The gallows humor that everyone falls into when speaking about smartphone addiction tells you everything you need to know. Everyone knows this is a threat to everything that makes us human. And yet we’ve conceded the war without any fight at all, accepting, fatalistically, what appears to be our doom as a species.
McInnes and Cumia both make points shockingly familiar to my own, but don’t venture into solutions. Probably because the only solution would be so radical, and seemingly impossible to pull off, that it’s not even considered.
The solution lies in the realization that the internet was our fatal mistake. The solution would be the total erasure of the internet itself. Short of a catastrophic sun flare, is it even possible to convince the world to eradicate something it feels it cannot live without? Is it plausible to consider that the addicts themselves would willingly burn down the opium den? How much longer can we really go on like this?
