Quotulatiousness

May 22, 2026

“Re-shoring” manufacturing isn’t the answer

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Tim Worstall uses the examples of Apple and Foxconn to illustrate that most of the value generated isn’t in the manufacturing side of the equation:

Yes, I know Apple is up to the iPhone 17 now, but it’s still as true about (some) iPhone addicts now as it was then.

Apple’s market capitalisation — the contribution to human wealth of the firm — is 4.3 trillion of those American dollars. That of Hon Hai Precision — most of us will know that better as “Foxconn”- is $3.1 trillion $. But those are the fun, New Taiwanese, dollars, which equals some $113 billion US dollars. Given the imprecision of what follows let us round those to $4 tr and $100b. Apple is worth 40 times Foxconn.

Now it’s not wholly true that Apple manufactures nothing. I think they — more so they say they do so than anything else — make some of the Macs themselves. And perhaps some number of their processing chips but I think even that is outsourced to other foundries, isn’t it? It’s also true that Apple uses more than one manufacturing company — Pegatron is a name I’ve heard around.

It’s also not true that Foxconn only works for Apple. It takes on that manufacturing and assembly work from a number of companies. Which is where my imprecision comes in, for I’m — just to make the example — going to assume that Foxconn does all and only Apple’s manufacturing, Apple does no manufacturing and sends it all to Foxconn. Those are incorrect assumptions but they’re good enough for this jazz hands of an argument.

So, designing stuff then selling it produces 40x the capital value of manufacturing it. We also know that Apple runs at 40% net margins and Foxconn most certainly does not. My numbers are a little out of date but it’s not all that long ago that the cost to assemble — ie, “manufacture” — an iPhone was perhaps $10.

We have pretty clear evidence that the place to make money in the global economy is sitting in an office and thinking therefore. Not out there bashing metal. So, why is it that so many say that the UK — and the US — must reshore all that manufacturing so as to get rich?

One explanation is as with that of the Physiocrats. French economists — and therefore wrong, they’re French — back in the old days who insisted that only growing food was real wealth production. They were musing over their brioche rather before anyone really manufactured anything — rather than artisaned — true but they have, of course, been proven wholly wrong. They might well have been about right for the centuries before them but were wrong by the time they wrote it all down.

We can extend the analogy to today. Yes, it has been true for much of the past couple of centuries that lots of manufacturing is what makes a place rich. Now, as with Apple and Foxconn this ain’t so. But some are still stuck in that old way of thinking.

Could be.

We can approach the same point from another direction. Actual manufacturing is something that is, these days, done by poor people in other countries. Why assume that if we did it it would make us rich?

May 15, 2026

Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:

“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.

Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.

The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”

Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”

I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.

Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.

At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.

“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.

Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)

High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.

The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.

But it’s not just the Swedes.

Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.

How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.

Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.

When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.

And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.

The good news: kids are drinking a lot less! But there’s also bad news …

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The good news seemed to be that teenage drinking was dropping fast. Fewer underage drinkers, happier teenagers, right? Not so fast …

⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.

It migrated inward.

Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.

That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.

So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.

The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.

The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

That is the trade.

A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.

This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.

The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.

It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.

The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.

May 14, 2026

QotD: Marx was right about “alienation”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, too, with alienation. Marx was talking about physical commodities — the guys who work in the widget factories can’t afford the widgets they make. Indeed, they never even see the finished widget as it rolls off the line — they are just a small cog in a big machine. But alienation is so much more profound than that, and more pervasive. Again, consider the laptop class. What are they connected to, other than their tiny social media bubbles? They have no real relationship even to their own physical body — just look at them, for pete’s sake. They’ve never done anything with their hands but type. And as for social relations, they’re so disconnected from other people that they will text people who are in the same room.

No shit, I’ve seen it happen. And it’s even worse than that, because they think they’re being socially savvy. “Oh, Jayden is in the middle of a conversation with Brayden; I’ll just text him, so as not to interrupt.” But since people under forty are physically incapable of not checking their phone the minute it beeps at them, it’s not just an interruption, it’s an especially obnoxious one … and they have no idea. What we used to call the “soft skills” — the ability to come up to Jayden and Brayden, assess where the conversation’s going, and steer it in such a way as to get Jayden the info he needs organically — are totally gone.

You can test this for yourself. Just don’t answer the phone. Or a text. Seriously, try it. It’s tough, isn’t it? No matter where you are, the fucking thing dings, and you immediately grab for it. It takes real physical effort not to. It’s much, much easier to simply turn it off, and while I’m all for that — indeed, I’m for dropping it overboard in the Marianas Trench, or shooting it into deep space — try leaving it on, and only checking your text messages at a set time. It’ll keep until 3pm (your designated “check message” time), I promise. Or if it won’t — if it’s the wife asking you to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home — then you’ll learn a different lesson, the one about how we use crutches for some reason when we’ve got perfectly good legs.

That’s alienation, in the broadest and most significant sense. Since you are constantly available — since your time is now a commodity, that you’re constantly selling to the lowest bidder — your personal worth is zilch. You’re a message-answerer and milk-fetcher and all-purpose Guy Friday, to everyone, all the time. Even to — make that especially to — the people who supposedly love you, and respect you. Because who cares what you’re doing right now? The important thing is that milk, no?

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

May 1, 2026

We are much more Brave New World than 1984

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Culturally, we had lots of warning from George Orwell and Aldous Huxley about their future — our present — and while we have had some success avoiding what Orwell feared for us, we’ve had much less success avoiding a Brave New World culture:

As the curtain of totalitarianism descended across much of the globe, in the mid-twentieth century, the Western intellectual class pointed to George Orwell’s 1984 as a blueprint for societal ruin.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with Orwell’s magnum opus, but for those who don’t know the gist: Orwell envisioned a dystopian future governed by a panoptic state, where an externally imposed oppression would ruthlessly strip humanity of its autonomy, its history, and its capacity for critical thought.

It is a great novel and many believe it was prophetic (I certainly believe parts of it ring true), but, as the cultural critic Neil Postman astutely observed in his foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, it was not Orwell but Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, who accurately mapped the specific destiny of the modern collapse.

Huxley recognised a far more insidious threat:

    What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

No “Big Brother” is required to deprive a populace of its cognitive liberty. He foresaw a society that would come to adore the very technologies that undid its capacity to think.

Where Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared there would eventually be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one left who wanted to read one. Where Orwell feared the truth would be actively concealed, Huxley feared it would be drowned in an endless sea of irrelevance. Ultimately, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us, while Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

[…]

The Collapse of Literacy in the Intellectual Elite

The symptoms of this cognitive counter-revolution are visible not only in the general populace but at the very apex of the educational system, signalling a crisis that threatens the reproduction of the intellectual class itself. Over the past decade, professors at elite academic institutions have sounded the alarm regarding a precipitous and bewildering decline in student literacy. In a widely discussed exposition in The Atlantic, Nicholas Dames, a professor of Columbia University’s required Literature Humanities course since 1998, noted that his undergraduate students, the supposed academic elite of the nation are now “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester“.1

Two decades ago, Dames’s classes effortlessly engaged in sophisticated, week-to-week analyses of lengthy texts like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Today, the landscape is unrecognisable. In 2022, a first-year student confessed to Dames that during her entire tenure at a public high school, she had never been required to read a single book cover-to-cover.2 Instead, her education consisted of excerpts, isolated poems, and fragmented news articles. This is a systemic failure; middle and high schools have largely ceased assigning whole books, breaking them down into easily digestible, context-free fragments to accommodate dwindling attention spans. High-achieving students can still decode words, but they struggle to muster the sustained attention or cognitive ambition required to immerse themselves in substantial texts. As technology provides instant gratification, the sustained labor of reading feels deeply unnatural to a generation raised on screens.

This anecdotal evidence from the highest echelons of the academy is overwhelmingly corroborated by a mountain of empirical data. The decline in sustained reading and linguistic proficiency is measurable and accelerating.

  1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
  2. Ibid

April 2, 2026

QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain

Filed under: Education, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ever met someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain? You’d expect a mouse, right? You know, with the secret police and all? But they’re the exact opposite of that. People who grew up under the KGB’s iron heel are fucking obnoxious, because they’re utterly shameless. It’s not “give ’em and inch and they’ll take a mile”; it’s “they’ll start by grabbing a mile, then demand ten more”.

Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.

As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …

… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.

In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.

It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.

Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.

March 15, 2026

Jobs and new technology – the example of the ATM

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Saturday’s FEE Weekly, Diego Costa looks at the classic example of how the role of the bank teller changed when automated teller machines (ATM) were introduced:

“Pulling out money from ATM” by ota_photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

[…] Those are important findings, but the study of capitalism in the age of AI is larger than labor-saving technologies inside a fixed institutional world. It’s the study of market processes that change the world in which labor takes place.

David Oks gets at this in a recent essay on bank tellers that has been making the rounds. For years, economists and pundits used the ATM to illustrate why technological progress does not necessarily wipe out jobs. In a conversation with Ross Douthat, Vice President J.D. Vance made exactly that point. The ATM automated a large share of what bank tellers used to do, and yet teller employment did not collapse. Why? Because the ATM lowered the cost of operating a branch. Banks opened more branches. Tellers shifted toward relationship management, customer cultivation, and a more boutique kind of service. The machine changed the worker’s role inside the same institution.

That story was true. Until it wasn’t.

As Oks puts it, the ATM did not kill the bank teller, but the iPhone did. Mobile banking changed the consumer interface of finance. Once that happened, the branch ceased to be the unquestioned center of retail banking. And once the branch lost that status, the teller lost the institutional setting that made him economically legible in the first place. The ATM fit capital into a labor-shaped hole. The smartphone changed the shape of the hole.

Vance looks at the ATM era and says: technology does not destroy jobs. Oks looks at the smartphone era and says: it does, just not the technology you expected. But if you stop there, you are still doing what economist Joseph Schumpeter called appraising the process ex visu of a given point of time. As Schumpeter wrote, capitalism is an organic process, and the “analysis of what happens in any particular part of it, say, in an individual concern or industry, may indeed clarify details of mechanism but is inconclusive beyond that”. You shouldn’t study one occupation within one industry and draw conclusions about how technological change works.

The obvious question you still have to answer is: where did those former bank tellers go? What happened to the capital freed when branches closed? What new institutional forms, fintech, mobile payments, embedded finance, neobanks, emerged from the very same process that destroyed the branch model? How many jobs did those create, and in what configurations?

The lost teller jobs are seen. They show up in BLS data and make for a dramatic graph. The unseen is everything the mobile banking revolution enabled, not only within financial services, but across the entire economy. The person who no longer spends thirty minutes at a branch and instead uses that time to manage cash flow for a small business. The immigrant who sends remittances through an app instead of through Western Union. The fintech startup that employs forty engineers building fraud-detection systems. None of that appears in a chart titled “Bank Teller Employment”. The unseen is the world that emerges.

When economists say the ATM was “complementary” to bank tellers, what they usually mean is something quite narrow: the machine performed one set of tasks, such as dispensing cash, and freed the human to concentrate on others, such as relationship banking, cross-selling, and problem-solving.

But the ATM did more than substitute for one task while leaving others to the teller. It made the teller more productive inside the same institutional setting. This is the comparative advantage layer that Séb Krier touches on when he says that “as long as the combination of Human + AGI yields even a marginal gain over AGI alone, the human retains a comparative advantage”. The branch still organized the relationship between bank and customer and the teller still inhabited a role within that world. The ATM simply changed the economics of that role, making the branch cheaper to operate and, paradoxically, more worth expanding.

But the branch is not just a building with unhappy carpet and suspicious lighting. It is an institution. It is a set of roles, expectations, scripts, constraints, and physical arrangements that organize how a bank and a customer relate to one another. It tells people where banking happens, how banking happens, and who performs which function in the ritual. The teller made sense within that world. So did the ATM. They were both playing the same game.

The iPhone did something different. Instead of automating tasks within the branch, it challenged the premise that banking requires a branch at all. It shifted the game to another board. Call this institutional substitution. When a technology is designed to operate within existing rules, the institution can often absorb it, adapt to it, metabolize it. The real threat comes from technologies that are not even playing the same game. The ATM was a move within the branch-banking game. Mobile banking was a move in the higher-order game, the game about which games get played.

Most discussion of AI stops at the level of task substitution and complementarity. Those are necessary questions, but ATM questions.

Joseph Schumpeter understood that entrepreneurship is not simply about making institutions more efficient. It’s about unsettling the institutional forms through which those efficiencies make sense at all. If you ask whether AI can do some of the work of a lawyer, a teacher, a customer service representative, or a junior analyst, you are asking an interesting question. But you are still mostly asking an ATM question. You are asking how capital fits into an existing human role. The more interesting question is whether AI changes the institutional setting that made that role intelligible in the first place. Now we are talking about institutional substitution. It’s a more dangerous territory and a more interesting territory.

And if the bank teller story is any guide, the technologies that bring about institutional substitution will not necessarily be the ones designed to automate an institution’s existing tasks. They may come from somewhere orthogonal, from applications and configurations that incumbents were not watching because they did not look like competition. The iPhone was not competing with the ATM. It was playing a different game, and it happened to make the old game less central.

So the real question is not whether AI will destroy jobs in the abstract. The real question is how AI will reorganize the architecture of production, consumption, and coordination. Not “AI does what lawyers do, but cheaper”, but rather “AI enables a new way of resolving disputes or structuring agreements that makes the current institutional form of legal services less necessary”.

Update, 16 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

February 15, 2026

The smartphone as a tool to create a real-life Idiocracy

Filed under: Britain, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Not being much of a film fan, I’d never seen the movie Idiocracy, but based on the description in Christopher Gage’s rant against the smartphone, I might not need to watch it as it’s happening all around us:

Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.

The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us — her captive audience — that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.

Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths — one thousand of them, in fact.

Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.

Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.

TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.

I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.

Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.

This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.

After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.

The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called “Ow! My Balls!” That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.

They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.

Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.

Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.

How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.

One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.

Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.

October 29, 2025

Smartphones don’t belong in the classroom

Filed under: Education, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

City Journal, whose articles I’ve been linking to for over 20 years, recently started a Substack to highlight articles including this recent post by Robert VerBruggen arguing against letting schoolchildren use smartphones in class:

Today’s kids are getting cell phones — with constant access to viral videos, gaming, social-media bullying, and potentially contact with strangers — as early as elementary school. My ten-year-old reliably informs me that everyone else has one.

Along with parents like me, schools have been struggling to navigate this issue. Phones have become a major source of classroom distraction. There’s a lot of interest in policy action: Earlier this year, my Manhattan Institute colleagues John Ketcham and Jesse Arm proposed strong restrictions on phones in schools. Some places, including Florida, have led the way in pursuing such policies.

A new study, released as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, evaluates Florida’s experiment. In the authors’ analysis, the rule drastically reduced student phone use, led to a temporary increase in disciplinary incidents, and improved test scores.

Let’s dig in a little.

The study focuses on an unnamed “large urban county-level school district” in Florida. While the state law restricted phone use only during instructional time, this district went further, requiring phones to be silenced and put away for the entire school day. The policy went into effect in May of 2023 and was enforced with disciplinary measures starting in September of that year.

The change reduced student phone use, measured via phone location data captured from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on school days, by about two-thirds. This is a striking victory if you find it self-evident that kids shouldn’t have cell phones on in school.

The transition was a little rough, with disciplinary incidents increasing over the first year—by around 20 monthly incidents per 10,000 students—especially in schools with higher levels of pre-ban phone use. Male and black students were disproportionately affected, though it’s unclear to what extent that stems from behavior vs. enforcement disparities. At any rate, discipline mostly returned to normal in the second year.

That’s also when the test-score benefits manifested. Scores rose a couple of percentiles, on average: a student at the 48th percentile nationally, for example, would tend to end up around the median. The change was largest in schools with higher pre-ban phone use. Student absences also declined and fewer kids switched schools, which may help explain the improvement.

All in all, this looks like a successful policy: Less distracting phone use in schools, better attendance, higher test scores. More effort is warranted, though, to confirm these results elsewhere — and to figure out the best way of implementing and enforcing cell-phone bans.

October 3, 2025

Adding digital ID to the pocket moloch … what could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s a terrible idea to trust the government — any government — in forcing digital ID on everyone:

An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.

During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his “panopticon”: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.

Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?

I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the “Alexa” voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.

[…]

Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the “nudge unit”, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for “non-essential items” – has hardly helped matters.

To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.

Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?

Tim Worstall adds that “they c’n fuck off ‘n’ all”:

So we’ve that wet dream of Tony Blair raising its ugly head again. There should be a national ID system. Actually, it’s not just Blair, T — the bureaucracy has been right pissed at the erasure of the wartime system since the 50s when it was abolished.

For there are two ways of looking at, thinking about, the whole governance thing. One is — the Blair, bureaucrats’, version — that the population are cattle, kine, to be managed. For the benefit of the bureaucracy of course — or at very least to be forced into doing what the bureaucracy thinks they — we — should be doing.

Then there’s that stout Englishman, the Anglo Saxon, version, which is that government are just the slaves we communally hire to make sure the bins get emptied. Well, OK, maybe raise a bit of tax for a Royal Navy to sink the Frenchies. But even then, not too much of that — the Civil War was, after all, triggered by Ship Money. Did the people who would not be slaughtered by the first wave of invading Frenchies — because they had the silly excuse of living 25 miles inland — have to pay the tax to run the Royal Navy to keep the Frenchies at bay or not? The King said yes — the King was right — and not for the first nor last time in British political history the guy who was right had his head cut off for being so.

Digital ID, so which version should we have? That one beloved of Froggie-type bureaucrats who view La Profonde as kine to be corralled? Or the Anglo Saxon version where we just devolve the scut work to a few slaves?

[…]

The reason this never will be proposed is that it doesn’t fit the reasons why our rulers wish to have an ID system. They’re insistent that we be their kine rather than they our. So, the Hell w’ ’em.

But it could be done. Government simply publishes an interface — an API — which says that proof of identity needs to be presented in this format. We’re done as far as whose kine is whose.

Update 4 October: From Samizdata, another illustration of just how toxic Two Tier Keir has become to British voters:

The Guardian reports:

    “Reverse Midas touch”: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs

    Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

    Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.

    The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

September 29, 2025

Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:

Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.

So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.

That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.

Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.

But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.

He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.

We ignore his warnings at great risk.

(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […]

(2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […]

(3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […]

(4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […]

(5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […]

(6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […]

(7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […]

(8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]

June 28, 2025

Punctuation microaggression

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:

“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.

At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.

That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.

Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.

Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.

According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.

In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.

Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”

To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.

Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.

March 24, 2025

Postcards from academia’s zombie apocalypse

Filed under: Education, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia points out exactly why them there kids ain’t learnin’ no more:

[High school students] just care about the next fix — because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.

How bad is it for educators right now?

Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:

    I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021 … I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn’t comprehended the material before, but hadn’t faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn’t care …

    Since 2021 I’ve been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn’t performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.

    I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.

I’ve made a similar claim in this article — where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.

Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing — and at an accelerated pace.

Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis — and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists — shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.

This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.

Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.

Below are more ugly numbers from another in-depth study — which looks at how children spend their day. It reveals that children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens.

YouTube usage for this group has more than doubled in just four years.

Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles.

In other words, these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system.

This is why teachers are speaking out. They see the fallout every day in their classrooms.

January 1, 2025

The EU emulates King Canute

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The headline is a bit misleading, as Canute’s failed attempt to control the tides was intended to refute courtiers’ exaggerations about his royal powers. The EU, on the other hand, is determined to impose stasis on a very dynamic and changing field:

The European Union will have the continent-wide standard for the buggy whip real soon now. That’s the logical conclusion to draw from that recent announcement about USB-C.

For those who’ve not been following along at home the European Commission is very proud of itself. They’ve managed to pass a law mandating that USB-C (don’t worry, it’s a shape of cable) be the only flavour of connector now allowed within the EU. This has caused the less intellectual of our own rulers — St Stella for example — to just quiver, gasp, with excitement. This is proof of the ability of the collective bureaucracy to really stick one to The Man or something. A vast victory over Big Cable it seems.

Well, yes. Those with a little history to their name will know that the EU has been trying to do this for some time now. So much time that they’d originally intended to make Micro-USB the Europe-spanning insistence but it took them so long to make their rules that USB-C had already superseded it.

At which point we might draw a couple of conclusions. Even, suggest an insistence or two. That first insistence would be that a time of rapid technological change is really not quite le moment juste to be insisting upon only the one way of doing things. Because change, d’ye see? No, this is important for we know, absolutely, that there’re people out there just itching to insist upon the one connector for electric vehicles. Who would, in the name of a vapid uniformity, insist upon freezing technology at its current state rather than allow it to develop.

We could, should, also go on to insist that such a legal insistence on the only form allowed means that technological development cannot happen any more. For, in order to advance or even just change it will be necessary to change that law, that definition.

Legal changes in the European Union are not easy. Of course, the Parliament cannot do it — they are not allowed to even propose law changes, let alone enact them. It is necessary first to convince the European Commission of the need for a change. That means convincing the bureaucracy of course. Once that’s done it must pass the Council of Ministers, which is all the national governments. Parliament is then allowed to say yes. Then, and only then, would it be possible to put the new technology — say, a new cable — on the market.

But the only method we’ve got of testing whether a new cable is better is by putting it on the market. That is — no, really — the only process by which we find out whether consumers desire this new cable with all its delights, at the price that suppliers are willing to make it. But in the European system they cannot undertake the basic usefulness test until they’ve convinced a continent full of politicians that the new is in fact necessary and compulsory.

October 5, 2024

Scary words of 2024 – “Luckily, FEMA is on the case”

Filed under: Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As I recounted a few days back, I was relieved to hear from my friend in the Asheville NC area after the region absorbed the damage from Hurricane Helene. Tom Knighton had a similar experience:

A friend of mine lives at the edge of where Helene did her worst. He just got power back on yesterday and was finally able to let me know he was OK. I was worried for obvious reasons.

In the deepest, worst parts of where the storm ripped things to shreds, they’re trying to just make it to the next day. They’re struggling to find clean drinking water, food, shelter, the works.

Luckily, FEMA is on the case.

They took to social media yesterday and posted this crap.

That’s right. People who don’t have internet, phone service, or electricity should call, download an app, or log onto the FEMA website.

I won’t ask how stupid can the federal government be, but I’m worried they’d take it as a challenge.

Back in the day, FEMA would roll into a disaster area with paper applications and facilitate all of that right there. While the internet and smartphones are glorious things, this is a prime example of when they’re a terrible option for people.

Right now, American citizens are struggling. They’re thankful to be alive and are working their butts off to keep themselves alive. They’ve paid taxes their entire lives, and now that they need some of theirs back, their federal government is telling them to do what is physically impossible for many of them.

I can’t help but see this and think that their claims of having enough money in spite of spending hundreds of billions on illegal immigrants ring a tad hollow.

If they have the money, why not put boots on the ground getting people signed up for any assistance they may be entitled to?

Honestly, while I’ve commented before about the gross incompetence of the government in disaster response — and I’ll agree that maliciousness is most definitely a possibility, if not a probability in these instances — this is just weapons-grade … whatever, be it stupidity, meanness, or a combination of both.

Heads should roll.

Update: David Warren notes that it’s not merely FEMA incompetence, it’s active deterrence for private relief efforts by all federal agencies.

From the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged”. The government is seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in”, to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.

This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy”, we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.

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