, this thing?
Tiffany: Yes. It’s called Dumb Co.—Dumb.co. And you can just get the phone. They’re not making their own hardware. They’re TCL flip phones. It’s like a flip phone that they are sourcing and then preloading with this custom OS, and then shipping to you. And yeah, you can just buy one online.
Warzel: Okay, so now, so you sign up for the thing in March. First time at the meeting: Describe for me the crowd. Like, who is participating here? And was there a very standard pool of, like, gripes or concerns or reasons for it? Like, paint that picture for me—because I have one in my head of like a Bushwick cell-phone-free meetup thing. And I want to hear from you what it was like.
Tiffany: To be clear, I’m a huge Bushwick fan. I love Bushwick. I know what the cultural trope is of Bushwick. But I think it’s a fantastic neighborhood: really interesting, lots going on, lots of different kinds of people. I will say, though, what you are picturing is probably pretty close to accurate. Everyone there, to my knowledge, everyone there that I spoke to was around the ages of like, 26 to 32. Mostly, you know, creative-class jobs, maybe tech jobs, some grad students, almost all women. I think of the 30, there were maybe four or five men.
And yeah, like super nice, thoughtful people. But I think all kind of on the same wavelength of like, I have a job or a lifestyle that kind of requires me to look at a smartphone or a laptop a lot, and that is bleeding into me doing it all the time in my personal time. And maybe a little bit of just angst about how you’re living your life in general, you know? Like, I think people talked about losing all this time to their iPhones, and not having time to read or write songs or make new friends. Or, you know, go do whatever they would want to do in New York City. They weren’t experiencing acute, specific harms that they mentioned from anything they were doing online. It was just like—the loss of time. All the time they felt they were losing.
Warzel: What’s your mindset going into this? Is it like, This could be good for me? Is it just, I just want to have the experience and just sort of see what it does? Or was it, I’m actually more interested in the ways that, like, I can watch, you know, other people give feedback? How much of this was for yourself, and how much of it was for just the reporting experience of being around this group?
Tiffany: I think it was mostly for the reporting experience. Like I said, you know, I don’t find it hard to put my phone away if I think of it. If I think, like, I’m using my phone a little too much, it’s easy for me to correct that. So I kind of knew it wasn’t gonna do that much for me personally.
But I was really interested in it mostly because in New York, over the past couple of years, there has been this palpable shift, or rising energy around being anti-smartphone, anti–social media. Literally walking around the streets, there’s posters everywhere that say, you know, Big Tech is watching you or Kick the screen time. Or the ads for Month Offline say Flip off. There’s just a lot of it everywhere.
The anti-AI spirit is pretty palpable in New York, too. You know, our colleague Mateo wrote about the Friend AI subway campaign that was defaced all over the city. So I’ve been curious, I guess, about how much of that is real, and what kinds of people are interested in it. Whether it’s just sort of smaller hobbyist groups, or whether there’s kind of a popular appeal. And so I think that was kind of the main motivation—was to actually meet some of these people who are contributing to this, I guess, for lack of a better word vibe that I’ve been getting.
Warzel: Month Offline is a pretty small group to begin with at the moment. But do you think this is indicative of something broader at the moment? Or is this kind of like a cultural, you know, like a coastal elite kind of vibe that’s there? Like, has it crept? Do you think this like ennui and culture kind of is everywhere, and we’re just not like hearing about it or seeing it as much? Or do you think that there really are these, like, locuses of, you know, the laptop class and like the creative class who are just like feeling this? What’s your sense of that geographically?
Tiffany: I think it’s both. I think there is an aspect of the tech backlash that is kind of an elite phenomenon, which you can see in some of the polling. People above a certain income level are more panicky about certain aspects of social media and technology. And that feels notable and strange, and I think probably comes from, I don’t know. like maybe what we’re just talking about. Like, if you have a laptop job, maybe you you worry about yourself more because you’re doing the thing more.
But I think there is a pretty broad anti-tech backlash in our culture right now—from the pretty popular phone bans in schools, the various attempts to regulate social media that haven’t really gotten anywhere because they generally run into pretty obvious legal problems. But we’re just starting to see a wave of personal-injury lawsuits against social-media companies. And I think there’s been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn’t really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like, Social media and smartphones are really bad for us, and I should be trying to use mine less.
I think they’ve also just kind of become uncool a little bit. And that’s just anecdotally speaking, but I have younger sisters who I just … I do not think that they find Instagram influencers or TikTok personalities or any of that stuff very cool. They don’t take pictures on their phones of things while we’re doing stuff. I think they mostly play Scrabble on their phones. I don’t know.
Warzel: Yeah. So, okay. So you are doing this experiment. You are bringing a flip phone with you as a primary device for a month out in the wild. What is the reaction from people when you take this brick out, flip it open, and try to engage in some way? Are people looking at you strange? Are they excited? What was the reaction?
Tiffany: Yeah, people are excited about it. Like, you know, I had friends who would want to look at it. They want to hold it; they want to flip it and flip it and flip it. You know, the guy at the coffee shop or somebody at the bar would say, “Oh, my God, it’s a flip phone. Where’d you get that? I kind of want one.” Et cetera. Like there was—I felt like anyone who saw it was kind of like tickled and intrigued, but probably also because they were all like roughly my age. So flip phones were hot stuff, you know? Those were the best phones you ever had, the most exciting thing you ever purchased or received, probably. So that was kind of the vibe.
Warzel: Yeah, no; they were great. They were like super, super durable. There was this, like, tactile pleasure that you got with it. It was like, a little bit of a device that didn’t work all that well, to navigate any kind of, like, early part of the connected world. It made phone calls really reliably well. But it also had this fidget-spinner-like quality to it, right? Where you could just, like, click around with it, and it was pleasurable in that way.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Warzel: So people liked it. How did it go for you? You wrote about some initial struggles. I think you said, quote, “At times like these, it felt as though this experiment in freeing myself was doing just the opposite.” What were those times? Explain the struggles.
Tiffany: Yeah; well, the main thing was that, as you know, we have a specific two-factor authenticator app that we are required to use for our jobs, for our work laptops. So I actually couldn’t leave my iPhone at home. I had to bring it to work with me every day, inside the yellow cardboard box that I had been given to stow it. So it was a little silly in that sense. I was just carrying it in a cardboard box; it’s like thumping around while I’m walking.
And then the one time that I actually did leave the house without it—I mean, I left the house without it a few times on the weekend. And this was on the weekend. I was going to a coffee shop to do some work on my computer and realized that I was locked out of it. I had to call my fiancé on my flip phone and be like, “Can you please bring me my iPhone so that I can touch the iPhone with my thumb, and then put it back in the box so that I can use this computer that is sitting in front of me currently?” That felt a little ridiculous.
And then I also talked about in the story, one of my sisters got into a medical residency; texted our family group chat. The text did not come through to my dumb phone. Neither did anybody’s, like, reaction texts to it. And I just coincidentally, five or 10 minutes later, texted them all, you know, “If you guys were thinking about drafting Seiya Suzuki early in our family fantasy baseball draft, he just injured his knee in the World Baseball Classic, so.” And she was like, “What?”
Warzel: That’s fantastic.
Tiffany: It was small things like that where I think I just was like, This is a needless inconvenience. But I think I also came in being like: It’s interesting that we got to this place. Where we have to pretend that something, or we believe that something as useful as an iPhone, is actually a hindrance to our happiness and functioning. Like, it’s good that I can look up where I am on Google Maps. But part of what we were talking about in this month offline was like, you know, maybe it was better when you couldn’t look up where you were on Google Maps, and you had to get lost, and you had to ask people for directions, and you had to try to remember where the roads were, like what the streets were, where you lived.
And I was sympathetic to that. Like, I do kind of pride myself on knowing my way around New York. But I’m also like: Why are we creating problems for ourselves? You know? And some people kind of … this is a new thing people were talking about this year. Frictionmaxxing. Like making things deliberately harder, because it makes them in some way more meaningful or authentic. It’s like—some people kind of can’t make things harder for themselves. Like, they’re hard enough already.
So there is sort of a tension there. Where I was thinking kind of all throughout, I totally get what everyone is saying. I totally understand why someone would do this. On the other hand—are we directly talking about the problems we think we’re talking about if we’re talking about how it’s kind of morally wrong to use Google Maps?
Warzel: You bring up this point, that it’s like—are we really attacking the right problem here? Like, maybe the problem is not the maps, and not all that. It’s that you have scheduled eight different things in eight different places that you have to, like, rush to. Where you don’t have time to plan it out or think about it. And that the problem with the connectivity is that it’s making you try to do too much at once, right?
It’s not that the tools exist; like, the tools may be fine on their own. But it’s the effect—the compounding effect of using the tool in so many different ways. This is what I think a lot of people feel when they feel overwhelmed by the connectivity in their lives, right? It’s like: Okay, I’ve got my calendar, I’ve got eight inboxes, 10 feeds I have to clear, all this stuff, meetings. Like, that’s not the problem necessarily, that that’s an outgrowth of the technology. But it’s not a problem with the tool. It’s a problem with, like, all the tools interacting on each other and making you feel insane.
Tiffany: Yeah, totally. I think something people talked about a lot that that resonated with me actually was, with the flip phone, just kind of feeling less available to people. And once I explained to people, like, “I’m using a flip phone this month,” it didn’t really bug them that I wasn’t constantly replying in group chats instantly. Or when I left the office wasn’t available on Slack, unless I went home and opened my computer. And my editor knew that.
I think that, yeah—the sort of frantic feeling actually went away a little bit. In the sense that you don’t have this tool that empowers you to be like, Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da, doing one thing after another—then you can’t do those things. So you have to just not. And that was pretty chill.
Warzel: It is pretty chill. I went to this golf tournament a couple weeks ago that famously doesn’t allow phones, right? There’s like a couple hundred thousand people in this huge open area, and you can’t have a phone for, whatever, eight, 12 hours. However long you’re there. There were certain people that I was trying to meet up with during the day, and you have to do the old-time thing of like, “We’re going to pick a place; we’re going to pick a physical location; we’re going to meet there at this time, right? Set your watches. I’ll see you.”
And the one thing that I thought about the entire time—it was usually pretty easy to actually execute those meetups or whatnot. The thing that I loved, that just felt so great about that, was like: I don’t have a choice. But to show up once I’ve made this commitment, right? Because, like, the window is closed. I have left the ability to say, “Hey, I’m gonna be 15 minutes late. I’m gonna be five minutes late.” And all of that like logistical, because we can be in such constant communication. And all the little changes are like, you know, canceling at the last minute when someone’s already showed up. Like, you just don’t have that option.
And the thing that I just kept thinking of is: Oh man, think about how it’s not that these devices are bad, or that, you know, I absolutely hate my phone in that way. But I just thought there is this simplicity of like: You still have the connection, but you don’t have to have all those, like, micro-things interfering. Which take up a lot of time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of, you know. That’s kind of, I think, what exhausts people.
Tiffany: Yeah. I had also with the flip phone, like when I was meeting up with people, I could text them. But with my iPhone, I have my fiancé and some of my friends, like I have their location on Find My Friends. So I can kind of be constantly resolving the anxiety of like: Where are they? How soon will they be here? Should I, like, take a lap before I go into the restaurant so that I don’t have to stand there? And when I had the flip phone, I was like, Well, I can’t resolve that question, so I guess I better not think about it. And I’ll just go to the restaurant and if they’re there, they’re there.
Warzel: There’s just less, like, cognitive load, right? Like I think that that is just one of the things that this produces is there are just scenarios you don’t have the ability to port through your head. You’re just like: I’ll be there. It’ll happen when it happens, or it doesn’t happen, you know?
Tiffany: Yeah, totally.
Warzel: Were there things that surprised you during the month? You know, things that felt either strangely joyous, or things that you were shocked about in your own life? One thing that I think about a lot is: People tend to say when they do whatever, unplugging things of any nature, that it’s really, really awful and hard at first. And there’s this like a ton of like, phantom scrolling, ghost scrolling or whatever. And then something just clicks, and it’s just like: Okay, I’m done with that. Like, it’s really hard to kick in the beginning, and then after a minute or a couple of days becomes very easy. I’m curious what your general experience was.
Tiffany: I think the main difference that I noticed, that I wasn’t expecting—because I had never really thought about it before—I love going on a really long walk. And so usually if I’m walking around Brooklyn or wherever, I would be listening to a podcast or listening to music or something. And in the past, like I would not think like, Oh, because I’m listening to this, I’m not engaged in my surroundings. Like I’m looking around, I’m saying, Oh what a beautiful tree, what a beautiful dog, whatever.
But not having that, I ran into people that I know more. And I was like, maybe they’re always around, and I’m just not seeing them. I’m not noticing people. I think I was just more engaged in hearing other people’s conversations, and kind of participating more in things that were around me.
And the degree to which I was using Instagram Reels as a nighttime pacifier, kind of—I was never the type of person who needs to stay up for hours, like inadvertently scrolling. But I loved the feeling of getting in bed, like getting all cuddled into my duvet and scrolling through Instagram reels for like 10 minutes before bed, and just seeing what the girls were up to. The girl in Kentucky who’s redoing her kitchen, the girl in the van life and whatever—just like what all my girls are up to. And it was really hard to give that up, to just get in bed and be like, I have no treat. I just have my thoughts. I just have my worries about everything I did wrong today, and everything I might do wrong tomorrow. That’s it.
Warzel: Good night.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Warzel: Yeah, in that sense, did you feel like then it created … you know, people talk about with food, having like “food noise,” right? Like even when you’re not hungry or whatever, you know, this idea of “when I’m gonna eat, what I’m gonna eat”—how, you know, a lot of people struggle with that type of thing.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Warzel: Did you find that this created, like, “scroll noise” for you? Or something like that?
Tiffany: Yeah. I think there were definitely times where I felt this irritation. Like, the same kind of irritation you might … just generalized irritation you might feel if somebody forced you to stop drinking coffee or something. I was just like, This is so stupid. But I was like, this isn’t fair. Like, I want to listen to my Bravo podcast, and I feel like I’m being punished. Yeah, I did have that a little bit.
Warzel: Okay, so with that in mind, this is like a decent way, I think, to segue into the broader conversation, which we touched on a little bit. About, you know—I feel like you’ve spent basically the last four or five years, wrestling with this question. This big debate that has been happening between, you know, the “it’s the phones, it’s definitely the phones” crowd—like social-media addiction. And the idea that like, it’s actually really hard to prove what is happening. It’s difficult to measure what is happening.
You wrote for us at The Atlantic here, in 2023, this long feature on the topic with the headline “No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing to Teens.” And this idea that there’s this uncomfortable reality here, right? That the mental-health and social-media connections are actually tough to net out. I was wondering if first, if you could just tell me a little bit about digging into that topic, working on that feature. Obviously, things have evolved since then; we can get into that. But what’s drawn you into that? And what have you kind of learned again, wrestling with that nuance?
Tiffany: It’s notable that six or seven, eight years ago, we were talking about this urgent need to reign in the powers of big tech companies. And we were talking about it in terms of intervening in what they were doing. We were talking about, like, antitrust solutions or privacy legislation or something that would limit their ability to make money the way that they were making money and amass power the way they were amassing power.
And then I think something shifted, maybe during the beginning of the pandemic and slightly afterward, where instead we started talking about how to protect kids from the internet by limiting their access to it. And it was being presented as something that had a really firm scientific basis and, you know, urgent kind of public-health component to it. So I just think that’s really important to understand as best as we can. And there are a lot of scientists who have been trying for a long time to understand it.
It’s really complicated, because, as we’ve been talking about in this conversation, a lot of things get sort of flattened or simplified into the same sentence. You know, like: Are boys and girls relating to this technology differently? How could we possibly know? Because this technology changes all the time, and by the time a study comes out, people are using the technology for different things. It’s very complicated and, I think, really interesting. And also really, really important, despite the fact that there are certainly people who would argue, “I don’t care what the science says; I know what I’m seeing, and we need to act now in dramatic fashion.” Yeah, I just—I think it’s important to know exactly what we’re acting on.
Warzel: Where do you feel we are on that continuum right now? You know, like, of the, “Of course it’s the phones” to like, “It’s really unclear.” Where is that discussion at the moment?
Tiffany: I think culturally we’re at “Of course it’s the phones.” I think scientifically we’re at, “You know, we spent a decade looking for proof of population-level harms of a direct relationship between social media and anxiety and depression and other terrifying mental-health outcomes. And that relationship on a population level has not materialized.”
That doesn’t mean that social media or heavy smartphone and screen use isn’t bad for certain people, or isn’t bad in certain ways. Something can be bad before it approaches the level of directly causing someone to develop a mental illness. Culturally, we’re at a place where we aren’t speaking with a lot of nuance. Scientifically, I think there are researchers who are digging more into the nuance, but they’re not really getting a lot of attention for those studies.
Warzel: In one of your articles—I believe around the social-media trials that recently happened, one in California, one in New Mexico, in which both ruled against the social-media companies—you quoted this professor of psychology. Name is, I’m probably getting the pronunciation wrong here, but Pete Etchells, I believe, in Bath University in England. And he told you that he found the situation, just the general situation, in this quote, really frustrating. And to quote you: One side denies that anything’s wrong. The other side compares social media to cigarettes, even though that makes little sense. And he says, “We’re not talking about a biological substance you could consume that has a demonstrable chemical effect.”
I think that’s really interesting, right? Because you have, on one hand, something that we are consuming in our brains. And even if we’re not consuming it directly, it does have this broader cultural effect. Social media affects how we communicate with each other, how we perceive ourselves against other people in the world. Like, it’s clearly acting on us. And yet these easy comparisons—or maybe not even easy—but these comparisons that feel in the moment, especially when people struggle with them, that are so apt. Like, yes, cigarettes or alcohol or whatever.
It’s like one thing is actually being physically consumed into our bloodstreams and changing that, versus sort of a cultural consumption. And that feels to me like a really important and also super-annoying distinction to have to make, when people are feeling a certain way. That you have to be like, “Well, actually, it’s not cigarettes, because you’re not smoking social media.”
Tiffany: Yeah, I had one of my notes apps of like story ideas that make no sense. I had one at one point that most it was like, “Headline: Most things just aren’t that much like other things.” This is so stupid, but…
Warzel: No, no; this is a classic writer thing. You have to have a notes app full of like totally crackpot ideas that make no sense to anyone but you. Otherwise you’re doing it wrong.
Tiffany: Yeah; it’s just like when you’re talking in metaphors, then it becomes like, okay, okay. But like, that’s useful to a point. Like, it’s not what we’re literally saying, which I actually have been sort of reflecting on as a reporter. I feel like seven or eight years ago, I was certainly part of a cohort of journalists who were writing about, you know, the extractive nature of social media. The way that it was like, gaming and profiting off of our attention; the algorithm does XYZ. And I think that was taken extremely literally. And now people can just say “the algorithm,” and it’s like there’s a boogeyman in the room.
Warzel: It’s really hard, because I see that too. I see a lot of just general, you know, “if X then Y,” with like phone behavior or tech behavior, right? And getting completely and totally rid of all of the human agency in the process. But then, I’m also like, Well, it is these algorithms too, to a degree. And you have to have that part of the conversation. I don’t know; I struggle greatly with that, because I think I don’t want to let all of that off.
And I do think that algorithmic social media has very clearly caused a ton of problems. I mean, would you agree with that? Where do you sit on that?
Tiffany: I think I toggle back and forth, yeah. Because, first of all, when I talk about being someone who grew up on the internet and loved the internet, a lot of what I’m talking about is an era before everything was centralized onto a handful of platforms that can feel either very boring and uninspired, or very infuriating and like nausea inducing and just awful.
There are other times where I, once in a while, still think, like, Yeah, this is really useful. Like when I was 14, I had no idea what was going on in the world beyond, like, the one newspaper article a week that I would read because my history teacher told me I had to. Whereas my sisters were, you know … people scoff at learning news on TikTok and on social media, but you can get a general sense of what’s going on. Like, I think they were very in tune to lots of different discussions about the news, about culture, about politics. I think they were probably way more media literate than I was. It probably took them not as much time as it does people of generations older to understand what is fake and real.
So yeah; I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I mean, to be clear, I think all of these companies have done egregious, destructive, insidious things. But I don’t know. On the other hand, it’s kind of like—to be galaxy brain about it—it’s sort of like, Well, this is the internet that we have. And we are kind of just talking and talking and talking and talking about whether it’s good or bad.
Warzel: This whole conversation just ties me up in knots, right? Like, it’s funny too. Because when you were describing your feeling of not being able to, you know, watch your thing at the end of the day, have your little social-media treats … we all have our little social-media treats, I think, or whatever. And that feeling of like: It actually made me physically kind of angry, a little bit, or frustrated. Or that feeling of like, I had to, you know, abstain from coffee. The thing that I find so interesting about that is like: That’s how people feel when they go off. Like coffee is a stimulant, right? It is a thing that does something to your brain.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Warzel: And yes, when you go off it, like you have a withdrawal effect of some kind. It’s very clear. I’ve taken my detoxes and done those things from social media before my time off; there is a change in my brain of some kind. But I feel like a rewilding of my attention in a way, and also the frustrations of having to not have that on me. And so I think it’s such a great example.
And I think like this, what you did, of going and actually trying to interact with technology in a different way, kind of go back a little bit. I think it’s really helpful and grounding to anyone who’s trying to navigate all of this themselves. Because you get to sort of see that it’s both more complicated and less complicated at times, you know? Like you feel these things that are like these poles, that I think are really serious and worth taking really seriously as a society.
Like, what is this constant connectivity in these ways doing to us as we walk through the world? And then also, at the same time, I think it’s always so telling that it’s not that bad when you do take them away. Then what was the pull, really, as much as we think? I don’t envy having to write about this, because it is so hard and so difficult to capture all of the distinct cultural feelings.
Tiffany: One of the reasons it’s so hard for us to talk about this and come up with solutions is on a certain level, we’re asking, like: “What is a good life?” Like, “What would it mean for me to be happy?” And so all of those things are mixed together, it becomes understandably emotional and fraught. And so much of it is anecdotal.
Warzel: I really like that feeling of so much of this is, yes—how to be happy. How to live in the world and make choices that you feel good about. And how much of agency one feels they have in that process, right?
One of my predictions for this year, just in my head, was this feeling of this cultural backlash to the phones. And kind of cloaked in, as you said earlier, like, an uncoolness, right? That just sitting as life is unfolding around you in public, and being just immersed in the little black squares, is loser behavior, right? It’s just like, it’s anti-social. And it’s like, it’s just not cool. It’s gauche, right.
Tiffany: Yeah, right.
Warzel: And I think that that, more than any of this stuff to some degree, can like—I think a cultural driver like that has the potential to actually have the most, more than even regulation of any kind. It’s like: If we all kind of decide that being glued to this thing in public is lame, that will change how we interact.
I think you’ve seen more moving toward phone-free spaces or concerts. Like artists saying, “Please just put the phone away; try to enjoy the experience.” And it’s not like they take them away necessarily always, but it’s creating a space and a norm that like, if you’re doing this at the concert, when they say not to, people are gonna be like, “Hey man; put that away.” You know, it’s like enforcing that norm.
It feels like eventually that’s going to continue to grow, just because of all of this ennui that we’re talking about. Do you feel like we are headed toward … maybe not a political, but like just a cultural, durable recalibration to how we perform with these devices in public?
Tiffany: Yeah, I hope so. Although I also noticed actually, during this month, I was talking to people about how they were saying, “You know, society’s organized around your smartphone now.” And it is kind of notable how hard it is to do certain things. Like, as you know, I am obsessed with the Mets. You cannot go into Citi Field without a smartphone. That is the only way to enter the stadium, is by displaying a mobile ticket.
Warzel: There’s no paper-ticket option or printout?
Tiffany: There’s no paper tickets. You cannot show a PDF; it has to be like the animated thing. And there’s certain things like that now, where I’m like, That is just wild. Like, it’s just wild that you simply can’t go in there unless you’re going with a friend, and they do it for you. Or I was talking to the guy, Jack Nugent, who made the OS. And he said, “Yeah, I have that problem too. I load the tickets at home on my phone, and then bring it in airplane mode with me to the stadium.”
Warzel: Just a lot of work.
Tiffany: I’m like—that’s annoying. But yeah, I think we could see people shifting culturally away from just developing new norms or reaffirming ones that people just haven’t really been following that much. In terms of like, “Don’t have your phone out at dinner.” Why would you need to be on your phone when you’re around other people? I think there’s cultural stuff that we can do that would make people feel a lot better, honestly.
Warzel: I think a lot of the time in reporting on this for the last whatever—as we both have, well more than a decade—I think a lot of times we get into these big broad conversations about technology, and expect these easy answers when you kind of like zoom out and look at it. It’s like, this amount of connectivity, the speed of the change and development: It is a completely wild sociological revolution, right?
And the idea that we would have some kind of easy fix, or like society would snap into understanding how to use this stuff right away, is actually the thing that’s most kind of irrational, I think. And I do wonder if, over time, or if we will look back on some of these years with all of this. I’ve seen other people in Gen Z describe the phones in schools as being like: “This was a social experiment that was conducted on me—whether or not it was okay to just give me this device when I was in eighth grade and just let me use it in school all day.”
Tiffany: Yeah.
Warzel: And I think that that idea of this is, in some ways, an experiment we’re running on all of ourselves at once. And eventually, society is going to probably say, like, “Okay; these are the norms.” Right? You’re going to be socially shunned if you behave this way in public in a way that like, 10 years ago, that was just how everyone was. Because we didn’t know any better. I think we may be in for a norm shift. I’m hoping for a norm shift.
Tiffany: I do physically interrupt lots of photo shoots on the streets of SoHo around the Atlantic office, so I’m doing my part. Give them the eye roll. Give them the “I’m walking here,” you know.
Warzel: That’s your right as a New Yorker; you’ve got to do that. Kaitlyn, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and trying to provide some nuance where historically there is not.
Tiffany: Of course. Thank you so much for chatting with me.
[Music]
Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thanks again to my guest, Kaitlyn Tiffany. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. And you can subscribe to The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my coworkers like Kaitlyn, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
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