The smartphone trap we built for ourselves

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that, as recently as seven years ago, we could reliably do without a smartphone:

I’ve been thinking about this drift toward mandatory apps and QR codes a lot lately, as a new millennial parent unhappy with my addictive tendency to mindlessly scroll near my baby. I also know that, parent or not, the research on ways that heavy smartphone use negatively affects our own well-being, attention spans, and relationships has become near-impossible to ignore. And people don’t need meta-analyses to be convinced: It’s why so many are turning to tools and hacks that aim to help us limit our phone use, or at least time spent scrolling on certain apps. It’s also why we’re seeing a wave of new clubs and social events that are proudly phone-free.

I think these “digital detoxes” are encouraging, and I’ve been researching so-called dumb phones myself. But none of these trends will really matter if we’re continually forced into a world of apps for every element of daily life.

Late last month, Meta agreed to pay at least $12.1 billion to settle claims that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, and announced it would be redesigning the platforms for younger users to include daily time limits, overnight lockouts, and restrictions on like counts and beauty filters.

It’s a start, but we have to think bigger than just the algorithms that keep us glued to our phones. Because they’re not the only forces that make quitting so hard. Increasingly, it’s just basic access to services and companies and public institutions that are making a smartphone exit feel elusive.

You should not have to have an addictive device in your pocket at all times in order to do ordinary things. We should be pushing for a world where adults can meaningfully reduce their smartphone use, or quit it altogether if they want.

And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan.

Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in.

We can fix this, and some people are already showing how.

Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.

Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10.

In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it.

Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.

I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.

The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.

Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.

But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.

Let’s protect the non-smartphone option

Smartphones aren’t going anywhere. But it’s eminently reasonable to demand that whatever cost a company or government pays to keep a viable non-smartphone option is a cost worth paying.

While the “march of digitization” might feel inevitable, Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center remind us that Americans have a long history of taking on technology in the name of humanity, from automobiles to firearms, and forcing some reasonable accommodations. There has been a push in recent years to preserve paper options for people who struggle to apply for benefits online. Some cities also have laws requiring businesses to accept cash. New York state just passed a ban on “cashless establishments,” which ensures people will still be able to dine out or shop without needing to go through a QR code or app.

Morell and Littlejohn point to other solutions, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which they say could be read to require businesses to serve customers who don’t use apps, or adding smartphone ownership to state anti-discrimination statutes.

Europeans have gotten further with this than we have. In 2023, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly urged member states to keep non-digital access to public services available, and in early 2025, a coalition of anti-poverty, disability, and digital-rights groups delivered an open letter asking the European Parliament to guarantee offline access to all essential services. Their argument is that the EU wants everything online by 2030 while more than 40 percent of Europeans still lack basic digital skills.

In the US, we’re also learning that Big Tech isn’t unstoppable. On top of the Meta settlement, school phone bans have spread to at least 40 states, with school districts now considering policies to limit laptop and tablet time, too.

Focusing on child safety first makes sense both morally and politically. Reformers have amassed a decent track record of getting companies and governments to redesign products around children’s vulnerability, and such redesigns rarely stay confined to kids. In 1997, cigarette mascot Joe Camel was dropped under federal pressure over marketing to kids, but the advertising restrictions that followed reshaped how cigarettes were ultimately sold to everyone. I’d be surprised if Meta keeps a chronological feed and a nighttime cutoff walled off for teens alone.

And yet, we shouldn’t rely solely on osmosis from kid reforms to fix our adult problems. For starters, reforms don’t always trickle down. Congress passed COPPA in 1998 to keep companies from harvesting kids’ data online, and the rest of us still have no equivalent federal safeguard.

Not every fix would require regulation. Afreka Ebanks, a spokesperson for Dumb.co, which sells smartphone alternatives, told me she’s optimistic that pressure on individual businesses can spark change, in part because marketing has shifted so heavily toward community and belonging in recent years. Companies that want to seem grounded in their neighborhoods, she argued, are more susceptible to locals asking for a non-phone option. She’s been asking her own gym to bring back the key fobs it used to issue, so members can leave their phones at home while they exercise.

Dumb.co is also betting that if enough people give up smartphones — not a majority, but a large enough minority — businesses won’t want to lose those customers. She cited Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC, which still makes it easy for riders to unlock bikes with a physical key even as most users go through the app. “They do want to serve those people who aren’t carrying around phones,” she said.

At the end of the day, we’re not going to restore less phone-dependent childhoods for our kids if we can’t also build a less phone-dependent society for the rest of us. And we deserve to have that choice. Opting out just cannot be functionally impossible.