What’s Too Much? This Warning Applies to All Smartphone Users
Everyone has one, everyone uses it every day, many even several hours a day: the smartphone. But now comes an urgent warning aimed at everyone who takes their smartphone for granted. And it doesn’t come from just anyone, but from the inventor of the smartphone.
The Apple boss said out loud something the iPhone inventor, Steve Jobs, would have never admitted publicly. Jobs knew better than most how to sell technology and infuse it with meaning. In his narrative, the iPhone was not merely a simple smartphone, but a promise. The iPad? It was more than a screen — it was a window to the world. Jobs seduced millions of people worldwide, and they lapped up the devices. The fact that his successor, of all people, is now spelling out the flip side of this success story seems like a break in the narrative. Or is it the overdue continuation?
An Open Warning About Smartphones
After all, Jobs was not a naïve evangelist of progress. Behind the scenes, there was an almost old-fashioned strictness. He imposed limited screen time for his own children, conversations were mandatory at the dining table instead of silent scrolling. Displays would never usurp books. He knew the technology he helped create not only required focused attention, but devoured it also. However, this ambiguity remained a private affair. In this case, having a clear warning about his own products would probably have disenchanted the magic. Jobs, for all his engineering skills, was above all, a master of staging and showmanship.
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Tim Cook, a man of numbers, supply chains, and soft power, suddenly finds an almost pedagogical angle. Less screen, more life, more nature, more presence — it sounds as if Silicon Valley has turned into a self-optimization seminar in the countryside for a moment. And yet, it is more than just hackneyed rhetoric: Cook expressed a malaise that has long been part of the background noise of a digitalized society. The fact that he does so while his company continues to perfect smartphones and the ilk, which encourage this exact behavior, lends the message an ironic edge.
Who’s Going To Go Without?
It could be read as a conscientious self-correction — or as a belated insight into a system that has long since taken on a life of its own. After all, hardly anyone will seriously consider putting down their smartphone just because its manufacturer advises moderate use. The devices have become too deeply integrated into everyday life, too functional, too indispensable for moral appeals to make a change. The digital economy does not thrive on renunciation, but on lingering.
In the end, we are left with a catalog of measures that sounds as sensible as it is annoying: Limit screen time, sensitize children, digital breaks, and strengthen media literacy. Everything is correct, everything is known, everything has already been repeated ad nauseam. Not least by health organizations, which have been pointing out the psychological side effects of permanent connectivity for years. The fact that these insights are now coming from the heart of one of the most powerful technology companies itself lends them weight, but hardly any novelty value. It is as if the industry is finally saying what its products have long been demonstrating quietly: that progress and excessive demands are often just a swipe away from each other.
