Flipping Off Phones

Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her i Phone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely. Warzel and Tiffany talk about the growing smartphone backlash, legal cases against “big tech,” and how, even if many people are convinced that their phones are a problem, the science remains far from conclusive regarding direct harm.The following is a transcript of the episode: Kaitlyn Tiffany: There’s been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn’t really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like: Social media and smartphones are really bad for us, and I should be trying to use mine less. [Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about what our phones are and aren’t doing to us.“It’s Obviously the Phones.” That was the title of a viral Substack essay that came out in March of 2024. Magdalene Taylor, a writer who focuses on sexuality and culture, was trying to articulate why fewer Americans were having sex or going out with friends. There were, she argued, all kinds of factors at play here for increased isolation and alienation in American life. But all of them, she argued, felt abstract compared to the one that was staring her in the face: “The problem,” she wrote, “is obviously our phones.”“It’s Obviously the Phones” is less an argument that cites endless empirical evidence as much as it says: Look around. Look how everyone is behaving. How could these devices that we carry around with us every moment of the day not be changing us? Now, about a week after Taylor’