Studies show that excessive phone use is linked to procrastination, suicide, spoilt sleep, food and water neglect, headaches, lower productivity, unstable relationships, poor physical health (eye strain, body-aches, posture, hand strain), and poor mental health (depression, anxiety, stress)
I'm addicted to the internet, not my phone. I used to spend 10+ hours a day on a desktop. Then that time was split between my desktop and a laptop, after I got my first one. Then smartphones came out, and it's now split between a laptop and my phone. Hopefully the next phase is phone/wearables. I'm sure there are still people spending that much time on desktops to mess with VR, since you're still tethered to a computer.
I’ll second this. Here’s an anecdote from just this morning:
I sat down at my desktop with my coffee. The first thing I did was fire up Unity and Visual Studio to continue some work on learning about networked multiplayer games. I spent about 2 hours reading API documentation and prototyping different things. I came away feeling like I had learned something and was making progress on a thing I care about.
After that I picked up my phone. I spent an hour scrolling through different news sites and jumping between apps. I came away feeling depressed, anxious, and like I just wasted an hour of my life on meaningless information consumption.
I’m sure some people have the same experience on a desktop/laptop and others can use their phone for creative endeavors, but for me, personally, the differences in experience between the two environments is quite stark.
I’m waiting to watch or read the first story to postulate making smartphones illegal like drugs. Chinese Triads smuggling phones across border, massive gun battles between rival “phangs” fighting over turf, etc.
Unlikely unless it starts becoming violent and challenges the government's monopoly on violence.
It's not that drugs are of concern to citizens but the people involved in the supply side are essentially directly challenging the government in a market that it refuses to regulate.
Whoever holds control over the apparatus for distributing violence the most efficiently and at large scale ultimately dictates the laws. Anybody posing a challenge to this basic low common denominator will become a target of the State which declares itself as the sole monopoly over violence.
This is why I believe countries fight all the time, it is simply not enough to hold monopoly over your own borders, to maintain its "large security apparatus" it needs new threats otherwise it stops growing, losing momentum and many groups declaring their own autonomous zones will find it easy to challenge the government as we saw in Syria and Arab Spring countries.
Why would anyone do that? Smartphones make a whole lot of the economy a whole lot of money. I imagine there'd be a much bigger fight that over say, drugs or even AR-style rifles.
Phones aren't addictive on their own, and I can prove it in one step: just disable any ability to connect to the internet for a whole week and tell me your phone usage during that time.
If nobody had phones the interest in them would fade for anyone being given a phone, because let's be honest here: how much content are you dealing with that hasn't involved using internet to access somebody ELSE's stuff? News is other people doing things, learning is other people teaching us, chatting is with other people, etc.
I can perhaps see a sci-fi take on internet usage being given out through world-government prescriptions, rationed access to the "escape world". Which reminds me of the setting for Ready Player One and its slums, just without the fanservice and with a much more realistic and grim vibe.
correlation does not equal causation. Phone addiction or internet addiction is a symptom not a cause. People are escaping to the internet becuase of the world we live in is cold.
There is a new US marine commerical out that shows a kid wandering the street kind of lost in hyper interactive world. The commercial plays off of this internet addiction and data mining product selling. Then clips to them becoming a Marine and finding purpose. Its a good commercial because its actually something that is a problem and that the Marines do have an answer, although with a great cost.
Brave New World predicted this. We are removed from community and it is scary so we find one on the internet and we go all in. The physical problems come with the fact that its not interactive but if there was a VR internet those could go away.
That still wouldnt fix the problem that you might feel closer to someone across the world than someone right next to you. And that a Maga hat and Antifa supporter might be neighbors but want to kill eachother.
My phone is that internet/phone addiction is not a problem its a solution. An escape from forever war all around us. Or you could join the Marines. I guess war is inescapable. Que the cranberries song.
Escapism is intensely popular, it’s behind the boom in video games, watching people stream themselves playing video games, super hero movies, scripted tv. OnlyFans let’s you have a quasi-partner who takes your money and gives you intimacy. Instant gratification, and if you don’t have what you want, just blame society for not giving it to you.
What’s great is that if you are a hard worker and have a long time horizon, it’s never been easier to extract huge compensation. Wealthy people want to invest to make money without any effort, and learning hard stuff like computer science, mechanical engineering, biochemistry and pharma development, etc. takes a tough decade of study and practice to get skilled enough to really kill it. But once you are an expert you can produce actual stuff that matters and investors can’t find enough smart and talented people willing to actually do stuff, so the premium paid to those that can make entertainment, life saving drugs, productivity-increasing tech, and so on gets ever higher.
Bet on making stuff for the Netflix box and drugs that keep fat people alive longer, and fun games that distract people from reality.
I don't disagree with your take that escapism is popular, but this can partially be attributed to the capable people you reference building technology that exploits our psychology to encourage further escapism.
I don't understand the desire to bet on things that would personally enrich you and your investments/companies but decrease overall wellbeing. The capable should build that which guides society towards connection and elevates collective goals, not exploit the exploitable.
The market demands this stuff. If human nature is to be lazy, fat, desiring instant gratification, and blaming everyone else for their problems, then someone will fulfill it.
I wrote a “hot take” above and am exaggerating, but I truly feel like the world we live in now makes it so easy to avoid discipline and hard choices. So those that accept that getting nice stuff takes effort and discipline will earn great dividends.
Peace Corp or something like that. I can't remember the name of the gorup that was started during the depression that put people to work doing things like building the national parks and other type of things. These groups provided jobs, life experience outside what ever town you grew up in, and could be a good solve for today's situation.
I would quit my job and drop everything in my life to join a program like that. The Intercept did an episode on it over the summer and I got chills listening to it.
Just slightly older guys then I am had mandatory service. I never heard someone say anything positive about the experience. Mostly learned how to avoid effort in highly controlled environment. Many stories about bullying is various kind.
But purpose was never mentioned, they seen it more of as waste of time.
well ok, but while we are on the subject, we have no proof of any causation anywhere in the universe, all we have is the correlation that we've never seen (for example) gravity repel, only attract.
Not really true. If two things are strictly correlative, that means there is an additional factor causing both.
If you eliminate all reasonable additional factors (by controlling variables), you can demonstrate causation. Arguing that there can be unknowable external factors behind everything is not very scientific.
Identifying causal relationships involving humans is difficult due to the excessively multivariate nature of all our interactions, and by extension how difficult it is to "control" humans (as opposed to water, or a wheel). That does not mean it is impossible to ever demonstrate causation.
Leibniz denies the existence of causation in his Monadology[1]. In short, everything acts solely according to its own nature without any interaction with anything else, but in a harmonious way that creates the illusion of causation. That strikes me as a bit far fetched, but it does show that accepting the existence of causation is a metaphysical choice and not necessary.
> Leibniz denies the existence of causation in his Monadology
This sentence is incoherent unless one assumes the denial of causation is bunk, since it makes no sense to attribute either Monadology in general or the specific claims from it being discussed to Leibniz unless he caused the existence of the work, which clearly he cannot have if there is no causation.
It's not even that they're asserting that there's no causation in that quote, they're rather asserting that the causation is backwards, which is also undemonstrated.
Addiction is sometimes described as something that is done repeatedly and is harmful. I can't get by without breathing, so I need to do that pretty often, but as it's not harmful, it's not an addiction.
The answer to your question is it depends... I don't think there is anything wrong with playing a dopamine hitting game on a 10 minute bus ride home from work (it's no different than the buzz from a shot of espresso), but if you are spending so much time that you are harming yourself (physically or emotionally) then that's an addiction.
There was a talk posted a few days ago here by Dr Gabor Mate about addiction:
Listening to music is essentially a drug in that it releases pleasurable neurotransmitters. I think we need to understand the positive and negative impacts to ourselves like you suggested.
> "Brave New World predicted this. We are removed from community and it is scary so we find one on the internet and we go all in."
That isn't how I remember Brave New World; it was about amusing ourselves to death with trivia instead of dealing with "important" things, but the sense of community in it was pretty strong - people grew up with and lived with the same local group of people, worked together, played Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy together, orgied together, and took soma to keep them all content. The main complaint they all had was why Bernard couldn't just be happy and join in the community.
Brave New World celebrated the twist-reveal where Bernard learns that exile to Iceland isn't a gulag but is really joining a distant group of people who don't like the society and want to live their own way like he does. I'm never sure if that should be taken at face value, or if it was a lie and the place was really a prison camp, but let's assume it was an honest and accurate reveal - that would be the opposite of your complaint, Bernard was lost and scared at having no community, was pushed toward a remote one he might fit in, and the book is all about how great that is that he doesn't have to waste his life doing just what the people around him are doing and that he can feel closer aligned with a group across the world than someone right next to him, and should take advantage of that.
> "An escape from forever war all around us"
The forever war was 1984, and that's not about Winston joining the Marines to find meaning in his life, it's about using the two minutes' hate to reinforce tribe membership by uniting everyone against a hate figure/group, and the strong (IngSoc) beating down the weak (objectors) until everyone is stamped into the same shape (boot on human face / industrial machine moulding stamp), the reveal at the end of 1984 isn't that Winston joined the Marines and escaped the forever war like Bernard escaped the trivia, it's that Winston came to love Big Brother and agree with everything good that Big Brother is and was and always would be, it's the equivalent of Bernard taking the soma and blending into the society and agreeing it was right all along, it's one or other of your Maga hat and Antifa supporter becoming overwhelmingly dominant, the state enforcing it, and the other being subsumed by it and liking it until there isn't anything else.
> "internet/phone addiction is not a problem its a solution. I guess war is inescapable."
Hence the Yin-Yang forever circling each other. There's no solution to whether white or black is better, or whether matter or energy is better, or whether hot is better than cold, both books posit an end - one that is either agreeable or disagreeable to the reader, but an end nonetheless - real life doesn't have ends it has circles, loops, repeats, back and forths, changing fortunes, ups and downs, births and deaths.
Maga hat and Antifa supporter both love their America, and their America doesn't include murdering thy neighbor. They might "want to kill each other" but each would like the other one realising how dumb they are and changing sides.
> their America doesn't include murdering thy neighbor. They might "want to kill each other"
Well, you can find a lot of message boards in which they fantasize about doing this. And it sells a lot of weapons. But the energy barrier is high; people like Kyle Rittenhouse cross it only rarely enough that they can be dismissed as isolated incidents. It's not every day that someone blows up a telephone exchange. Just another isolated incident.
>And that a Maga hat and Antifa supporter might be neighbors but want to kill eachother.
You seem to be ignoring the possibility that these people come to these ideologies because of the Internet, which leads to the hollowing-out of community coherence that you mention.
>Marines do have an answer, although with a great cost.
Do you mean an individual cost or societal cost?
I think one of the ironies about the human condition is that we value things that we’ve sacrificed toward much more than the things we have not. E.g., Marines have esprit de corps in part because of their sacrifices not despite them.
The strongest connections are often made through hardship. To think we can have that connection without a cost doesn’t seem congruent with how we’re wired
What do you mean less valued? My impression is that the Marines are the most respected of the services. (I am not serving nor a veteran of any armed service).
I don't want to tell tales out of school or anything. I've met an ex-marine who suffered damage in training and stories from internet videos all corroborate the general story. The marines are the offensive branch, and the individuals get treated poorly. You get a lot of respect for your title, but other branches have a better quality of life and better jobs available.
https://youtu.be/UMoLKLM8SMg Fun story time by an ex-air force guy who was going to join up to the marines (4:30).
Counter to this anecdote, I’ve met a reasonable number of Air Force, Navy, and Army who retrospectively wished they joined the Marines. I’ve never met a Marine who wished they joined another branch (with the exception of when other branches offered even more difficult opportunities Marines didn’t, like before MARSOC was established)
Marines certainly are closer to harms way generally was the impression I got.
As the child of an enlisted Air Force solidier who served for 20 years, I always thought the Air Force got the worst rap of the branches. The "chair force" moniker didn't help.
The society they are a part of does consider it a worthwhile skill, which is why they’ve created a niche for it.
There may be disagreements on the individual level, but society creates institutions (like the military) and the policies they execute based on their aggregate values. Or in cliched terms, people get the government they deserve
> The society they are a part of does consider it a worthwhile skill, [...]
It only mitgologizes it. That's not the same thing. When they rejoin economy nobody says "let me offer you a job or money or food or a place to live because now you can kill people on miltary command".
The only places where people might find your "skill" worthwhile outside the place that conditioned you are criminal or borderline criminal.
It’s odd to me that you have a concept that the military is somehow not part of society as a whole. For better or worse, the military is interwoven throughout society. It is an institutional construct of society. It is a part of society like other institutions like Congress or the courts. I don’t know that your point of “rejoining they economy” holds up well in that context. People have felt the military is the strong arm of the economy for a long, long time. (If you disagree, look up War is a Racket, coincidently written by a Marine).
The point I was trying to make is that if society did not value that role it wouldn’t exist. Society as a whole has decided there is a need for a standing army, and funds the continuation of it. Again, individuals may disagree but society at large has decided its of enough value to keep in existence. We don’t do this because of it’s “mythology”, especially not to the tune of $700B a year. We can argue about whether society has a misguided value system, but I think it’s very hard to make a case that society doesn’t value the purpose of the military. That’s a high price tag for mythological storytelling.
The veterans I know would likely argue that the skills they were taught in the military go far beyond the ability to kill. I don’t disagree that (in Rumsfeld’s words) the base intent of the military is to “kill people and break their things” but this is similar to the oversimplification that the only purpose of a company is to make money, full stop. The Marines I know spent more time on humanitarian missions than combat missions.
> Again, individuals may disagree but society at large has decided its of enough value to keep in existence.
I firmly believe that's the other way around. Society has ybo say about whether military should exist.
There are always people who prefer to focus on arming themselves and extorting others. Either by threatening or offering protection from threat, which blend together.
People argue whether goverment rules the people, or if the people are actually stronger then goverment and goverment rules just because people will it.
The truth becomes apparent when government and people can't keep stable relationship between themselves and ability to collect tax is threatened. Then the military steps in and supports either government or the people.
That's because the only reason military allows goverments and people do what they do is that it results in steady stream of taxation that military can feed on.
Of course people also benefit from tax being collected in stable and predictable manner instead of military just roaming their country and taking whatever it desires randomly.
Nations, armies and goverments are most advanced mechanisms of keeping human violent extortionists and most dangerous technologies from interfering with the economy.
It's of tremendous benefit to our civilisation, except for two world wars which I hope were enough for militaries to learn that they can't efficiently steal economies to extort from neighbouring militaries.
But nontheless if you join the army you join the organisation that's freeloading on everybody else while sharpening teeth that will be used against them if they misbehave. Until you stay there you are golden. But if you plan to rejoin the rest of the world at some point, time spent in the military will be at best wasted years for you and cause of much damage to your life and psyche at worst due to conditioning and abuse you underwent.
Can you get something good out of it? Sure. But how many ex-military end up in dangerous jobs or without purpose in life outside, treating damage done to them by military with opioids? You probably don't have them in your social circle but I'd say there are at least a few for each one of your ex-Marine friends doing charity.
This belief of mine is mostly based on concept of "monopoly for violence" if you want to read more about it.
That’s a good point and probably why there is an increased focus on the transition to civilian life. I suspect the distinctions between civilian and military life are what makes the transition difficult. The #1 thing they miss is the camaraderie, not the ability to blow shit up (although the adrenaline of the job is probably high on the list).
To the overall point of this thread, that lack of connection in society is part of what draws many back to rejoining
Yes, difference make it hard. They also acquire both physical and mental health issues. Mental health issues in particular makes them more likely to end up homeless or in prison, more likely to be violent.
It is not just camaraderie and connection, it is whole different expectations on what you should do. It is difficulty to find and keep job for example. Not having required skills, having trouble to communicate.
> The strongest connections are often made through hardship. To think we can have that connection without a cost doesn’t seem congruent with how we’re wired
This is the irony for me, my closest friends are people I crunched with at work. Going to breakfast together at 5am was a bonding experience. Staying overnight the day before shipping, etc... I'm not saying I want to force that on anyone but they are actually good memories for me and I made good friends. It helps that they were creative products so we were putting ourselves in them. I don't know how I'd fell crunching on someone else's goal/deadline/project.
A good read is Sebastian Junger’s Tribe. To your point, the UK civilians he interviewed who lived through the WW2 bombings referred to them as “the good ol’ days”
I think it was just an example of how little we can be connected to our local community. It's not bad in itself, and you can likely have both strong remote relationships and strong community ties at the same time.
> And that a Maga hat and Antifa supporter might be neighbors but want to kill eachother.
That Maga hat and antifa might not be as opposed in views if they talked to each other. The problem is that we've reduced friction for finding like minded people so far that it's not worth it to go through the unpleasantness of talking with strangers.
The platform also magnifies shallow thought from a minority of contributors. One of the signals we use to mediate our thoughts is how we think our cohorts feel about something, this is even more true for people without much critical thinking skill.
An individual can have extreme views and end up inside an echochamber that makes them think they're in the company of millions when in reality it's just a handful of others (and probably some bot accounts).
Is it the phone people are addicted to, or the media available through it?
Especially Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Twitter. All of which seem designed to cultivate obsessive compulsive behavior in their users with social proof, intermittent rewards and a builtin hedonic treadmill.
given that most phones are designed in such a way that running anything other than curated apps on it is fairly difficult the distinction is quite blurry.
The phones and the operating software they run are built to discourage anything that isn't media consumption or passive app use.
We didn't have these issues back in the early 2000s. Cause of price and the average person didn't use a computer as often as they do now. That's because there was barely anything to soon them then.
I myself spent a lot of time on the computer back then, mostly playing computer games. And I remember how everyone talked about how addictive and bad computer games were.
I remember skipping college classes to play World of Warcraft. Then my graphics card crapped out. So I skipped classes reading psychology books I got from the library. Turns out, my problems were depression and social anxiety, not video games.
I'm lucky that I didn't have issues like that. For me, it was just entertainment, nothing too detrimental. But maybe if I had a computer in my pocket, it would have been different.
For whatever reason I never got into games. I learned to program and found that to be fun and rewarding. Started in the mid 1980s. Back then, there were games for home computers and home gaming systems, but they were pretty lame. Arcades were still a big thing then for gaming. Kids would spend a lot of money in arcades, one quarter at a time. I never saw the appeal.
Hi there, millennial here. I spend hours and hours on live journal, flash game sites, and various web comics in the mid-2000s. I think I spent basically the same number of hours per day on the internet I do now. Just now some of it is work instead of teenage entertainment/dithering, and a lot of it is on a phone.
Watching TV stations was the only purpose of TV set, while social network apps are just one of many purposes of mobile phones. Many people do not use such apps, but still use mobile phones.
iPhones also have a greyscale mode under accessibility:
Settings, then choose Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters. Turn the Color Filters toggle switch on, and Grayscale appears as the top option
phone addiction seems to be just a single subset of the addiction/improvement feedback loops we have in most industries: food addiction, sugar addiction, clickbait addiction, social media addiction, 'app'/phone addiction, video game addiction, and many, many more
I am really curious if this is markedly different from concerns people had about children wasting their time away reading books, as seen in Don Quijote for example.
Compared to games today, books normally aren't developed with individually profiled feedback loops and tenfold teams with psychologists and behaviorists trying to optimize them.
I find that having a phone is like having a menu that has too many options. You just never seem like your happy with what you're choosing. There is something nice about not having an infinite library of music that you can skip every song to get to the next song to skip.
It's not all bad, but you definitely have to be mindful. One thing I miss the most about my younger years is being able to ride in a vehicle and just look out the window at things. Now I find myself going to the same tired things on my phone...
Something that I've found useful when meeting someone in real life, I take an old phone that's only capable of making calls. That way I avoid any possible communication issues, but I don't get distracted at all.
The problem is that people under the age of 40 or so don't communicate via phone calls in the first instance. So a phone is not a means to communicate with them and you don't avoid any possible communication issues.
Your lunch meeting is telling you on Slack that they're going to be late. You think you have no 'possible communication issues' but you're mistaken.
>The problem is that people under the age of 40 or so don't communicate via phone calls in the first instance.
Where on Earth are you getting this information? You've made an unsupported claim that I was able to debunk by talking to the four tables around me. What's your source for "people under the age of 40 or so don't communicate via phone calls?"
I literally don't think I've been called unannounced by someone under 40 in a decade. In fact I think it's now something of a social faux pas to call unannounced. Maybe the people around your tables are just really rude?
The first one says 'millennial[s] won't take your phone call' in the first line. Then it even quantifies it 'a quarter never use [their phone] for calls'.
If a quarter of people you might be meeting never make or take a phone call, how successful do you think you're going to be in trying to reach them via a phone call?
'Most of the twenty- and thirty somethings I socialise with would rather suck Donald Trump’s toe than make or receive a call in order to have a chat'
Your lunch meeting sends you a message via WhatsApp, but you don't receive the message because you don't have WhatsApp installed.
They think you've seen the message, you don't know they sent anything, neither of you realises, they don't turn up, you leave.
They message you again, you don't reply because you still don't have WhatsApp, and the two of you assume the other isn't interested and you lose touch.
1 year later, you install WhatsApp and it delivers the message from your lunch meeting.
If only you'd known! This happened to a friend of mine.
What happens to any text messages or iMessages that you receive while your SIM card is in your other phone? Do they still end up showing in your conversation history on your main device?
Not specially hard. And you're comparing different stuff. I'm not using a different phone because it's easier, but because having a smartphone is distracting. It's noticeable, but in case you need a link.
Incredible — the effect was present even when the phone was turned off. I would think that a phone that is off but nearby would be less of a distraction than a phone that is on but in the next room. It would take longer for me to turn on my phone than walk to the next room to get it.
Well, except when people start jumping from buildings.
I know two people, one of whom successfully jumped from the 3rd floor of a building and another that had to be restrained from doing so. It's a real risk, although I personally have done psychedelics many hundreds of times and never felt the urge to jump even when climbing trees, building exteriors, etc.
I want to do it on the beach, I'm afraid of running into the ocean and drowning. What would you say is the probability of this scenario occurring for a first time trip?
I've been with dozens of people on their first trip with acid that I knew was acid. And I've had dozens more experiences with people thinking they were taking acid when it was really 25I or something even worse (if it tastes like something, it's not acid). When I was younger taking any drug anyone could get their hands on, I was usually in the latter camp. And I think very few people are privileged enough to not be in the latter camp as you don't tend to have much control over the drugs you get. Most normal people might get like one "acid contact" their whole life and they're taking whatever he has to sell them.
If you're in the former camp (taking real acid), I have a truly hard time believing the anecdotes of bad things happening. And I think most anecdotes are actually stories from the latter camp. Just take a small dose and know that you can take the edge off with a beer if you really needed to.
But if you're in the latter camp where you don't even know what you're taking, I'm not particularly surprised if something bad happens.
Although my original comment was specifically about the toxicity of mushrooms, as somebody who’s never tried any of these drugs I’m curious if there’s a distinct difference between the type of trip with LSD vs mushrooms? Is one more likely to induce a violent trip for example?
They are different, but maybe not consistently so for everyone. The visual distortions might be similar but the feeling will probably be different.
I get a certain uncomfortable bodily sensation on LSD, to the point that after fifty or sixty experiences with it I no longer use it. I strongly prefer mushrooms and suggest mixing them with small amounts of MDMA for an incredible experience.
Alcohol delivery services are already a thing everywhere, Berlin has "cocaine taxis", now all that's missing is pot delivery once it finally becomes legal...
Lol I'm not proposing an LSD-based solution, but I do have a relevant anecdote from my first trip.
We were on the beach sitting on blankets, and my phone somehow got lost in the folds of the blanket while I was coming up. For the next ~4 hours I basically forgot "who" I was, being deprived of a phone that constantly shows me my friends, notes, and pictures. Eventually, I did find my phone and it was the weirdest experience ever to look at my phone and slowly start "remembering" who I am.
It sounds like you're correlating forgetting who you were and the phone, but you should be correlating the LSD and forgetting who you were. These drugs de-activate the "ego" forming parts of the brain, the parts that make us feel like an author/being/center of it all.
While it's certainly true that LSD is the primary reason I had ego semi-dissolution in this experience, I'm saying that phones serve to reinforce our understanding of ourselves by "interrupting" our raw conscious experience with memories and data that we correlate with our self. On other trips where I had my phone, or when I was at home in an environment I've known all my life, I had virtually no ego dissolution at all.
Another thing about HN patriots patrons is that they worship 'Thinking fast and slow,' the book, and I can tell you; evvery page of that book is laced in L S D ( !)
LSD actually cured my surfing (while I was taking it). I'd just be consciously aware the whole time that I was sitting at a computer, trying to distract myself.
What a terrible thing to be addicted to... it's a small box that spies on you and gives you almost nothing in return. I cancelled my cell phone service 8 years ago and it was the best thing I've ever done for myself.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say less terrible than being addicted to alcohol, meth, crack or heroin. Less dangerous than cigarettes so probably less terrible than a smoking habit too. Probably less damaging financially than a gambling addiction unless you are blowing a shit ton of money on in app purchases.
What things can you be addicted to are LESS terrible than being addicted to your phone?
Anecdata of course but most of the people on my Facebook feed who constantly post status updates are not the most mentally healthy. In fact a lot of them write about their mental health struggles in these statuses. Which I suppose is good in their transparency and openness but I'm not sure the act of posting is helping. In fact I find it deeply narcissistic.
> Your online and offline behavior gets more integrated and you don’t know what you did in the digital reality or the material reality.
Not sure if it's just me, but this is getting very hard to separate during quarantine. I often remember conversations that happened over text as having happened in person. Perhaps my mind is accounting for the lack of face-to-face interaction.
Interesting. For all the issues listed, the one thing I did not see mentioned is the effect on long term memory. I wonder if it is simply discarded in the way discard the fact that we used to, out of necessity, remember phone numbers and now we do not and thus considered just a cultural change.
Then again, having near constant access to almost all human knowledge can render a man rather unwilling to retain information.
I basically discourage addiction by making things “difficult” for myself on my phone:
- Minimal web bookmarks (i.e. I have to type in most web sites I want to visit; this is just enough of an encumbrance that I won’t flip open things like Reddit every 30 seconds).
- I never install apps meant for content consumption, I use their web sites. (This is usually a better experience anyway, since the vast majority of them are somehow worse than their web sites, packed with ads/notifications/spying/crap that no one should want anyway.)
- Certain web sites I refuse to use at all on mobile. This gives me a much larger and more useful view anyway, and I can enforce sanity with a lot more plug-ins that way.
- As of latest iOS, I shove most apps into the Library so they are not even on my home screen. That way, they are straightforward to retrieve with a swipe-down search but not as easy as just tapping them open. I find that I use them slightly less this way.
- I turn off many notifications, since app-makers have long abused them anyway (as virtual ads, or designed in some way to suck people back into their apps for no reason; I drew the line when apps started outright lying about things, e.g. red dots implying messages that were not actually there, etc.).
- I set it up so that my lock screen will not show most things without an extra step.
I do a bunch of this stuff, too. Notifications are a big one and I highly encourage people to be ruthless in disabling them. There is no use case for receiving an instant notification when somebody happens to mention you on social media that won’t make your life worse.
One quibble: I also uninstalled most apps, but there isn’t a single one of them with a mobile website that’s better. It really is a far worse experience to have to use the website.
certain addictive apps like twitter, I keep off my phone. Happy to spend a half hour at home browsing sites like that, but I don't want to be glued to my phone while out and about.
This is my strategy as well. My best tactic is device selection. I'm rocking an iPhone SE (4" form factor). (Side note: Big kudos to Apple for fully supporting this phone - my first iPhone)
The small screen and keyboard discourage any extended use of my phone.
Huh, what browser? Or did you make it not remember anything visited? Don't they all figure out what you want these days? I mean if I type 'r' FF presents me reddit.com, 'n' is news.yconmbinator.com as best match etc. For the sites I visit most, it's actually faster than looking up a bookmark.
The paper they are basing the opening sentence "phone addiction is one of the biggest non-drug addiction(sic) in human history" on is written by a Doctor of Business Administration, a dean that has "particular industries of interest are banks and non-profit organizations" in his bio and a third researcher with 2 publications total, including the article in question (published 2011).
This may in no way weaken the point that some of the brightest minds of today are working on producing digital Skinner boxes, black on top, with humans as the rats, interfaced via phones.
But basing an attempt at a strong argument about the addictive nature of cell-phones on an article with low relevance in scientific fields specializing in addiction could be described as suspect (most citations on g.scholar on the piece could be delineated as in the fields of business and management ).
Anecdotally, I recently discussed phone addiction with a youngish tenured professor friend in the psych department at a major university. Two things stood out for me:
1. My academic friend really had a limited understanding of the success of machine learning in driving engagement online. How algorithms can and will enhance whatever mechanism they discover to drive engagement numbers. And how our brains are not wired to compete against them.
2. He took exception to the word addiction in the context of phones. He felt a phone could not drive addiction in the same way as a substance.
My opinion is that our academic research is significantly behind due to the sheer speed and exponential growth of phone/app usage.
Maybe your friend is just ignorant if they are purely psych and not well versed in cognitive-neuroscience, which may be the best field for investigating and understanding modern day tech addictions via fMRI brain scans, etc.
I wouldn't expect the field of Psychology to lead research in the area, as you also concluded in your closing statement.
Phone addiction is linked to so many problems because phones are used for so many things.
Exemplified by the following quote from the article "5. Inability to feel pleasure and excitement in the offline world but excessive emotions are tied to online rewards like gambling, likes, shares, followers, sexting, masturbation to porn, etc."
The phone itself is like a gun to a soldier, a force multiplier. By itself, it does nothing, give it to a friendly soldier and he will become more effective, give it to the enemy and he will become more dangerous.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadI sat down at my desktop with my coffee. The first thing I did was fire up Unity and Visual Studio to continue some work on learning about networked multiplayer games. I spent about 2 hours reading API documentation and prototyping different things. I came away feeling like I had learned something and was making progress on a thing I care about.
After that I picked up my phone. I spent an hour scrolling through different news sites and jumping between apps. I came away feeling depressed, anxious, and like I just wasted an hour of my life on meaningless information consumption.
I’m sure some people have the same experience on a desktop/laptop and others can use their phone for creative endeavors, but for me, personally, the differences in experience between the two environments is quite stark.
It's not that drugs are of concern to citizens but the people involved in the supply side are essentially directly challenging the government in a market that it refuses to regulate.
Whoever holds control over the apparatus for distributing violence the most efficiently and at large scale ultimately dictates the laws. Anybody posing a challenge to this basic low common denominator will become a target of the State which declares itself as the sole monopoly over violence.
This is why I believe countries fight all the time, it is simply not enough to hold monopoly over your own borders, to maintain its "large security apparatus" it needs new threats otherwise it stops growing, losing momentum and many groups declaring their own autonomous zones will find it easy to challenge the government as we saw in Syria and Arab Spring countries.
If nobody had phones the interest in them would fade for anyone being given a phone, because let's be honest here: how much content are you dealing with that hasn't involved using internet to access somebody ELSE's stuff? News is other people doing things, learning is other people teaching us, chatting is with other people, etc.
I can perhaps see a sci-fi take on internet usage being given out through world-government prescriptions, rationed access to the "escape world". Which reminds me of the setting for Ready Player One and its slums, just without the fanservice and with a much more realistic and grim vibe.
There is a new US marine commerical out that shows a kid wandering the street kind of lost in hyper interactive world. The commercial plays off of this internet addiction and data mining product selling. Then clips to them becoming a Marine and finding purpose. Its a good commercial because its actually something that is a problem and that the Marines do have an answer, although with a great cost.
Brave New World predicted this. We are removed from community and it is scary so we find one on the internet and we go all in. The physical problems come with the fact that its not interactive but if there was a VR internet those could go away.
That still wouldnt fix the problem that you might feel closer to someone across the world than someone right next to you. And that a Maga hat and Antifa supporter might be neighbors but want to kill eachother.
My phone is that internet/phone addiction is not a problem its a solution. An escape from forever war all around us. Or you could join the Marines. I guess war is inescapable. Que the cranberries song.
Funny that you've mistyped "phone" instead of "theory".
Must be a Freudian phone.
What’s great is that if you are a hard worker and have a long time horizon, it’s never been easier to extract huge compensation. Wealthy people want to invest to make money without any effort, and learning hard stuff like computer science, mechanical engineering, biochemistry and pharma development, etc. takes a tough decade of study and practice to get skilled enough to really kill it. But once you are an expert you can produce actual stuff that matters and investors can’t find enough smart and talented people willing to actually do stuff, so the premium paid to those that can make entertainment, life saving drugs, productivity-increasing tech, and so on gets ever higher.
Bet on making stuff for the Netflix box and drugs that keep fat people alive longer, and fun games that distract people from reality.
I don't understand the desire to bet on things that would personally enrich you and your investments/companies but decrease overall wellbeing. The capable should build that which guides society towards connection and elevates collective goals, not exploit the exploitable.
I wrote a “hot take” above and am exaggerating, but I truly feel like the world we live in now makes it so easy to avoid discipline and hard choices. So those that accept that getting nice stuff takes effort and discipline will earn great dividends.
Perhaps we should bring back a year of mandatory military service. Or some other kind of mandatory community service.
But purpose was never mentioned, they seen it more of as waste of time.
Correlation does not imply causation, but that doesn't mean that it can't be causation.
If you eliminate all reasonable additional factors (by controlling variables), you can demonstrate causation. Arguing that there can be unknowable external factors behind everything is not very scientific.
Identifying causal relationships involving humans is difficult due to the excessively multivariate nature of all our interactions, and by extension how difficult it is to "control" humans (as opposed to water, or a wheel). That does not mean it is impossible to ever demonstrate causation.
[1] https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-...
This sentence is incoherent unless one assumes the denial of causation is bunk, since it makes no sense to attribute either Monadology in general or the specific claims from it being discussed to Leibniz unless he caused the existence of the work, which clearly he cannot have if there is no causation.
I think it's both. People seek an escape and phone apps are extremely addicting.
Is it bad for something to be a "dopamine slot machine" if it's only because it actually allows you to consume knowledge more rapidly/efficiently?
Books and pen pals can be similarly problematic for some.
Also consider that a big insight might come from many small insights
The answer to your question is it depends... I don't think there is anything wrong with playing a dopamine hitting game on a 10 minute bus ride home from work (it's no different than the buzz from a shot of espresso), but if you are spending so much time that you are harming yourself (physically or emotionally) then that's an addiction.
There was a talk posted a few days ago here by Dr Gabor Mate about addiction:
https://youtu.be/vMstO3U4sVw
(Skip the 10 min intro, then watch at least the first hour)
His views are very different from the mainstream US view of addiction being substance abuse that can be fixed by restricting access to the drugs.
Ok, but where is your argument that this is positive for mental health? Why show up half-assed? Brave new world is obviously a dystopia.
> but if there was a VR internet those could go away.
What the fuck? Are you serious or just have no clue how other humans work?
That isn't how I remember Brave New World; it was about amusing ourselves to death with trivia instead of dealing with "important" things, but the sense of community in it was pretty strong - people grew up with and lived with the same local group of people, worked together, played Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy together, orgied together, and took soma to keep them all content. The main complaint they all had was why Bernard couldn't just be happy and join in the community.
Brave New World celebrated the twist-reveal where Bernard learns that exile to Iceland isn't a gulag but is really joining a distant group of people who don't like the society and want to live their own way like he does. I'm never sure if that should be taken at face value, or if it was a lie and the place was really a prison camp, but let's assume it was an honest and accurate reveal - that would be the opposite of your complaint, Bernard was lost and scared at having no community, was pushed toward a remote one he might fit in, and the book is all about how great that is that he doesn't have to waste his life doing just what the people around him are doing and that he can feel closer aligned with a group across the world than someone right next to him, and should take advantage of that.
> "An escape from forever war all around us"
The forever war was 1984, and that's not about Winston joining the Marines to find meaning in his life, it's about using the two minutes' hate to reinforce tribe membership by uniting everyone against a hate figure/group, and the strong (IngSoc) beating down the weak (objectors) until everyone is stamped into the same shape (boot on human face / industrial machine moulding stamp), the reveal at the end of 1984 isn't that Winston joined the Marines and escaped the forever war like Bernard escaped the trivia, it's that Winston came to love Big Brother and agree with everything good that Big Brother is and was and always would be, it's the equivalent of Bernard taking the soma and blending into the society and agreeing it was right all along, it's one or other of your Maga hat and Antifa supporter becoming overwhelmingly dominant, the state enforcing it, and the other being subsumed by it and liking it until there isn't anything else.
> "internet/phone addiction is not a problem its a solution. I guess war is inescapable."
Hence the Yin-Yang forever circling each other. There's no solution to whether white or black is better, or whether matter or energy is better, or whether hot is better than cold, both books posit an end - one that is either agreeable or disagreeable to the reader, but an end nonetheless - real life doesn't have ends it has circles, loops, repeats, back and forths, changing fortunes, ups and downs, births and deaths.
Maga hat and Antifa supporter both love their America, and their America doesn't include murdering thy neighbor. They might "want to kill each other" but each would like the other one realising how dumb they are and changing sides.
Well, you can find a lot of message boards in which they fantasize about doing this. And it sells a lot of weapons. But the energy barrier is high; people like Kyle Rittenhouse cross it only rarely enough that they can be dismissed as isolated incidents. It's not every day that someone blows up a telephone exchange. Just another isolated incident.
Don't forget the people that shot at him and tried to stomp his head in.
You seem to be ignoring the possibility that these people come to these ideologies because of the Internet, which leads to the hollowing-out of community coherence that you mention.
There's even a dedicated reddit for this fallacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM
Could you be a bit more scientific with your argument?
Do you mean an individual cost or societal cost?
I think one of the ironies about the human condition is that we value things that we’ve sacrificed toward much more than the things we have not. E.g., Marines have esprit de corps in part because of their sacrifices not despite them.
The strongest connections are often made through hardship. To think we can have that connection without a cost doesn’t seem congruent with how we’re wired
https://youtu.be/UMoLKLM8SMg Fun story time by an ex-air force guy who was going to join up to the marines (4:30).
As the child of an enlisted Air Force solidier who served for 20 years, I always thought the Air Force got the worst rap of the branches. The "chair force" moniker didn't help.
There may be disagreements on the individual level, but society creates institutions (like the military) and the policies they execute based on their aggregate values. Or in cliched terms, people get the government they deserve
It only mitgologizes it. That's not the same thing. When they rejoin economy nobody says "let me offer you a job or money or food or a place to live because now you can kill people on miltary command".
The only places where people might find your "skill" worthwhile outside the place that conditioned you are criminal or borderline criminal.
The point I was trying to make is that if society did not value that role it wouldn’t exist. Society as a whole has decided there is a need for a standing army, and funds the continuation of it. Again, individuals may disagree but society at large has decided its of enough value to keep in existence. We don’t do this because of it’s “mythology”, especially not to the tune of $700B a year. We can argue about whether society has a misguided value system, but I think it’s very hard to make a case that society doesn’t value the purpose of the military. That’s a high price tag for mythological storytelling.
The veterans I know would likely argue that the skills they were taught in the military go far beyond the ability to kill. I don’t disagree that (in Rumsfeld’s words) the base intent of the military is to “kill people and break their things” but this is similar to the oversimplification that the only purpose of a company is to make money, full stop. The Marines I know spent more time on humanitarian missions than combat missions.
I firmly believe that's the other way around. Society has ybo say about whether military should exist.
There are always people who prefer to focus on arming themselves and extorting others. Either by threatening or offering protection from threat, which blend together.
People argue whether goverment rules the people, or if the people are actually stronger then goverment and goverment rules just because people will it.
The truth becomes apparent when government and people can't keep stable relationship between themselves and ability to collect tax is threatened. Then the military steps in and supports either government or the people.
That's because the only reason military allows goverments and people do what they do is that it results in steady stream of taxation that military can feed on.
Of course people also benefit from tax being collected in stable and predictable manner instead of military just roaming their country and taking whatever it desires randomly.
Nations, armies and goverments are most advanced mechanisms of keeping human violent extortionists and most dangerous technologies from interfering with the economy.
It's of tremendous benefit to our civilisation, except for two world wars which I hope were enough for militaries to learn that they can't efficiently steal economies to extort from neighbouring militaries.
But nontheless if you join the army you join the organisation that's freeloading on everybody else while sharpening teeth that will be used against them if they misbehave. Until you stay there you are golden. But if you plan to rejoin the rest of the world at some point, time spent in the military will be at best wasted years for you and cause of much damage to your life and psyche at worst due to conditioning and abuse you underwent.
Can you get something good out of it? Sure. But how many ex-military end up in dangerous jobs or without purpose in life outside, treating damage done to them by military with opioids? You probably don't have them in your social circle but I'd say there are at least a few for each one of your ex-Marine friends doing charity.
This belief of mine is mostly based on concept of "monopoly for violence" if you want to read more about it.
To the overall point of this thread, that lack of connection in society is part of what draws many back to rejoining
It is not just camaraderie and connection, it is whole different expectations on what you should do. It is difficulty to find and keep job for example. Not having required skills, having trouble to communicate.
This is the irony for me, my closest friends are people I crunched with at work. Going to breakfast together at 5am was a bonding experience. Staying overnight the day before shipping, etc... I'm not saying I want to force that on anyone but they are actually good memories for me and I made good friends. It helps that they were creative products so we were putting ourselves in them. I don't know how I'd fell crunching on someone else's goal/deadline/project.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bCjEV75F2tM
Wait, is it a problem that some have remote friendships that are closer than those physically near them? If so why?
Which isn't too say proximity is bad. It can be a relationship enhancer, and so can distance.
That Maga hat and antifa might not be as opposed in views if they talked to each other. The problem is that we've reduced friction for finding like minded people so far that it's not worth it to go through the unpleasantness of talking with strangers.
An individual can have extreme views and end up inside an echochamber that makes them think they're in the company of millions when in reality it's just a handful of others (and probably some bot accounts).
[Helpfully] I believe you meant "cue."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cue
Oh the vileness, the violence. I'm now completely convinced marijuana is the devil's lettuce! Don't just tell your children, TELL EVERY CHILD!
EDIT: to add, people, watch the 1938 release, the 36 has poorer image/sound quality.
Especially Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Twitter. All of which seem designed to cultivate obsessive compulsive behavior in their users with social proof, intermittent rewards and a builtin hedonic treadmill.
The phones and the operating software they run are built to discourage anything that isn't media consumption or passive app use.
If the headline were about television addiction would you question if it’s the TV set or the shows?
So I guess I agree - the problem isn’t the hardware but then nobody really ever thought it was. I think that’s why my tv analogy works.
Especially Samsung have built-in some excellent tools for helping managing screen time.
Myself I am terrible with Twitter/Reddit and can easily waste hours there, but my S10 locks the apps after 45m usage per day.
Settings, then choose Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters. Turn the Color Filters toggle switch on, and Grayscale appears as the top option
https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/the-19th-century-moral-...
Same for all social media. This is the only site I use that could be categorized like that.
I find that having a phone is like having a menu that has too many options. You just never seem like your happy with what you're choosing. There is something nice about not having an infinite library of music that you can skip every song to get to the next song to skip.
It's not all bad, but you definitely have to be mindful. One thing I miss the most about my younger years is being able to ride in a vehicle and just look out the window at things. Now I find myself going to the same tired things on my phone...
Your lunch meeting is telling you on Slack that they're going to be late. You think you have no 'possible communication issues' but you're mistaken.
Where on Earth are you getting this information? You've made an unsupported claim that I was able to debunk by talking to the four tables around me. What's your source for "people under the age of 40 or so don't communicate via phone calls?"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2019/11/04/millenn...
https://bgr.com/2018/12/09/millennials-phone-calls-survey/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/mobile-chat/why-millennia...
https://www.inc.com/john-brandon/why-millennials-dont-like-t...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/nz-life-leisure/110277251...
https://jeffjbutler.com/2019/04/02/why-millennials-dont-like...
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-millennials-ignore-calls
https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-never-cold-call-a-mil...
Etc etc etc etc
I literally don't think I've been called unannounced by someone under 40 in a decade. In fact I think it's now something of a social faux pas to call unannounced. Maybe the people around your tables are just really rude?
>Maybe the people around your tables are just really rude?
Maybe, but you certainly are.
The first one says 'millennial[s] won't take your phone call' in the first line. Then it even quantifies it 'a quarter never use [their phone] for calls'.
If a quarter of people you might be meeting never make or take a phone call, how successful do you think you're going to be in trying to reach them via a phone call?
'Most of the twenty- and thirty somethings I socialise with would rather suck Donald Trump’s toe than make or receive a call in order to have a chat'
Lol what more are you looking for?
That was the point.
Your lunch meeting sends you a message via WhatsApp, but you don't receive the message because you don't have WhatsApp installed.
They think you've seen the message, you don't know they sent anything, neither of you realises, they don't turn up, you leave.
They message you again, you don't reply because you still don't have WhatsApp, and the two of you assume the other isn't interested and you lose touch.
1 year later, you install WhatsApp and it delivers the message from your lunch meeting.
If only you'd known! This happened to a friend of mine.
Edit: I actually have two phone numbers. So the new phone is still at home receiving everything
https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2017/06/28/just...
/s
Why bother stopping a bad habit? That takes effort. Much better to play Russian Roulette with mind altering substances.
(Assuming you are referring to the article about mushrooms)
I know two people, one of whom successfully jumped from the 3rd floor of a building and another that had to be restrained from doing so. It's a real risk, although I personally have done psychedelics many hundreds of times and never felt the urge to jump even when climbing trees, building exteriors, etc.
If you're in the former camp (taking real acid), I have a truly hard time believing the anecdotes of bad things happening. And I think most anecdotes are actually stories from the latter camp. Just take a small dose and know that you can take the edge off with a beer if you really needed to.
But if you're in the latter camp where you don't even know what you're taking, I'm not particularly surprised if something bad happens.
I get a certain uncomfortable bodily sensation on LSD, to the point that after fifty or sixty experiences with it I no longer use it. I strongly prefer mushrooms and suggest mixing them with small amounts of MDMA for an incredible experience.
I'm afraid it's a pass from me on investment. ;)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605880
Which PAAS (psychedelic-as-a-service) would you pay the most money for?
It's a great way to sell drugs because you can always claim that whatever is stashed in the backseat was left by one of your passengers.
re: the business and yogafication of psychedelics
Quite a long story but I found it thought-provoking.
We were on the beach sitting on blankets, and my phone somehow got lost in the folds of the blanket while I was coming up. For the next ~4 hours I basically forgot "who" I was, being deprived of a phone that constantly shows me my friends, notes, and pictures. Eventually, I did find my phone and it was the weirdest experience ever to look at my phone and slowly start "remembering" who I am.
it's virtually dripping in it!
What things can you be addicted to are LESS terrible than being addicted to your phone?
Not sure if it's just me, but this is getting very hard to separate during quarantine. I often remember conversations that happened over text as having happened in person. Perhaps my mind is accounting for the lack of face-to-face interaction.
Then again, having near constant access to almost all human knowledge can render a man rather unwilling to retain information.
- Minimal web bookmarks (i.e. I have to type in most web sites I want to visit; this is just enough of an encumbrance that I won’t flip open things like Reddit every 30 seconds).
- I never install apps meant for content consumption, I use their web sites. (This is usually a better experience anyway, since the vast majority of them are somehow worse than their web sites, packed with ads/notifications/spying/crap that no one should want anyway.)
- Certain web sites I refuse to use at all on mobile. This gives me a much larger and more useful view anyway, and I can enforce sanity with a lot more plug-ins that way.
- As of latest iOS, I shove most apps into the Library so they are not even on my home screen. That way, they are straightforward to retrieve with a swipe-down search but not as easy as just tapping them open. I find that I use them slightly less this way.
- I turn off many notifications, since app-makers have long abused them anyway (as virtual ads, or designed in some way to suck people back into their apps for no reason; I drew the line when apps started outright lying about things, e.g. red dots implying messages that were not actually there, etc.).
- I set it up so that my lock screen will not show most things without an extra step.
One quibble: I also uninstalled most apps, but there isn’t a single one of them with a mobile website that’s better. It really is a far worse experience to have to use the website.
The small screen and keyboard discourage any extended use of my phone.
Huh, what browser? Or did you make it not remember anything visited? Don't they all figure out what you want these days? I mean if I type 'r' FF presents me reddit.com, 'n' is news.yconmbinator.com as best match etc. For the sites I visit most, it's actually faster than looking up a bookmark.
This may in no way weaken the point that some of the brightest minds of today are working on producing digital Skinner boxes, black on top, with humans as the rats, interfaced via phones.
But basing an attempt at a strong argument about the addictive nature of cell-phones on an article with low relevance in scientific fields specializing in addiction could be described as suspect (most citations on g.scholar on the piece could be delineated as in the fields of business and management ).
Anecdotally, I recently discussed phone addiction with a youngish tenured professor friend in the psych department at a major university. Two things stood out for me:
1. My academic friend really had a limited understanding of the success of machine learning in driving engagement online. How algorithms can and will enhance whatever mechanism they discover to drive engagement numbers. And how our brains are not wired to compete against them.
2. He took exception to the word addiction in the context of phones. He felt a phone could not drive addiction in the same way as a substance.
My opinion is that our academic research is significantly behind due to the sheer speed and exponential growth of phone/app usage.
I wouldn't expect the field of Psychology to lead research in the area, as you also concluded in your closing statement.
Exemplified by the following quote from the article "5. Inability to feel pleasure and excitement in the offline world but excessive emotions are tied to online rewards like gambling, likes, shares, followers, sexting, masturbation to porn, etc."
The phone itself is like a gun to a soldier, a force multiplier. By itself, it does nothing, give it to a friendly soldier and he will become more effective, give it to the enemy and he will become more dangerous.