May 2026

We are all addicts now 

Since the invasion of Iran, the USA has been compared to Britain at the end of its empire in the early 20^th century, neglecting its own population and getting embroiled in foreign conflicts.

But there’s another comparison to be made, where the USA (and much of the developed world) is China in the 19^th century, and Britain is Silicon Valley. Our addiction is smartphones and social media, rather than opium.

The combustion engine and the radio are inventions that are not generally objects of addiction. They are game-changing social innovations that have been universally popular, and some people may become addicted to them. But their ubiquity is largely a function of how they fit like nodes into the infrastructure and have been indispensable for other developments, while they are themselves also often enjoyable (driving a car, listening to music).

The same is not true of coffee, the widespread use of which arises more from the grip caffein takes on the body.

What are Smartphones? Smartphones are integral now to society, but that status depends on a lot of other things being true as well – including the nature and speed of work today, the precarity of workers, social isolation, etc. Perhaps the same could have been said about the combustion engine or the radio in its early days, but I think the status of phones is still more cultural than material.

Sidebar: The distinction is interesting and should be explored more: whether a thing's status as integral is materially determined (like wheels, screws, oil) or culturally / socio-economically determined (cosmetics, advertisements, media more generally). Where would currency fit in? And how does the origins of a thing's status effect our relationship to them? If it's cultural, then its status is likely determined by humans, in forms of constraints and affordances that are reified daily (rather than, say, the physical structure of a bridge or canal that's been in place for seventy years constraining / affording traffic flows). What further psychological effects does this have on the person using / depending on the device?

I argue that our relationship to smart phones as people (rather than the relationship between phones and other aspects of society, e.g. the electricity grid, data servers, or even abstract “deadlines” and such) is more one of compulsion with little personal payoff. We do not enjoy them for themselves, would rather society find some way not to need them. The same cannot be said of other innovations: the wheel, antibiotics, or writing.

Compare a few cases:

• Cars: not addictive, integral, popular—we’d like to reduce the necessity of our use but not abolish

• Coffee: addictive, not integral, popular, it’s not necessary really (though it fuels worker energy under capitalism, against fatigue and alienation); we’d like to keep using it, but maybe change the context

• The wheel: not addictive, integral, it makes other things popular, no change desired (except maybe expanding other ways of travel, e.g. flying cars or more high-speed rails).

• Antibiotics: not addictive, integral, not popular in the relevant sense, appreciated

• Smartphones: strong case that they're addictive, integral in a contingent way (depends on cultural / socio-economic factors: social alienation, the nature of work today; and this may also be causally related / supported / not challenged because of addiction*) popular in the way opium was popular to the merchant class in 19th century China: it doesn’t make people happy, we want it to be different.

An important side-bar consideration: would addiction actually make us create the circumstances where we need the phone more … as in, not supporting bans on phones at work or school would be an obvious one; but it could also be supporting the construction of new cell towers or resigning to high-density but atomized living? This would be analogous to stranding oneself on an island with booze so one can’t be stopped from drinking (or not pressing for shorter workdays because longer work days justify a speed habit).

Technologies are made to be useful because they're profitable to the companies that produce them (e.g. Microsoft giving a discount to a startup to use their 360 suite, but also having it so that Outlook or Teams is not as functional on Safari than Edge). But do those who are addicted to a service or product themselves have a hand, active or passive, in making something indispensable, in order to service their addiction?

What would it mean, then, if most people now behave like addicts—per their relationships to their phones? Billions of people engaged in compulsive, continuous use, despite whatever cost there is to memory, to attention, to sleep. Dozens of hours a week. What would it mean if the device was at society's center not because society would crumble in its absence (as it might the wheel, electricity, or water purification)—but because we can't face the withdrawal from it.

It's not a new claim that phones are addictive, yet the sense I get is that this is still often taken as metaphor (the way that society being a "money game" is taken as metaphor, and in both cases its being treated metaphorically masks its actual status).

There are complex reasons why phones are prolific and hard to move away from. Many employers do require workers to have and use smart phones. Vulnerable sectors of the population really do need them to stay safe and connected to care. And they are a different kind of device given the wide range of affordances. One could argue that it allows us to be active in a way previously impossible, tapping into a stock of creativity and productivity that had no application before phones. Yet, if the convenience (i.e. time freed-up for enriching activities) and creative / productive affordances were the reason we used our phones, we might expect they'd make us happier, but the declining rates of self-reported happiness suggest otherwise (there are, of course, complex reasons for this as well, but the dominance of smart phones and social media has to be considered as a causal factor).

For many, it'd be less convenient to use a basic phone, or no phone at all, but it wouldn't ruin their lives. Civilization would not descend into an abyss without phones, apps, or social media—it would just take some adjustment. And yet, we continue to use. I'm less interested in arguing (what I think is likely correct) that the relationship billions of people have to their phones is not unlike an addiction to gambling, shopping, or drugs. What interests me is what it would mean that something which is so integral to society's functioning (even in an ephemeral, contingent way) is also the object of an addiction. Again, the relationship between a thing being integral and a thing being addictive needs to be studied, as these phenomena are not the same. A creative illustration of this is spice in the Dune series, which is both a kind of integral technology and an addictive substance.

To make the point another way: an object (or service) can be independently useful and addictive. This has two results: (A) its latter properties can be masked by the former (probably more common with shopping rather than substance addictions); (B) it can become difficult to meaningfully stop "using" an addictive object or service, because it is also useful. Imagine a shopaholic who was also a buyer for various fashion retailers, or a sommelier who is an alcoholic. Shopping is useful to the buyer because it gives them an income, likewise with wine for the sommelier. They have reasons for wanting to quit, i.e. the harm of their respective addictions, but they can't because doing these tasks, aside from being addictive, is too useful in providing an income. Can the same be said of smartphones? They've been made too useful for us to separate from them, which is what breaking our addiction might require.

What would it mean if we are all addicts now, and the thing we are addicted to, despite the data and headlines, is masked as such because of all its professed acolytes: efficiency, productivity, connection—the fact that it is just a brilliant piece of human invention.

Those acolytes may be true and yet — people hate their phones. We dream about a society without them, would like to not have to have them. Is this because we hate other aspects of society that phones accelerate, because we hate the loss of freedom that comes with addiction, or because we just genuinely do not like them? Regardless, we keep using them. Smartphones are pretending to be the wheel, or the printing press, or penicillin, but they are actually opium.

Trump is an escape from reality

Feedback loops are everywhere, perhaps most pervasive being the following: distraction begets degradation begets the greater need for distraction, and so on. Trump is an apotheosis of this. For some, he is cause of the need for distraction, for others he's the solution, but to everyone he is also the distraction itself.

For many of his supporters, he offered the promise of change—a reversion to the "good old days," a harder line on immigration, etc. But those promises are not enough to explain why Trump's success has continued. Why has his approval rating barely ever fallen below 38%, that part of his base, so cult-like that it is unshakeable? But why is he also generally tolerated by the rest of the public, especially in Trump 2.0. Sure, there's been moments of widespread protest, but in general we continue to live our lives as normal, as he enriches himself through crypto-bribery and theft and violates the constitution over and over again (to say nothing of his personal history).

Trump is almost impossibly both an escape and a distraction from reality, and he is reality impending. He is, more than anything, a reality TV star. Reality TV is always a simulacrum. A mirror world. A place to escape into, appealing maybe because of its accessibility given its similarity to reality, but less its content. It's another place to exist, or rather to not exist here. Trump is that other place here in reality, all at once. It’d be so much easier to mount a serious resistance if he was a scary, angry dictator. He’s instead this kind of hologram that glimmers and shifts and changes shape, like the scramble suit in A Scanner Darkly. He can become what he wants to if it means winning another hand of whatever game he's playing that day—convincing Kentucky voters not to vote for Massey or arguing for a billion dollars to build a ballroom—and he'll believe it the way method actors believe in their characters.

To watch Trump is to experience a swirl of possible feelings rather than one feeling: rage, schadenfreude, disgust, hilarity, comfort. It’s crazy. You often can’t even believe what you’re looking at it's so absurd, amidst the ocean of self-seriousness of politics (especially politics before Trump).  (Trump as a close cousin to Tim Robinson in that respect). It's hard to commit to one feeling because it's like getting mad—or disgusted or despairing—at a senile grandpa, or a giant toddler. Yet these are also characters he plays. Trump is acting constantly, and how do you then get really angry at someone for never breaking character? Even when he's killing people by cutting health insurance, by bombing Iran—absurdity asserts itself. He's WWE guy, The Apprentice star, and he's blowing up the world? Of course he is.

He succeeds because of this. He is able to be an impending aspect of reality—disrupting and destroying and reshaping the world, history, and the future, because he himself is an escape from it, a performance. There are two barriers here: the first, the distraction by this magician on stage; and the second, that extra layer of absurdity that creates a gap where there should be rage. It's the contradiction that this is actually and still our president (not eight but twelve years later), and that a reality TV star could wreak havoc globally, could actually be (on some measure) the most powerful person in the world. It feels like being trolled. And given his character, his charade, it often feels absurd getting angry at him, absurd organizing a protest or strike, "Against whom? Trump? Trump's just crazy, come on," and then, into that gap, enters the illusion: "You know he has America's best interests at heart." Of course this works in his interest, as does the schadenfreude we feel against him (likewise during the Bush-era).

Trump is not one thing to get mad at. Some days he's silly. Other days he's humble. Other days he's horrible. On all days, he's absurd. It's absurd. And all around him the raptors continue their work: Miller, Kushner, Kennedy.

When Trump is gone, when the show is over, it'll be something like the cold, gray screen when the movie's over and the credits are killed. Except another movie will start playing. The real movie, the real nightmare: when someone worse than Trump takes power—someone with true iron-fisted instincts and the competency to follow through; when inequality is so extreme that large swaths of the population live below the poverty line, relegated to "red zones" a la Klein's "disaster apartheid"; or when the government is left so defunded and dysfunctional it can't respond meaningfully to the climate crises in the cache, or to the next pandemic. That will be the real legacy of Trump, his supporters, and his audience.