Judge the tree by its fruits. Children are showing very real signs of addiction, and unlike known quantities like video games, or TV in past generations, parents are being pressured into handing children a device, usually completely or effectively without any safety controls, a private screen with which everyone in the world, every corporation, foreign country, friend or foe, can pour propaganda, toxicity, lies, porn, etc. directly into their brains. We should be careful with this.

Before the smartphone did all this, no one would have come out and campaigned to build a new kind of free library outside every middle school where all these things were advertised and made readily available to kids anonymously. We do have real libraries, but they don’t just automatically accept and push books donated by any random company, foreign country, or random pervert. Because that’s an insane thing to do.

The burden should have been on the “smartphones are good” people to prove that giving kids all that was worth the downsides, or to have shown how any supposed benefits could be had more safely, without requiring all parents to become experienced MDM admins, which they just won’t do.