You're Wrong About

Phones Are Good, Actually with Taylor Lorenz

• Sarah Marshall

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Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are talking with Taylor Lorenz about how technology is probably not the solution to, or the cause of, all of our problems. Just some of them. We last had Taylor on to talk about influencers and now she is back to talk about how phones and kids’ access to technology have become part of really a classic moral panic of the kind that we have always talked about on this show. 

I really loved having Taylor on again, and she is also now the host of her own podcast. It's called Power User. And if you want more Taylor, you can find her there. And if you want to read more Taylor, you can also find her in her book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. This was a really fun conversation for me. I had a lot of baggage that I wanted to explore about my own relationship with technology. You might feel that way as well. 

And thank you so much for listening. If you want to listen to more You're Wrong About, you can always check us out on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions if you don't subscribe already. Our June bonus is coming out soon. We also sometimes have longer versions of our episodes on there. We did that most recently with our George Michael episodes. We talked there last year with Carmen Maria Machado about Flowers in the Attic. There's all kinds of stuff. Give it a look if you haven’t or spend your money on a kiddie pool and fill it with water and lie it. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for finding us probably on your phone. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the program where we look today's and yesterday's moral panics in the eye and say, “Calm down, why don't you?” And with me today is Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor: Hi. Hello. 

Sarah: Oh, thank you so much for being here with us. 

Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. I feel like moral panics have become like 30% of my beat lately.

Sarah: Yeah, was that your goal when he set out or did that just become inevitable based on covering the internet? 

Taylor: I think it just became inevitable with technology. I don't know. There's a lot of fear around any sort of new media. And that's ultimately what I cover. 

Sarah: Taylor, we're doing an episode today, which in my Google Calendar for this recording, I at least I'm calling phones are good for you, actually, and I think that I'm being clickbaity here with myself. I'm not going to say that I think my phone is good for me, but it feels like what we're talking about today, if I'm correct, is, it correct to blame phones for everything? And in fact, for some things that maybe are good.

Taylor: I just think that there's a complete moral panic around technology and social media specifically. And that's not to defend Facebook or some of the worst platforms ever. I get it. But I feel like we have this super optimism about technology and social media and the iPhone. It all came at once together in the late aughts and early 2010s. 

Sarah: It really did. 

Taylor: Yeah. And everyone was so excited and optimistic. And then there was this correction. And everyone was like, wait a minute, okay, these are not all universally wonderful tools. But I feel like we threw the baby out with the bathwater because now what we're seeing is this kind of reactionary moral panic around kids and technology and specifically kids and social media use or kids and phone use. A lot of it's driven by this one recent book that came out called The Anxious Generation, which is what I would argue, just full of a bunch of moral panic nonsense about kids and phone use and how it's destroying the younger generation's mind. 

Sarah: Yeah, I would love to talk about where you think this story begins and it does feel like we are in very classic moral panic territory. I'll say that my own personal concerns about phones, I don't have kids. So I don't care about the kids. I care about me. And I know my phone is negatively impacting my life to some extent, but it feels like one of the classic moral panic patterns is for adults in a society to be nervous in a way that reflects what's going on pretty accurately in a general kind of way. 

To recognize that technology is posing threats in our society in this case, and then perhaps rather than having the thoughtful conversation about it that is rendered necessary by that problem, deciding to invent a problem and save the children from it. Is that accurate here? 

Taylor: Yeah, 100%. And this is not even the first moral panic around phones. There was, of course, a massive moral panic around landlines back when those became pervasive. I found a great old news article claiming that women talking on the phone too much was the cause of nine out of ten divorces, which I don't know how they got to that number. But it was believed to be destroying young people's brains. 

Sarah: I knew women were to blame, but I didn't realize it was our phone use. 

Taylor: So much of the talking points around the negative effects of landlines, telephones mirror concerns about social media, which is ultimately like, why are these young people spending all this time connecting with each other through technology? That is ruining them.

Sarah: Right. And any moral panic that's focused on fear of young people having too much autonomy, really, and too much ability to develop culture and bonds with each other and be exposed to people that can lessen the chokehold of the family unit, which sometimes deserves to be lessened, that fear always reveals a lot about the person who has it, I guess, or often it does. And I would love to talk about where the story begins, whether we should go back in history or talk about this particular book. Take us where you want to. Where's chapter one? 

Taylor: Yeah, I think it's worth thinking about some of these historical moral panics, but to me this specific story really begins in 2007 with the release of the iPhone. That's also the year that Twitter launched, and Facebook became super mainstream around that time. They had started accepting everyone, you didn't have to be a college student to join anymore. 

Sarah: I was aghast by this because I had just become a college student in September 2006. So the timing was terrible for me. I was like, Mark, what are you doing? 

Taylor: I know. But then, within a couple of years too, you had the launch of Instagram and, eventually Vine and Musical.ly, and this birth of social media in the early half of the 2010s right when iPhones were taking off because the iPhones launched in 2007. It really took a couple years for most people to get their hands on them. They were expensive. People were very excited about social media, very excited. This was supposed to bring democracy and connection and happiness to the world. Zuckerberg was on stage talking about connecting the world at scale and how this would save humanity.

Sarah: Yeah, and it's so hard to get back to that feeling. I can begin to think of reasons why that felt in reach. But did people have citations for this? Or was it just surely it will be wonderful for us all? 

Taylor: December 2010 is also when the Arab Spring really kicked off, especially throughout 2011. So I think we started to see these examples of really liberatory movements, same thing with Tumblr, which was also really popular at this time. You saw the beginning of body positivity movements. And then you had these progressive political movements and all of it was being ushered in by social media. 

So I think to a lot of liberals, they saw social media as this driver of progressive change in society. And it all seemed very good. And also let's not forget that Silicon Valley was previously seen as this bastion of liberalism. Mark Zuckerberg was a Democrat, so it was like, this is going to save us. These were also the Obama years. People were optimistic and Obama himself had such a tight relationship with the tech industry. 

Sarah: Yeah. The time travel this is sending me on is really dizzying because I'm just thinking about it's 2010, I have my first smartphone, which is an Android with a slide out keyboard. I'm using Facebook to communicate with other people in academia because my first year of grad school or 2011 was when I got that phone. And Tumblr is this delightful thing that feels like a faster version of the live journal of my high school years. 

And yeah, it does feel like we have opened this direct pathway into each other's lives that allows us to share a lot of really great stuff. And I guess maybe one of the first things I can think of that feels like Pandora's box had opened too far was Gamergate. Does that figure into your view of this? 

Taylor: Yeah, that started later. So I would say we had this like 20, really 2007/8 to 2012, 13, just positivity. It was sunshine and rainbows. We love technology. Wow. Have you heard of this thing called Uber? It's going to be great. Yeah. And also there was so much innovation in the social space that these platforms at the time were not super focused on monetization. They were mostly focused on scale and growth. So they weren't super ads heavy yet. There was no such thing as algorithmic feeds. 

Everything was reverse chron. It was just such a slower time on the internet too, in so many ways. And you had more competition. You had Hipstamatic versus Instagram. You had Foursquare, you had this sort of Cambrian explosion of like social media apps because the app market was huge. In 2012, if you made a hit app, you were a success. That was the path to like tech stardom. And so it was exciting. 

I think Gamergate was the first inkling of when we really started to see social media turn negative. And it wasn't really until 2014-ish, and I actually don't think it was taken seriously at all, even remotely. It was more seen as this fringe movement. But that's when you started to see the negativity, the first glimmer of it, I would argue. 

Sarah: Can you describe what Gamergate was in a nutshell for people who didn't have the pleasure? 

Taylor: Yes. Ha ha, Gamergate was this coordinated harassment movement against women in the video game industry. It targeted the sort of women that were seen as progressive in the video game world, video game journalists, video game developers, female video game journalists, female video game developers. 

The whole thing was sensibly about ethics and gaming journalism because one female tech journalist had dated some gaming guy and that was supposed to make her unethical or it was all basically nonsense bullshit excuse to harass women who were trying to build this sort of more progressive inclusive space in gaming. This notion that games aren't for girls, it was a very far right driven movement. It was very closely tied with the men's rights movement. 

Sarah: Which feels very based on the idea that it's all a zero-sum game and that men have two rights and if women take away one, then men will have one right left, basically, and a lot of other stuff.

Taylor: Exactly. And who are these women saying that we could see a woman with a less than perfect body in a video game or, who's the woman game developer who made my favorite character’s tits smaller. Let's destroy her life.

Sarah: Right, people who were not very online I think maybe didn't take it super seriously because it was like gamer-on-gamer violence, I guess. It felt like men's rights as a concept was maybe a scary thing but a small scary thing, and that didn't turn out to be true. 

Taylor: And the media didn't know how to cover it. They had never really covered these like networked harassment campaigns. These types of campaigns, ultimately they're bad faith manufactured outrage campaigns directed at women. Now we understand this playbook. It's very commonplace. Half the internet runs on it. But at the time, these people were exploiting media companies and were able to shape coverage. 

And I don't think people paid too much attention to the gaming world anyway. They were like, ah, that's some gamer drama. We're not going to cover it in any meaningful way. And here we go. We'll just continue on. We love social media. Oh, I guess there's some harassment happening on Twitter to some women in gaming, but that's not a big deal. Instagram just added video! Isn't that exciting? And Vine is taking off and this is fun. 

Sarah: And this Logan Paul, he certainly makes some fun little videos on that Vine. 

Taylor: Yeah, this will never go wrong. He's lassoing women on the street. Isn't that funny? But then, it was really 2016, when that all changed. 2016 was such a moment of reckoning for social media and how people started to view technology because suddenly Trump was elected, and this movement that had been bubbling really birthed out of Gamergate, this far right sort of faction of the internet. Normal people saw that political power manifested in the world for the first time, and they were like, holy shit, did Facebook do this? Because Facebook famously boosted his campaign. People started to question whether these platforms were so good. 

Right after the 2016 election and really when Trump came into office in 2017, that's when you started to see tech reporters really change their tune, on Facebook specifically, but soon it boiled out into other platforms too. The criticism started with Facebook and of course, then led into, first it was like extremism on Facebook, then it was like scandals like Cambridge Analytica. Charlottesville happened. There were a bunch of shootings that happened that were live streamed on Facebook. 

Sarah: And what was the Zuckerbergian response through all this? 

Taylor: Not good. 2016 is when the algorithmic feeds came to platforms like Twitter and elsewhere. And the whole internet really became more algorithmic generally. So you started to see a little bit more outrage, a little bit more pigeonholing. And the narrative around tech changed. By 2017, 2018, people were like, okay, these platforms might not be all roses. And this is also when you started to see reporting come out on the gig economy, apps like Uber and things that we loved as these free delivery services, they actually rely on a lot of exploited workers. Maybe that's not the best system. 

Sarah: And also, wasn't it that in the beginning for the first seven minutes that they were around, Uber actually paid drivers quite well. And then, of course, once they had them in their pocket, I assume they were like, okay, now we're going to pay you 25 cents. 

Taylor: Exactly. It flipped. All of these platforms use their power to crush competitors and push people out and then once they had captured the market, they just started monetizing. And really the era of monetization comes a little bit later, but it was becoming toxic, and the internet was becoming increasingly toxic. Remember 2017, 2018, Twitter, Trump, and just the level, we were all slowly adjusting to this chaotic news cycle of protests of violence of chaos. 

Sarah: Yeah. It is hard to remember that transition, because I think we all have gotten used to every piece of news we hear sounding like season 350 of an alien reality show or something, which is apparently what we're living through. That old episode of South Park, I think, was correct. What we expected from the news we got in a day really changed a lot very quickly.

Taylor: So that's like when tech started to be accepted as not great. COVID hits in 2020, and it pushes everyone online to an insane degree.

Sarah: Including small children, which, it makes sense that we're dealing with some panic about that, I guess.  

Taylor: But I would actually say it wasn't the children that caught exactly. Yes, the children were getting more online. A lot of those kids were already pretty online, but they weren't really coming themselves on the internet. 2020 is also when a lot of Gen Z’ers were able to vote for the first time and really express themselves and really use their voice on the internet. So you had everyone suddenly pushed online and then you really started to see this generational fracturing occurring. It's 10 times worse now than in 2020. 

Sarah: Interestingly, I don't feel like anyone was even talking about Gen Z before 2020. I feel like everyone was still complaining about millennials despite the fact that we were like 36 by then.

Taylor: Yeah. I actually think what 2020 did is it made all of these cable news pundits and all of these kinds of Boomers and older people suddenly have to take the internet seriously and suddenly live in the internet world and like they didn't like what they saw. 

Sarah: Yeah. God, that's true. God, you're right. And millennials and Gen Z were like, I was born into darkness. 

Taylor: And so that's when you really start to see this panic and so much of it is driven by COVID, too. And these right-wing talking points that said, actually, forcing your child back to school in person during the pandemic is better for them than having them on zoom because-

Sarah: Your child would sooner die than have to play another iPad learning game.

Taylor: I think that what Republicans and right wingers really did successfully is like tie the trauma of the pandemic to being online and everyone was trapped at home on their phones. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I certainly feel that way too. Yeah. I think I have PTSD about the Twitter interface, maybe at my lowest moment. So I guess flashback to scrolling and like white and baby blue. 

Taylor: But, I want to correct some of what we all might think.

Sarah: Please, thank you. Because I am feeling very oppressed by my personal devices that I also love. And I think I want to be told that it's not my fault. 

Taylor: It's not. We can get into this, but I just want to say around 2020, there's been so much rewriting of history. I was in Atlanta for a lot of 2020, and they never even closed down indoor dining. This notion that America had any kind of serious lockdowns because people were working from home for a while and getting takeout. Yes, it was enormously traumatic, and it remains traumatic. Let's not forget that, by the way, disabled people are still forced to be completely remote even four years later. 

Sarah: So yeah, it isn't over. Yeah.

Taylor: And people keep talking about oh, it was so traumatic when I was It's but that's what you're subjecting disabled people to now, by the way, but I think it's also- 

Sarah: But it doesn't matter if it's not me, right?

Taylor: I think we allowed these sort of right wingers to set these narratives about the pandemic quite successfully in the media, specifically when we talk about technology, that instead of saying, yes, this pandemic continues to be horrible and especially in 2020, I was in New York in the early parts and the deaths and the sirens and everything, it was scary, but phones allowed us to have connection. We were able to connect in a way that we would have never been 15 years prior and that was liberating and amazing and beautiful, really. 

Sarah: Yes, it would have been a lot more like Pearl for a lot more people if we hadn't had technology, I think. 

Taylor: Yeah. Look, I'm not saying I was having all the best experiences online during that time, but fundamentally phones are providing connection. I was able to connect with my family members that I couldn't see for months over FaceTime. We had all these family FaceTime’s and the technology was a lifesaver during those early months, and it was not framed that way subsequently. 

Once things started to open up and there started to be this freak out about children in large part because of the ongoing harm of the pandemic. The fact that hundreds of thousands of children have lost their primary caregiver since the start of COVID. Instead, we start to freak out about phone use. 

Who's this new generation that 1) has a political ideology that's very different from mine, that is spending all their time online, expressing ideas that I don't like. And also they're having a hard time in school, and they're depressed. They're having a mental health crisis and they're depressed. And it must be not because of this entire economic system that we've created or this horrible world that we've forced them to grow up in. It's because they spend too much time on their phones. It's because the pandemic made them spend too much time on their phones. 

Sarah: My favorite part of the Bell Jar is when Sylvia Plath writes, yeah, it's not the exact words, but something like, “It was a hot, humid summer in New York City the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. And I was addicted to Candy Crush, which accounts for my major depression.”

Taylor: Exactly. It's such a ridiculous framing and yet it feels right to so many people, I think, especially older people, because I think actually young people have much less complicated relationships with technology, especially millennials and younger, but they've grown up with it. It feels second nature. They're not questioning it in the same way. They evolved into this media climate, whereas older people are like, why are all these young people spending time on TikTok? What is it doing to their brains? It's turning them against the United States. Why do they have all these radical views and why do they want to upend the system? It's the phones that are the problem. Let's take away the phones. The phones are making them anxious, depressed, miserable. 

Sarah: Oh shit. Okay, so this is really interesting because something that I feel like is a major theme of the show and that I have to come back to is that the Satanic Panic is a moral panic that functions partly by accusing, the satanists, the gays, the girls, the gays, the theys, of plotting to satanically overtake the United States because satanists want to infiltrate the highest houses of government and set the standards for how professions operate and the ethical standards for the United States. 

And interestingly, the satanic panic flourished in the period when American fundamentalists were plotting to do exactly that and successfully, I might add. And so I think there's always such an interesting element of projection in that. And then of course, the fear of the kids are on TikTok, or the kids are learning about Black Lives Matter at school, or my child has a trans teacher, and it's bad for them. And is it bad for them? Or are you afraid that you can't maintain the kind of stranglehold that you need on your child in order to maintain the kind of patriarchal control that is often the worst thing that can happen to a child, but is very Christian and therefore moral, quote unquote. 

Taylor: And that's exactly what you're seeing. Basically, this antiphone panic that's emerged in the past year has led to quite horrifying pieces of legislation, right? It's these laws in places like Florida and Utah that are seeking to ban people under the age of 16 or 18 from even using the internet and social media. It's the Kids Online Safety Act, which is very inappropriately named because I would argue it does not keep kids much safer. Marsha Blackburn, co-sponsor of the bill, when asked why she talks about social media and how kids are being indoctrinated into this transgender ideology online. 

And you see this time and time again, where young people express themselves. They express a progressive ideology. They express a progressive gender identity, or they start talking about human rights. They talk about wanting to upend the status quo. Look at the TikTok ban, right? The entire sort of elite ruling class of the media and politicians come down with a hammer and say, okay. No, absolutely not. 

And by the way, you guys are all brain poisoned zombies for thinking this way. It reminds me very much of the panic over children reading novels and getting all these crazy ideas in their head about changing the world and leading better lives. 

Sarah: Tell us about the novel panic for people who don't know the pleasure again. This is actually a fun one. I'm not being sarcastic.

Taylor: When the printing press came out, whatever, books came on the scene. But it was really when novels started to become mainstream and the cheap, easy novels, lots of young people were reading them and lots of young women. It's always, the concerns are always around young women and kids. All of the media and leaders were getting- and you saw this happen with comic books later too in the 50s- but getting very concerned about young people reading novels and having these fantasies and how that was making them delusional and they weren't going to go work in the factory anymore because they'd read a novel about a better life and they were going to Go pursue, some ridiculous pursuit.

Sarah: And they're going to go to Santa Fe like Jack Kelly.

Taylor: Yeah. And it's so funny too with the comic book panic, which is so similar to the TikTok and social media panic too. In the fifties, it was thought that comic books were poisoning the youth's minds and stuff. And the lawmakers were arguing that Batman and Robin were spreading gay messaging, that they were secret gay lovers, and that Batman and Robin was gay indoctrination to the youth.

Sarah: And I fucking wish. 

Taylor: I know. And that resulted in book burnings and people passing these restrictive laws and comic book companies being driven out of business. And beepers as well. It's hard to remember because we were children, beepers are like the little things that alert you when someone's trying to call you. There was such a moral panic around beepers that several states made it illegal to carry any sort of paging device and they arrested dozens of students because they thought beepers were leading children to a life of crime. And so they arrested 70 students in one Chicago high school for possession of beepers.

Sarah: I am this close to getting a beeper at this point because the idea of someone when they need you just being like, hey, I need you, you get a beat from them. And you're like, okay, I should call them, it's so appealing in this era. I just had my phone on ‘do not disturb’ a lot of the time, which I think a lot of people also forget you can do. You don't have to receive everything that it can give you, you can set boundaries with your phone. 

I don't know, I feel like it just goes to show that we can panic about anything if we set our minds to it. It also makes me think of the line in Meet me in St. Louis, which I think is in 1900 when Judy Garland's sister is getting a phone call. A very brand new, exciting phone call from a guy who she hopes will propose and somebody is I wouldn't accept a proposal from someone who proposed to me over an invention. Everything is an invention at one time or another. 

Taylor: I think it's also this failure to recognize digital friendships and digital connections as legitimate or as valid or as nurturing, as offline friendships. Especially when it comes to LGBTQ youth, they're much more likely to connect online, especially and have the internet be this lifeline and social space for them. And a lot of young kids of color as well. 

In the wake of all of the police violence and Trayvon Martin's murder and parents of color are much more likely to keep their young children home than allow them to go out because of the threat of police violence. And we never do anything to address that. We never say, let's fix those problems so that kids can spend more time roaming outside, running around the streets like they did in the 1970s or whatever and eliminate these over militarized suburban police departments that harass kids for walking home alone. We're like let's take away their phones. Why are they spending so much time at home on the phone? Where are they supposed to go out to? They can't hang out alone outside without maybe the cops harassing them or, they're living in less walkable cities than ever. It's harder and harder to even walk to a friend's house compared to decades ago.

Sarah: And their parents could get in legal trouble if they're allowed to play outside, depending on their age. 

Taylor: And we've eliminated third spaces. There's no malls to hang out at. Everything costs money. Young people don't have a lot of money. Where are they supposed to go? Where is this mythical place that they're all supposed to be hanging out with each other?

Sarah: It does feel like this is a moral panic where the solution is taking something away from minors rather than giving them more resources, which also seems like a good way to tell that maybe something is wrong. 

Taylor: You see the harms over and over again. And now what we're seeing with social media, we're seeing this crackdown on free expression on the internet and allowing young people to have a voice on the internet. And that is ultimately what all of this is about. It is panicking parents and older people saying the internet and social media and phones are destroying young people's minds. And making them depressed and miserable. And so to save them we have to take it away. 

Sarah: Interestingly, some of the same people who did not understand the purpose of quarantining people when there was an actual viral threat to be slowed down, are trying to shelter in place so their children never see a trans person.

Taylor: Exactly. These are the same people that Jonathan Haidt, who wrote Literally, the Coddling of the American Mind is now the one pushing his book called The Anxious Generation, the entire premise of which is that we should coddle the younger generation by removing their access to technology. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Taylor: Phones are not the problem here. If that was the case, then why did suicides drop when kids did remote school? School can be traumatic, youth can be traumatic. So much of the harms that we talk about with adolescents are not due to phones that they're due to like economic conditions. Young people are also growing up in a time of economic precarity. They watch their parents struggle through the Great Recession and they are growing up in this world that is crumbling, facing climate change and no health care and this ongoing pandemic which young people are acutely aware of. And they want to take away the phones. 

Sarah: And the clock is ticking until one of these kids gets mowed down by a Cybertruck whose accelerator pedal is stuck.

Taylor: Exactly. And we can totally acknowledge the problems of social media, the problems with algorithmically driven feeds, the problems with whether or not it actually radicalizes you. I think there's some debate on how much of that is driven by social media and how much is just driven by our political climate at large.

Sarah: But what do you think about that? Because I feel if I had children, then I would think I'm worried about the misinformation on social media, but social media is also something that I really do go to for comfort. And if I want information on anything. If I want just to see some gardening tips every day, then TikTok is where I go for that. And there are a lot of crazy corners of the internet, but also that, most kids are pretty savvy and at least some ways and they can find what they like.  It seems like giving too big a share of blame. for the right-wing radicalization of people, especially young people in America is maybe giving too little credit to how bad of a foundation we put it on.

Taylor: Young people in America are largely not radicalized to the right. Young people in America have much more progressive values than older people. And it's the progressivism that these older people have a problem with, but it is, look at Jonathan Haidt, right? His issue is with. young progressives. The internet is fundamental to education about these issues, right? Kids are learning about Black Lives Matter not from the mainstream media, from social platforms. Kids are learning the truth about COVID. 

The only place that you can find accurate information about COVID these days is social media because so many mainstream media organizations just parrot government talking points saying the pandemic is over, ignore the thousands of deaths a week and tens of millions being disabled, and the fact that we still have absolutely no treatment for long COVID and we have fewer treatments for COVID now than we did two years ago. 

And by the way, yeah, we're continually six months late, eight months late updating the vaccines and they're not equally protective for all, although they're wonderful, get vaccinated, but. And look at Palestine and Israel as well, which is really, that's the motivation, more recently for them passing the TikTok ban.

Sarah: So people can't organize and protest. 

Taylor: Yeah, but also so that people cannot get access to information. There's a reason this is all happening also in Meta and these platforms are cracking down on quote unquote political content. There's censoring Palestinian journalists. They don't want young people getting news directly. The very things that they found were so liberatory about social media when they saw democracy being brought to certain places in the Middle East, in the early 2010s with the Arab spring is the same thing that they don't want happening in our own country. 

Sarah: Wow. Yeah.

Taylor: Instead of looking at our system, and saying, God, young people today have so much anxiety because they have to deal with non-stop school shootings, they are entering into a point of no return with climate change, a very uncertain future, a geriatric sort of political system that increasingly doesn't represent their interests. They're witnessing an ongoing mass murder of Palestinians abroad, live on Instagram and TikTok. And by the way, what are their job prospects? 

Sarah: And then people are mad at them for drawing conclusions based on the things they do see. 

Taylor: Exactly. And instead of saying, let's fix all of these problems with these systems and build a better world that these young people can thrive in, we say let's take away their access to the information because if we just cut them off., they won't be able to organize. They won't be able to question things. And we're just going to psych them all out and tell them that these phones are what's ruining our mental health, not the economic system we're all living in, the political system that we're all living under. 

Sarah: Yeah, if we're having a social media panic about large scale protests against the genocide of Palestinians, the children are perfect for banning protesting for the death of actual children, which is their primary use. The imaginary children cover up the real ones. 

Taylor: Yeah, this notion that phones are what's causing this unprecedented mental health crisis and not the material reality that most kids are living under is primed to appeal to parents who believe that there's this one singular danger that's destroying the younger generation. If we can just ban phones and strip young kids of their civil liberties, everything will go back to normal. And it'll be like the 1990s again. And, this idyllic time in the past.

Sarah: Which we also hated. And when all we did was complain about teenagers. The thing about teenagers is, look, I have not been alive for thousands of years, but I am pretty sure that there's never been a time in history when adults have been like, these teenagers, they're all right. We're going to stop bothering them. They're great. We just think they're tip top. At every time in history, at least in recorded history, people have been freaking out about how teenagers are worse than they were before because everyone thinks that they had it together when they were a teenager, apparently, I guess. 

Taylor: When we talk about keeping kids, quote unquote, off the phones, we're not having these nuanced conversations of what are they doing on the phones? Sure, if your kid is just sitting on the cell phone and scrolling Twitter, refreshing it for 12 hours straight, that's not healthy. Or are they FaceTiming with friends? Are they texting people? Are they on TikTok making funny videos? Are they being creative and using the phone to make their own funny content that resonates and allows them to express themselves or express their ideas? Those are positive things. 

Sarah: Are they learning about autism? Because nobody else will tell them.

Taylor: Oh that's so funny that you mentioned autism. 

Sarah: Are phones causing the autism? 

Taylor: That is what people like Haidt seem to imply. And same thing with ADHD, that it's this social contagion and everyone. No, first of all, we're lucky that young people are getting educated enough to get these diagnoses that can be life changing, by the way. As somebody with severe ADHD who grew up actually without a cell phone for much of my life as a millennial, we didn't even have social media for most of my time on this earth. It's just ridiculous that ADHD somehow didn't exist before phones. It's just that it wasn't treated, and you were forced to just fail out of school all the time and nobody gave a shit. 

Sarah: I think it's fair to say that all forms of neurodivergency have been wildly underdiagnosed in girls, especially historically. And it does feel like people's reaction to change understandably, and this is actually, I don't know any of the terminology for this, but there is a phenomenon where if somebody thinks there's a ghost in their house, then often they'll say this thing suddenly appeared and sometimes something didn't suddenly appear, you just suddenly noticed it and you didn't notice it before and you assume you would have. And so it becomes a story where it suddenly appears. 

And I think that's a similar thing happening on a bigger scale where if suddenly, oh my God, so many people are being diagnosed with autism and ADHD. No shit, Sherlock. We weren't diagnosing enough of them earlier.

Taylor: A hundred percent, especially if it's helping young people understand themselves better and ultimately have more autonomy. 

Sarah: Yeah. And understand their needs and understand that they have needs, which I think for older generations. Boomers, God love them. I love all their music, but like they, very sadly for them, were raised in a culture where having needs is the worst thing you can do in any relationship. And I'm glad that we're saying goodbye to that world, but it makes sense that they want to defend everybody else suffering like they have. 

Taylor: And I think what's scary too, is that this panic, which is so driven by the media and these sort of like figures that are very vocal in these books and it's a whole industry backed by the way, right wing money and right-wing special interest groups, it's resulting in this bipartisan federal and state legislation that is aimed in quote unquote protecting the kids. And I think anytime you have lawmakers like agreeing on something and rushing, rushing any side of legislation that strips civil liberties away from young people in the name of protecting them, we should be concerned. 

Sarah: Yeah, I think that's a really good template. Any time you see some, a law that claims to be for young people, for kids, for minors, and it's taking away their civil liberties or their human rights because children do have rights, then yeah, that's pretty easy. We can all remember that. I think I feel good about that. 

Taylor: I also think these people and especially older people that are championing this movement, they, if anything, are trying to brainwash young people and confuse them about what life was like before cell phones. They're the ones saying, all this depression you're experiencing, all this loneliness. No, that's not a normal reaction to our broken world. No, that's not a normal reaction to being a teenager and going through adolescence. It is the phone that is causing it. And so you should get up here and testify on Capitol Hill and join us by saying that we should restrict this stuff and these kids sometimes fall for it. 

I was talking to one Gen Z content creator recently, and I'm just like, the stuff you're saying, she's saying before cell phones, it was this beautiful world, and this is what it was like. And I was like, let me tell you something. No, it wasn't. It was actual hell. It was hell. And no, it was hell for so many people, especially if you're a young woman or neurodivergent or LGBTQ. I can only speak for myself. 

I very much credit Tumblr with saving my life. It was terrible to grow up in a suburban town with, when you're isolated and your entire experience and understanding of the world is limited to your physical reality and the people around you, often of whom, many of whom suck.

Sarah: And the question of where did all these gay people come from is often people kept in the dark about the ways life can be and the ways they can live and the fact that there is community for them out there will often just live and die all alone. That's not a better way for people to exist.

Taylor: 100%. And that's the world that these people that are freaking out about phones and social media and stuff, that's the world they want to get back to. And it's not about improving these systems or improving the world and improving the things that young people, when you actually pull young people and you say, what are you concerned about?

And they bring up things like climate change, gun control, COVID, Palestine, Israel, foreign wars that we're spending billions of dollars on. Those are the things that they're bringing up. They're not like actually, yeah, if you could just block TikTok, that would be great. No, young people are against all of this. This is a movement driven by boomers. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Taylor: And it's authoritarian. 

Sarah: If anyone, it's all these boomers who are getting fooled by AI generated images on Facebook who need to have legislation passed about whether they should be allowed to have social media. 

Taylor: They so clearly can't navigate it, but I think a lot of them don't. That's the other thing. They're comfortable banning TikTok, a major communications tool used by 170 million Americans because it doesn't feel important to their lives. So they think, oh, ban it. It's poisoning kids against Israel or whatever Lindsey Graham was saying on the floor. 

Sarah: Yes. TikTok is to blame. Not Israel's actions. 

Taylor: Yeah. Not the actual atrocities. When you listen, when you actually scratch the surface and you listen to these Senate hearings or these House hearings when they talk about these bills, it's Blumenthal. It's Blackburn. It's Lindsey Graham. It's really what the problem that they seem to have is with the content online. 

Sarah: ‘My nephew showed me a video of a 14-year-old girl who said that her gender was mob wife aesthetic. And I just do not think….’ That wasn't a Lindsey Graham. That was an Al Gore impression. But, I guess you go to war with the troops you have.

Taylor: You're not far off from what these hearings actually sound like. Do you remember the Momo panic that happened in 2019? 

Sarah: Yes, I do. I do, but please refrain from asking. 

Taylor: It was pushed by the Today Show and all the usual suspects in the media. It was this notion that there was this terrifying character named Momo, which was really just a picture of this sculpture by this Japanese artist. And allegedly Momo would message her child on Facebook or social media and tell them to kill themselves and this was apparently tied to deaths around the world and never mind that I don't know how this inanimate sculpture is messaging anyone but there was zero deaths tied to this and that was just like repeated as fact constantly. And this idea, I'm sure, is if there's any chance of it being real, we just need to repeat it as if it's a real threat. And so everyone should be terrified, and then they'll make good decisions.

Taylor: And it's so absurd. It became like the tide pod thing to where it was such an absurd premise that then teenagers finding it funny made content pretending. Oh, Hey guys. Yes. Momo messaged me actually on Facebook messenger when I was eight and I barely survived. Making content, obviously mocking it, which the boomers then use as evidence of reality, they fall for, they don't realize it's a parody.

Sarah: Which again it crops up everywhere, but it's a satanic panic. Kids learn that adults are afraid of Satan. They write hail Satan on a bridge that adults treated as proof of satanic activity. It's a feedback loop. 

Taylor: Yes. You listen to these narratives push and it's all about like control and the technology controlling the children and-

Sarah: The technology shouldn't control my children, I should control my children and make them come to the daddy/daughter dance. 

Taylor: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. When really it's liberatory for young people in so many ways, especially underprivileged people and marginalized kids. And that's who these sorts of laws and stuff target and harm the most. That's why you see a hundred LGBTQ groups coming out against things like COSA and other state legislation, because these are the groups that are harmed. 

And I wish that we could all develop healthier relationships and recognize that maybe the phones aren't the problem, maybe we also are a little bit of the problem and the way that we are viewing the world, maybe we take a little bit more. Not to put the blame on ourselves I was thinking of this with COVID recently because you can feel so much despair over things sometimes and especially things like climate change or the pandemic or war or whatever right, it feels like you're just one person and you can't make a change and so you go online, and you scroll, and you read endlessly, and you get more and more upset. 

And it's easy to think this phone is what's making me upset. But really, it's like your powerlessness. And actually, by connecting with people online, by getting involved in your community, by doing small acts of whatever you feel, doing small acts to fight back against the systems that you want to fight back against, whether it's distributing masks at a protest or calling out problematic stuff or starting a group for LGBTQ youth in your area or whatever. I don't know. Those things actually, it can make you feel like you have more agency. 

Sarah: This is blowing my mind though. I'm like, me not mad at phone? Me mad because sad? Yeah, because my feelings of conflictedness about my phone part of it are that like, I need to set boundaries with my phone. It's not my phone's fault that I wake up and got on it and immediately fritter away half an hour on TikTok. My phone isn't making me do that, do that. It is very addictive, and it is like a lot of addictive power to contend to. But it's part of our lives. It's not going away. It's like TV. Which actually did go away because it's on the phone now. 

Taylor: And I'm all for targeting these companies’ business models and making them less addictive. Congress could do that. Congress could go after these predatory business models. They could pass data privacy reform. They could make it so that these apps are less addictive so that they're showing us less ads and leading us down the fear rabbit holes. They could do that. But they're not doing any of that. Instead, they're trying to pass age verification laws to use the internet. That's crazy. 

Sarah: So it can keep having all the problems it does, but then this way kids can't learn about themselves and the world.

Taylor: And it won't jeopardize the profits of Meta. 

Sarah: Meta, which wants to chop off all of our legs. 

Taylor: Which, many members of Congress have quite a bit of stock in, of course, too. And so many of these lawmakers, especially, and so many of these pundits, these conservative pundits that are out there pushing phone panic with their books and their podcasts and things. These are the same people that railed against things like public parks and other things, gun control measures, things that would enormously help young people's mental health. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Taylor: They're the same ones pushing a regressive view of gender that harms young women. I hate the young women stuff, especially. Young women are constantly tokenized and young women are some of the most online groups than ever. They're like super communicators and super connectors. They're the heaviest users of social platforms. And so to make this, to have these old boomer men push panic about teen girls without ever actually engaging with what teen girls are actually asking for, which is fundamental human rights and things, changes to the system. It's just infuriating. 

Sarah: I don't know. I'm happy to be led out of my own little moral panic cul-de-sac that I had roomba-ed myself into because I think I feel so conflicted about technology's role in my life, that I am an easy dupe for this kind of thing. I'm like, yeah, it's the phones. The phones are doing it, whatever it is. But really, we all have to resist easy answers, and this is such a sneaky one, because we all are conflicted about our relationship to technology, I think, and yet that's not the answer. 

Taylor: And I just want to make it clear, Silicon Valley is horrible. The people that run Silicon Valley are horrible. This is not absolving them of anything. There are meaningful ways to build a better internet. But to build a better internet, we can't just throw the internet out. We need to allow for more access, and we need to allow young people as well to develop a healthy relationship with phones. 

I think of this like phone abstinence culture too, as very similar to how phones are constantly compared to a drug. And I think it's a terrible comparison. I think that phones are like food, right? You have to eat food. You have to have human connection. That is actually good for you. You might have a cupcake or a piece of chocolate cake and scroll Twitter for five hours. 

You also might FaceTime with your grandmother or Facebook message with your grandma or catch up with someone or make a really meaningful new friend on discord that changes your life. And that's maybe like eating vegetables. We have to engage with technology. Generally, it's just about learning healthy boundaries and healthy ways to interact. And if we ban kids from using that technology, they can't learn to use it healthfully. 

Sarah: It's the same thing as in the nineties. I feel like you probably remember this. There was this craze and maybe there still is for families that have dinner together, have lower rates of divorce, higher rates of kids going to college, have dinner with your family! And that just led people like my mom to force their families who were not capable of passing a civil hour together to spend time together every night because it's like we must adopt the superficial markers of a happy life, even if it kills us. 

Taylor: That is it. It is the superficial markers of a happy life. And it's not like, maybe it's the fact that certain people have to work two jobs and they're working the night shift and that's why they're not having dinner together and that means they're more economically disadvantaged and that might lead to higher rates of divorce or drug use or whatever. Let's never address any of the systemic problems in America. Let's just make sure that kids don't know about them so they can stop being so loud on Tik Tok because that is the real problem here. 

Sarah: And we're allowed to once again, brush aside the real long lasting, very, generally very related to patriarchy and white supremacy problems that are the root of the evils in America today and blame the teenagers for noticing them. 

Taylor: I really want to be clear about what's underneath all this and the studies that they pull out, they might sound really scary because when you put up a chart with a bunch of numbers, it's oh, that's scary. But dig into those studies because it falls apart very quickly. In fact, Haidt specifically, who wrote The Anxious Generation. His book is very heavy on studies. And I think that's why it's so convincing. 

So Haidt cites 476 studies in his book. Two thirds of these studies that allegedly talk about the harms of social media and the modern internet and things like TikTok were published before 2010 as in before the period that social media even really existed in the way that he talks about it. And not only that, but tons of those studies also found no effect or an effect in the opposite direction of his claim. Many of them didn't even analyze the same groups of people at different times to see how one thing changed. 

There's a lot of bad science in this realm. And I think that we need to be careful because technology is also evolving quickly. And some study that was done in 1995 on teens and internet use should not be used to ban TikTok today. I think we just need to have more nuance.

Sarah: This conversation has made me feel better where I'm like, the answer isn't for me to escape all this technology that is in my life. The technology is not the problem. It's exactly what you said. It's my ability to find some way to feel that I can engage with the information I get about the world and feel that I can affect my own community. I don't know. We get so stuck in our head thinking about the magnitude of the problems around us and how small we are compared to them. But the truth is that on a level bigger and deeper than conscious thought, we understand and feel better when we just know that we're doing something. 

Taylor: And the media plays a key role in all of it. The media is the one, especially with the satanic panic and phone panic, it's like, the media is the one that launders these things to a mainstream audience, specifically parents. 

Sarah: Because a moral panic is ideal from a media perspective because it's theoretically altruistic journalism, where you're allowed to be as sensationalistic as you like.

Taylor: Yes. Yes. That's such a good way to put it. 

Sarah: So Taylor, the kids are alright, and everyone else needs to work on themselves. I'm very happy with the conclusion we've landed at and where can people find more of your wonderful work and your wonderful self? 

Taylor: Yeah I have my own podcast. It's a weekly tech podcast called Power User. It just launched. So if you want to hear more of my rants about technology, I interview people every week on topics like this, like social media, internet, and I'm also on my phone all day. So you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, as long as TikTok is around, just @Taylor Lorenz everywhere. And subscribe to my YouTube. Please subscribe to my YouTube. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. Like, comment, and subscribe. And hit the bell. 

And that was our episode. Thank you so much again to Taylor Lorenz for being our guest. Thank you, Taylor for absolving me of my guilt about using my phone a lot. Thank you so much to Corinne Ruff for editing help. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick as always for producing. We will see you in two weeks.