How the World Got Wired · The Phone in Your Pocket

The Complicated Part

Now I have to be honest with you, the way I have been honest with you in other chapters.

The iPhone is one of the great inventions of human history. It put the entire library of human knowledge — every book, every encyclopedia, every map, every translation, every news article — into the pocket of any person on Earth who could afford one. It let strangers in different countries see each other’s faces and talk in real time, for free. It let people in poor villages do banking without ever visiting a bank. It let protesters organize against governments. It let kids stay in touch with grandparents on the other side of the world. The video your grandmother sent from Vietnam, that we have been talking about since the prologue, exists because of devices like the iPhone.

It has also, very clearly, done some harm.

Studies show that the rates of certain kinds of unhappiness, especially among teenagers, started rising sharply around 2012 — about five years after the iPhone launched, around the time smartphones became widespread among young people. We do not know, with full certainty, how much of that rise is the fault of the phones. But many serious researchers believe a meaningful amount of it is. The phones are very good at capturing attention. They are very good at making you feel that you should look at them. They are designed, in deliberate and careful ways, to keep you using them, because every minute you use them is worth money to the people who make the apps and the people who sell the ads on the apps. The system you read about in the last chapter — the one where you are not really the customer, where your attention is the thing being sold — became dramatically more powerful when it could ride in your pocket all day.

Many adults you know are uneasy about what their phones do to them. Many of those same adults give phones to their children anyway, because the alternative — being the only family without one — feels harder than the costs of having one. Many of those children grow into teenagers who feel, sometimes, that they cannot put their phones down even when they want to. These are not problems made up by overcautious grown-ups. These are real things, happening to real people, in real numbers.

I am not telling you to dislike your phone. I am telling you to notice it. To notice how it works on you. To notice the ways it is wonderful — and there are many — and the ways it has costs that the people who made it did not exactly intend. The iPhone is, like almost every other thing in this book, a both/and. A wonder and a hazard. A gift and a price.

What you do about it, when you are a little older, is up to you.

What Comes Next

The iPhone made one more thing possible, and this is the thing that will shape the next several chapters of the book.

Before the iPhone, most of what people did on the internet was sitting still — at a desk, in front of a computer, deliberately going online. After the iPhone, the internet was always on, always with you, and the question of what you were doing on it became different. You weren’t going online to do a specific task anymore. You were online constantly, in small pieces, throughout your whole day. And the new internet companies — the ones that came after Apple and Google — built their products specifically for that new way of being online. Always-on, social, fragmented, designed for the moments when you had ten seconds free.

The next chapter is about the most important of these companies. About a website that started, like Google and Apple before it, in a college dorm room. About a young man who built it as a way to look at pictures of fellow students. About what happens when nearly every human being on the planet ends up using the same product for several hours a day.

That’s Chapter 16.

It is called The Social Graph.

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