✪ Steve Jobs Gets The Last Laugh

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obespierre, Trotsky, and Che Guevara are all now drooling with jealousy down in Hell. Jobs’ handheld communication device has succeeded where Maximilien’s efficient guillotine, Leon’s wacky theory, and Che’s M1 Carbine all have come up short. However, this wasn’t Jobs’ first revolutionary success. He bragged on that epochal January day that he had already “changed everything” in 2001 before promising the enraptured horde, “We are going to do it again.”

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You were probably too busy that particular afternoon to really notice: working, reading, or just daydreaming—three activities Job’s “revolution” has snuffed out—in the service of heeding his call to change the course of history. Today, nearly two decades later, we can survey the devastated landscape. Steve Jobs’ revolutionary iPhone has transformed human beings into lab rats who spend all their waking hours pawing the reward lever inside their new handheld cage. The human species is worse off thanks to the catastrophic parting gift Steve Jobs left us before his untimely death in 2011. 

Is this hyperbolic exaggeration? Please consider these examples. Your dinner companion has to step away from the table mid-conversation for a supposed emergency. Consumed with concern, you offer to help. When she returns, you learn that her precious child Devynn has just mommy sent 11 texts in quick succession. Devynn’s inconsolable distress arose after the babysitter wouldn’t let Mommy’s little princess have two scoops of ice cream instead of just one as originally agreed.

Your stunted conversation resumes, but no one really remembers what you were talking about. Not convinced? OK, say you’re overwhelmed with sadness because you just had to put down your elderly dog. You confess and plead to your closest friend, who’s enthralled by an Instagram video, “I haven’t been this upset since my grandmother died. How do I get over this?” After a long pause, your preoccupied friend looks up and says, “Oh, hey, how’s Fido doing?” You walk away even sadder. Still not convinced? How about the three automata in the New York subway who filmed a burning woman set on fire by an illegal alien instead of trying to help put out the flames? 

The mountains of evidence just keep piling up; I’m just announcing the ineluctable verdict. My fellow juror, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christine Rosen, has also voted to convict.

Rosen reminds us that recent “technological change … has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution” in The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, her must-read assessment of Jobs’ catastrophic legacy. And this reviewer appreciates her hyperbole. The wizards behind the technological curtain aren’t guiding us along the Yellow Brick Road. Instead, they have managed “to bring out the worst of human nature,” just like we saw in the subway. Rosen correctly identifies Jobs as social media’s guiding spirit. But in his defense, not even the dismal Jobs could have imagined anything as solitary, nasty, or brutish as TikTok, Facebook or Twitter. Once again, we have the charred human remains to prove it.

Rosen explains our descent into this Stygian inhumanity as a toxic side effect of our “collective complacence in assuming that change brings improvement.” Better to make a video of human suffering than to alleviate it. My students mock my 8-year-old iPhone. Then they happily squander an entire weekend buying a new device and transferring all their silly apps onto it. The Stoic philosopher Seneca taught us that life isn’t short; it’s just that we waste too much of it.

Rosen proves Seneca’s point when she writes, “We now spend as much time consuming the experiences of others as we do having experiences of our own,” an insight which will unfortunately fall on the deafest of ears unless someone posts it on YouTube. Our bovine acquiescence to technological change looks poised to grow as the utopian promises of AI further degrade our internet-infected, tech saturated, collective consciousness.

As depersonalizing masks reminded us during the pandemic, “Facial expression is our primal language.” However, our digital screens have now replaced faces as the primary focus of our gaze. Rosen informs us of exactly what we have sacrificed in the trade off. When we lose our primal language, we lose our humanity. And when we use screens to mediate our communication, we surrender “our ability to assess the trustworthiness & authenticity of others.”

Or to paraphrase a modern American philosopher, The Notorious B.I.G., “Mo’ screens, mo’ problems.” “Civil disengagement” occurs when we glue our noses to our screens and completely ignore reality or others within our physical proximity, some of whom may literally be on fire. As Rosen sees it, this lack of awareness has destroyed “our sense of duty to others.” Rosen backs up that painful truth with a story about how passersby ignored an attack on a blind man in Philadelphia. No one even bothered to call 911. Left unchecked and untreated, the civil disengagement tumor will eventually metastasize into a full blown, Stage IV civil collapse. And even if we excise the tumor early enough, Rosen warns, “Technologies work against intervention” as we calculate how many up votes our video of a violent crime might earn.

Technology has destroyed the all-important tactile aspect of learning by substituting the process with a bunch of screens. Why learn to write with a pencil and paper when keyboards abound? Why bother mentally calculating the product of some addition or subtraction in your own head when you can use the calculator in your phone or directly ask Siri? Your local school board has already answered that question, and you probably don’t like the answer. Handwriting used to offer “a glimpse of individuality.” Those of a certain age could associate friends and relatives by their individual penmanship. Not so with keystrokes. The Common Core State Standards for Education obeyed Jobs’ revolutionary dictates and abolished cursive writing requirements. But if you can’t write it, you also can’t read it, as Rosen points out.

And it all gets worse. Without handwriting, our cognitive skills decline and we lose the “sensory experience of ink and paper.” Ultimately, we “lose the ability to read the words of the dead,” as any archival researcher can attest. Students who take notes by hand absorb more than those who do so on a device, since writing’s slower pace forces us to synthesize information for efficiency. In China, where 4 percent of students are “already living without handwriting,” the phrase “Take pen, forget character” presages our quickly approaching illiterate future. Rosen is more blunt: “A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.”

Screens have even changed the simple chore of waiting. Instead of calmly waiting in line at the bank, lost in our thoughts while the ATM’s touchscreen befuddles a legally blind octogenarian, we now lose our minds if we can’t access Wi-Fi. Who has time to go to a store when you can just click “Same-Day Delivery” at Amazon? The “relentless acceleration of everyday life” has made us hopelessly impatient. The diminishment of individual effort has left us dependent on technology for life. Rosen cites an example of road rage here. “The often deadly overreaction to perceived slights” on the highway speaks of our impatience with our fellow citizens who are just as “flawed, tired, and distracted as we are.” And don’t forget, your video of a road rage incident might even go viral!

Thankfully, Rosen includes a counterrevolutionary manifesto in her cri de coeur. She dismisses trite suggestions that we “take a digital Sabbath, avoid multitasking, and put those phones away at the dinner table!” Instead, she goes all in: full root and branch in her radical prescription. She cites three crucial questions the Amish ask of all emerging technologies: “How will this impact our community? Is it good for families? Does it support or undermine our values?”

While you, I and Rosen would probably agree with that line of inquiry, remember that many Americans do not. Their definition of “community,” whether by race, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other polarizing quality, drives us further from any understanding of the common good that every community aspires to. Would “families” include throuples, consanguineous marriages, and same-sex pairings? And today’s reigning “values” run the gamut from prudent frugality to excess consumption, and from flag burning to flag worship. The Amish have their priors, and a long record of success to prove their inherent value. American society can’t begin to answer those questions without first finding some—any—common ground. But readers like us would directly benefit by taking up Rosen’s suggestion with (counter)revolutionary fervor.

Rosen proposal of holding tech companies responsible for this mess fails on several counts. Ragtag “Moms Against Technology” groups stand no chance against white shoe law firms the tech companies keep on retainer. Besides, how will those moms have time to organize when Devynn demands 24/7 real-time communication via text, voice, and emoji as she navigates her way from her therapist’s office back to her bedroom for a few hours of doomscrolling? Lobbyists will bribe politicians to ensure meaningful legislation never passes. Political scientists harp on the collective action problem as an impediment to political change. Devices have now converted that impediment into an insuperable barrier.

Instead, how about we just take responsibility for ourselves and put down our phones? Let’s stop aping the Addiction Industry’s BS excuse that we are powerlessly enthralled by our electronic devices or that we have a disease that forces us to pick up our phone every two minutes. Put down your damned phone. Turn off your iPad. Pet your dog. Take a walk. Greet a stranger. Write a letter. Read a book. Curse Steve Jobs. Become human again. ✪

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