Forgive the personal aside at the outset, but it’s relevant to the point at hand. I remember buying my first smartphone. It was 2010 and I’d just moved back to Canada from South Korea, where I hadn’t been able to purchase an iPhone. Upon my return, I tried to hold out against the rising phenomenon of endless interconnectedness. I didn’t hold out for long. I bought an iPhone and set it up. That same day, I was in line at a coffee shop and for the first time in my life, found myself ignoring the cashier as they asked for payment. I was distracted, scrolling on my phone.
In the fifteen years since I purchased that phone, and several of its successors, smartphones have become ubiquitous. The phones are not just a device, but an extension of us, our social connections, memories, cognition, and even our consciousness. As of 2024, 98 percent of Americans owned a cell phone, 91 percent of which were smartphones. That’s a considerable leap from the 35 percent who owned a smart device when Pew began tracking ownership in 2011.
In many ways, the phones now own us. A 2025 study found that on average, Americans check their phone over 200 times a day — “almost once every five minutes while we’re awake.” As people spend hours each day scrolling or typing, over 40 percent report feeling addicted to their smartphone. Different studies yield varying results, but the through line is similar: most of us own smartphones, and most of us spend more time on them than we’d like — tethered to them at considerable personal and social cost. There are plenty of reasons to down this tool.
An outright ban on smartphones would be, to say the least, heavy handed — and likely unconstitutional in both the United States and in Canada, depending on how it was enacted. But let’s think through the proposition, beginning with the premise that smartphone use is a collective problem, not a personal one. It represents a pickle we need to get out of together. After all, an individual’s ability to unplug is shaped by social norms and expectations. It’s almost impossible to put down your smartphone if no one else will.
That collective dimension is already acknowledged in schools, where cell phones are increasingly banned. Officials cite a growing body of evidence that show the devices are bad for kids. Even some tech bigwigs are sending their children to “anti-tech” schools. But scaling that up to the rest of us is tough work, especially when you’re talking about taking on an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year, and still growing.
Smartphones aren’t just bad for kids. They’re bad for adults, too. They make us more lonely, depressed, stressed, anxious, and prone to suicidal ideation. Using them at the dinner table or wherever we congregate makes us unhappy. They can also have negative effects on exercise, attention spans, and cognitive function, and even our sex lives. In short, smartphones are bad for our mental and physical health, making us miserable, stupid, and antisocial.
Smartphones — and the social media platforms they support — aren’t just bad for individual health; they’re corrosive to the health of the body politic, both socially and politically. We’ve long known that, as conduits for the internet, phones facilitate the spread of misinformation and disinformation, amplify outrage, and enclose users in algorithmically tailored media silos. The result is a narrowing of perspective that leaves many of us intellectually isolated, reactive, and disconnected from opposing views.
Smartphones are supposed to “connect us to the world,” but, in fact, they often render us unable to understand — let alone trust — those outside our bubble. Over time, this deepens polarization and erodes faith in shared institutions, making it harder to agree on basic facts, let alone act collectively. The consequence isn’t just confusion — it’s a slow-burning crisis of legitimacy.
Even when smartphones offer access to accurate information, their effects undermine our ability to process or act on it. The tool that was ostensibly meant to serve as a gateway to endless sources of information — to liberate us from constraints on learning — has done no such thing.
Just as smartphones offer the illusion of social connection, they offer a false sense of political agency — as if picking up your phone and posting is the equivalent of organizing, mobilizing, or building solidarity.
Meanwhile, the now-habitual impulse to grab your phone to tap out a quick post or text reply while in the presence of others — friends, family, service industry workers — is not only rude, but corrosive to basic social interaction. Smartphones are anti-political, anti-intellectual, and antisocial menaces.
With smartphones, we — which is to say, the tech industry — have created a device in which we’ve met our match. Worse still, being always on and always reachable is particularly punishing for workers. Bosses routinely exploit that access to blur the boundaries between labor and life. For the millions of jobs that hinge on email or messaging apps, the distinction between work life and private life has collapsed.
Not only are we always now connected, we’re also always connected to work. Recognizing this, countries including France and Australia have adopted “right to disconnect” laws in an attempt to free workers from being shackled to their devices outside of work hours.
Smartphones pose a problem for society at large, but in particular for socialists who advocate for a social, economic, and political order that assumes and requires a functional base level of sociality that these devices undermine. Smartphones are not prosocial. It’s hard to imagine a socialist order run by device-addicted zombies, increasingly disconnected and semi-literate — reverting to something like an oral tradition, only mediated through ChatGPT, dashed-off texts, and nihilistic shitposts on Twitter/X, all while uploading TikToks between tasks.
Today flip phones, or “dumb phones” with limited functions are having a bit of a moment. In 2023, nearly 100,000 of them were sold in Canada, a leap of 25 percent over 2022 sales. There’s been a similar movement in the United States. But the majority of cell phone users remain smartphone users, either by choice or by force of habit, social pressure, work demands, or utter addiction. Is this what we want for ourselves? For our friends, families, and partners? Surely not. We’re caught in a trap, and we need to get ourselves out of it.
What if we banned smartphones and forced ourselves to be free? It might sound absurd. But it’s less a literal policy proposal than a collective cry for help. Many of us want to disconnect, but we can’t do so alone — not without losing touch with the world around us. Disconnection, today, carries real social and economic costs. Until such time as smartphones and social media can be democratically governed or nationalized — liberated from the imperative to profit off our attention indefinitely — a ban may be the most realistic path to reclaiming our lives. This isn’t a rejection of freedom; it’s a call for a deeper kind of freedom: a collective precommitment to a social order that gives us our lives back.
What if we lashed ourselves to the masts, like Odysseus sailing past the sirens, freeing ourselves from the alluring but costly melodies of our smartphones? What if instead of “connecting,” we reconnected — with one another, with ourselves, with books and films, with the news, with the outdoors, even with our work — free from the constant pressures of our devices? We might be smarter, happier, healthier, kinder, and more present. Better yet, we’d be free.