Smartphones are strongly addictive

TECHNOLOGY HAS ENABLED people to fill every moment of their lives with a stimulus of one sort or another. It has eliminated the boredom of solitude, replacing it with a continuous need for instant gratification. Or rather, as Tristan Harris, a former product manager at Google, puts it, it is technology companies that have made this trade for humans, designing platforms, games and apps to keep them hooked.

Worries about the warping effect of technology are nothing new. Every tremor of progress in history has been accompanied by a moral panic. The printing press allowed “evil men” to “flood the market with anything that hints of lasciviousness”, warned a monk in Venice in the 1470s. Any form of entertainment is especially suspicious. Reading books, going to the theatre or cinema, listening to new music, playing video games—all have been presented as threatening to undermine authority, degrade human relationships and lure people into sin.

But the smartphone is different from all of them. Never before has one device combined every element of modern mass media: telephony, texting, music, video, the internet, social media,...