A couple of weeks ago, the Honest Sorcerer discussed "the end of science as a useful tool". I would like to contribute with my own reasons why, even if it were true, it wouldn't be a big deal. Science as useful tool is ending, says the Sorcerer, because:

• anything like the newest smartphone is not a sign of “unstoppable progress”, just the "industrial scale refinement of technologies based on a set of already established principles".

• "when the entire industry you're in keeps hitting the repeat button with every product release, then you know that you are in trouble. A big one."

• "Based on the pace of scientific progress till the 1960’s, we ought to be driving flying cars powered by anti-gravitational engines by now. On Mars. But we don’t."

• (quoting a 2010 study on Complexity and the productivity of innovation) "Our investments in science have been producing diminishing returns for some time" (more on this later)

• "AI will certainly generate material prosperity to a select few, but not to society as a whole" (of COURSE, I say)

The Sorcerer then mentions Sabine Hossenfelder’s three hypotheses for lack of scientific progress (denialism, actual lack of more stuff to discover and a badly broken way to do science) and adds his own: "I would argue, and many teachers would certainly agree: we are already well past our peak in human mental capabilities as a culture." (A newer video by Hossenfelder about the genius who is rebuilding physics on the axyom that 1+1 = 2 would support that hypothesis)

The Sorcerer then moves to the much bigger issue that's outside of science as such, presented in Hossenfelder's video about flat earthers:

“[F]lat earthers are the first symptom of a much bigger problem. They show us what happens when people realize they can’t understand modern science, don’t trust scientists and therefore throw out even the most basic scientific knowledge on the rationale of skepticism. […] Sometime in the middle of the 20th century or so we reached a point where modern science just stopped being comprehensible to anyone without a special degree.

I't's not just about science...

This is important because, of course, it isn't limited to science. Borrowing from Srinivasan and Bardi:

• "The faith in the State is plummeting in parallel with that in Science"

• "Science, religion, the law system of a state, and some other elements of society we normally take for granted... are all communication tools. You could define them as "languages.""

But maybe it's not a big deal

The Honest Sorcerer rightly points out that "Technology is not science. It is the application of scientific discoveries." For ordinary people, however, science and technology are pretty much the same thing, and in any case the useful tool whose end would really matter for them is technology, not science. Are they ending? I can't exclude that, having said myself that these days there is little as obsolete as what the most visible people call innovation, and even stuff like the Metaverse is just narrow-minded, reactionary thinking.

Now, let me add my own hypothesis. Hossenfelder is surely right to say that science stopped being comprehensible to anyone without special degrees. However, I don't think that's why people don't trust scientist, or something we should seriously worry about anyway.

To begin with, I argue that common people lost faith in both technology and science not because they do not understand them anymore, but because they do not understand the problems that those disciplines triumphantly declare they solve, or will solve.

That is, the problem is not that quantum physics is impossible to master without years of hard study powered by the right genes, which it is. The problem is when those "languages" are used, by the usual suspects who suck all the oxygen in the media, just to talk, no: sell crap. Especially if it's the crap only they sell.

The problem is that, even if we are tricked to buy them, we are frustrated from the impossibility to understand what's the damned REAL problem and need that e.g foldable smartphones, home appliances that can be bricked WITHOUT your consent or fake autonomous vehicles are supposed to solve and fill. Attempts to really, sincerely believe that certain innovative, maybe even AI-powered services may work at scale better than what we used before can be equally disheartening. Dating apps, anyone?

Apart from that, what's hard to see through all those smokescreens is that there would be nothing bad, even if we really weren't smart enough to do more science, or science really had nothing new and useful to offer anymore.The full paragraph (quoted by the Sorcerer too!) of that 2010 study says:

"Our investments in science have been producing diminishing returns for some time. Within a few decades, our results suggest, we will have to find new ways to generate material prosperity and solve societal problems."

Exactly! Even if that were true, in every field of technology, so what? Really, what would the actual problem be? We reached the end of development of scissors, cups and everything other "oldest mostly-unchanged tools that we still use" centuries ago, but so what? Did those things stop to be useful?

We just have to replace "find new ways" with "go back to, or rediscover" certain ways.

The only way in which the end of science and technology would really be a problem is if they really were the only "way to generate material prosperity and solve societal problems", instead of "the way most fashionable today". But first, that is obviously false: human beings and humanity have always been much more than science and technology. If anything, the problem has always been to see science as THE first or sufficient tool to generate prosperity etc etc.., instead of stuff like solidarity, common sense and real politics in general.

Second, there is still so much to with the science and technology we already have to make us accept any "end" or more exactly temporary stop of science for a few decades. We already have all the science we need to solve REAL problems we actually have now. We already have all the "science" we need to, if not to solve, at least make much more manageable, problems like, in random order:

• city traffic, with public transit and reserved lanes for bikes and, of course, scooters done right

• AI religion (not AI!), with common sense

• costs and slowness of nuclear power, with an SMR Liberty Program

• Impulse shopping, Amazon's monopoly and carbon footprint with making of Amazon a SLOW standard, and Singapore-style shipping

• the end of work, with seeing things in the right order

• almost all the problems created by social media and smartphones, with understanding that they are not the same thing, that RSS is good and so would be really personal clouds

• obesity and some mental health issues, with the good old "Eat Food. Not Much. Mostly vegetables" rule, combined with slowness, at alll levels

• PLEASE, do add other big problems and their solutions with appropriate technology in the comments!

Demand policies like those that from your political representatives, and 99.99999% of any sadness you may feel because science is ending will go away.

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Here’s the trick: the most important part of the paragraph you just read is that I did not write it this month of May 2024, when Stellantis stopped the assembly line of the electric FIAT 500 in Turin. I wrote it almost fifteen years ago, when FIAT, its workers and their unions were playing exactly the same script about the stop of another FIAT plant, in Termini Imerese. As in, we really haven't learned anything in fifteen years.

But maybe now we are to the point where there is nothing to learn, just an already well established reality to see. We need to see what comes after the car and who will do it, because the car as a mass phenomenon is already dying, for all the reasons I wrote here, and all these that came later:

• High borrowing costs are eroding Americans' appetite for big pickups

• The enormity of many cars, not just American ones, also is a "desire to wall oneself off from the world, to float above degraded infrastructure and the threat of violence even as one contributes to both". That is, a mental and social health issue to solve as soon as possible

• Signals that we already are in the "early days of decrossoverification" and that the "End of Private Cars" has already begun even in American cities keep coming

• More people want what the Dutch already have : "streets that everyone, from the youngest children to the most elderly adults, would feel safe using."

• More and more people will drive their current cars till they fall apart, not because doing so does save a LOT of money, but simply because they cannot afford otherwise.

• For many others, their first electric car may be just the gas-powered one they are driving now

• Smart cars are still so dumb that they may cost you hundreds of dollars just for something as stupid as fuses for talking to satellites that shouldn't even exist (1)

• Driverless will never be really driverless (not soon enough to matter for those who would really want to make or use driverless cars now, at least): not if, as we can learn from the NHTSA investigation, the Waymo company with "an overwhelming lead in making autonomous cars that work", is the same Waymo company that is "not even close" to dealing with road construction and road emergency situations

• Even bigger fantasies like air taxis remain luckily unviable, because if they did become real, they would just move traffic jams up in the air (me, 2018) (2)

• Ford is "shifting its strategy for EVs as demand wanes". The 2024 New York International Auto Show was unimaginable even a few years ago: "no Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, or Maserati...[almost no] German manufacturers".

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What next, then?

I said this years ago, and I'll repeat it now: I fail to see how carmaker stocks can still be considered a long- or even medium term good investment. The mass car of 2024 is just another culture that "rose to the top of their arcs of progress… Only to experience a fall and a subsequent dark age thereafter. And most ironically... developed their most sophisticated technologies right before their demise" (source).

What comes after the cars of today may not even be cars. If you ask me, if cars for mass private transits weren’t dying period, personal hovercrafts would be a cool, real life version of Luke Skywalker's landspeeder, that would be perfect in the real towns of our real world that are already reducing paved infrastructures. On a more realistic level, the vehicles that are powering an EV revolution in India, and generally electrifying faster than basically any other type are not cars, but highly effective rickshaws. An even bigger, even cheaper and easier revolution may be subsidized PRIVATE scooters.

But sticking to cars... The engine type doesn't matter. A mass car industry can exist only if car remains a mass product. In a world where population keeps concentrating in cities, rural residents may certainly still need and keep huge SUVs or pickups, but they would very likely have to build them by themselves, Mad Max style, or pay them as much as a house.

The only "mass" cars that can survive are cars that will bury all current car makers. First, simply because of cost and lack of space, there will be too few, mostly shared cars where most people are going to live (cities) to keep Car Business As Usual profitable. Second, because those cars will have to be beyond the capability of most current carmakers to adapt.

We have billions of battery-operated devices of all sort because their batteries, being small, fungible commodities that only exist in a few tens of fully standardized models, can go inside any device made for them, and even be moved from device to device, anywhere in the world. To survive, cars must become like those batteries.

Imagine a "car" that is only a flat platform you can plug "inside", that is below, any car body you ordered separately, including ones you may rent for special occasions, e.g. going to a fancy wedding.

Imagine a car like that, much simpler, much cheaper because it's much more modular, based on few standardized frames shipped in flat packages like Ikea furniture.

Imagine such a car coupled with laws that make its repair by any independent technician really easy and affordable for decades, with open protocols that directly connect buyers and sellers of spare parts.

Such real innovation is the only way for cars to survive, and at some point it WILL happen simply, if nothing else because all the alternatives are already withering away. To make it happen in the least traumatic way possible though, two things are necessary, starting yesterday:

1. Lots of future-, not market-oriented regulation and standardization

2. Super-optimized manufacturing and distribution

The only organization that has both enough influence and is not close, but less distant than any other to the right mindset to make the first point start now is the European Union. The EU just loves to regulate, and this is its real, not perfect but usually beneficial soft power. The only organization that can do the second point soon enough is China. Assuming it’s not already doing just that, of course. Says here, about a Chinese car that sells around $12,000 in China, with craftsmanship comparable to vehicles that cost three times as much:

• Any car company that’s not paying attention to BYD as a competitor is going to be lost when they hit their market

• "Chinese EVs are so good that without trade barriers, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world”

Summing up, the solution, or more exactly the only unavoidable future for a car industry that is also sustainable, whatever you mean by sustainable, looks a lot like managed "rightsizing" by EU-driven regulation of Chinese production of EV, or at least hybrid cars. A hugely difficult task, yes. Wars have happened for much less. But if the EU and China were smart enough to partner on this... Wow!

At the personal level, this means that, wherever you live, your last car will very likely be Chinese but..

Does it really matter, since your next car will likely be your LAST car anyway? Would that be really bad? For whom? If there is one thing we know for sure, is that no matter how the car industry evolves, most of its current employees won't make it to retirement anyway. Their personal livelihood must be guaranteed, but that is a separate problem that would exist and be urgent even if nothing described here happened.

As far drivers and consumers are concerned, a car is just a tool like a screwdriver, not one's dignity. What would be wrong if everybody who needs a car got even better solutions, or a car so good that "pretty much demolishes most other car companies in the world" and lasts at least 25 years, in a world that doesn't make him or her want to wall themselves off?

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

1. If you don't believe me on satellites, read this, this and this

2. Flying cars? Nah. Also here and here

On May 8th, 1945, what was still standing of an abominable regime that must never return signed its unconditional surrender to allies from all over the world.

Among other things that surrender, celebrated as "Victory in Europe Day" on May 8th or May 9th, also led to the Schuman Declaration of May 9th, 1950, that the European Community and its successor, the European Union, celebrate as Europe Day since 1985.

For these reasons, and because I strongly feel that a better understanding of "Europe" could be really useful for all human beings (including those against any "Europe") no matter where they live, I celebrate this Victory Day/Europe Day relaunching an idea I had sometime in 2015.

Back then, through this article, I discovered the existence of a book titled “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, ”written in 1987 by a Mr E. D. Hirsch Jr..

That book, which contains the “5,000 essential concepts and names - 1066, Babbitt, Pickwickian - that educated (American) people should be familiar with”, was written because “children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy - a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has”.

As soon as I read that article, I thought that an European version would be really useful, but had no time to propose it until 2017. Since it didn't succeed, but I dare think it would be even more useful today than in 2017, here it is again. In a nutshell:

• everybody suggests through this poll one or more of the 5000 concepts, people, books, events, works of art, ecosystems, industries, places etc... they think every European should know in 2024 (you can read all the submissions so far here)

• once there are 5000 suitable submissions, I automatically download and reformat as one e-book all the corresponding entries from Wikipedia, and make it available online free of charge, with the same license as Wikipedia

To know why I would do this in this particular ways, and all other details, please read the "How I will build 5000 concepts for Europe, and why" part of my original post and the corresponding FAQs. Before that, however, allow me to outline...

Why you'd want "5000 words for Europe" TODAY

There are at least six big reasons:

• BECAUSE what Hirsch called "cultural literacy" almost forty years ago is even more necessary in an age of deep fakes, crucial elections and highly polarized culture or politics wars, both in and outside Europe

• BECAUSE, even if what I wrote right after the Brexit referendum were false, that is: even if in 2016 young UK voters were not “betrayed” from their own non-voting peers, it's almost certain that at least many Brexiters were not informed enough, and could have used such a book

• In other words: BECAUSE, willing or not, Europeans and their more or less informed choices (starting with the upcoming European Elections) play a non-negligible part in world affairs, and that part will be even more relevant (for better or for worse, is anybody's guess) in a multipolar world. Understanding where those decisions come from, historically and culturally, is helpful even for non-Europeans.

• Also BECAUSE, since Europe sits just besides the only (BIG) part of the world where population will grow, a book like that may make integration of the millions migrants that will reach Europe whether Europeans like it or not a bit easier.

• BECAUSE, whatever Eurosceptics worldwide may believe, the European Union never was about straigthening bananas and similar Euromyths, or about merely making business easier. The real goal of Europe, as A. Cottica said much better than me:

"Europe was never about standards - though they support innovation and growth, and give consumers and business confidence. Standards are just a tool to develop the European single market. And the single market itself is just a machine designed to prevent war.

Europe is about peace. Peace initiatives have happened before, but the European Union is self-reinforcing. Over the decades, EU institutions have enabled, and we the people have built, a dense web of relationships. First it was international trade; then education (Erasmus, anyone?); then business partnerships; then thousands and thousands friendships and marriages. War has become unviable, unthinkable. This was never meant to stop at our borders."

• Last but not least, a book with the 5000 words that every European (or anti-European) should know would be useful BECAUSE, from its General Food Law, Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Right to Repair directive to GDPR, the Digital Service Act, and this year the Artificial Intelligence Act, not only the European Union already is a regulatory powerhouse (see "about peace" above), but also aims to become a "superpower of digital growth".

We can discuss the "growth" part another time, but it's impossible to deny that an European soft/digital "superpower" would counterbalance the very few, extremely powerful companies from just one or two countries that right now dominate every aspect of digital life across the whole planet. That is, if you care about anything digital, any background info on how Europeans came to see certain matters differently from both the US and China could be useful, or at least interesting.

You don't need to agree with me to want "5000 words for Europe"

Those above are my own reasons to have "5000 words for Europe" in one book. I do hope I can complete this project. But even if you completely disagree with every one of those reasons, hate the EU or live on the other side of the planet, I hope you’ll agree that "Europe" is something everybody should know better, even if only to cricitize or fight it. So, thanks in advance for submitting your own suggestions, and for sharing as much as possible this invitation!

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

Journalism and classic media in general are in trouble. That's no news, of course, in all the senses "no news" may have. However, there is an interesting development that may come from SOME of those media.

Two weeks ago, P. Fahri wrote in the Atlantic that "Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble", because "the flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing."

In that article, Fahri first summarizes a report describing how readership of the 10 largest american conservative websites fell down 40 percent since 2020, then tries to answer "why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle."

In a nutshell, Fahri argues that the obvious culprit is Facebook, because:

• since 2018, Facebook has been "deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members", also on Instagram and Threads

• conservative digital media are much more dependent on social-media referrals than "prominent mainstream and liberal sites", simply because the former are newer.

Just for the record, that "deemphasizing" from all social media is THE reason why I was forced to open this Substack, since newsletters are the next best thing to do, if not the only way left, until people refuse the solution explained below.

Back to Fahri, his thesis is that, when social media (and Google!) started to strangle publishers and adult discourse in general, "prominent mainstream and liberal media" already had already, much more than right-wing ones, established brands, lots of staff and paying subscribers to weather that storm. Therefore, they are suffering, but much less than the on average much younger right-wing outlets, for which the only way to be visible was to excel at "injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people's feeds".

This makes sense, but even if it were completely wrong it would not matter for this post. Here, I want to speculate about one specific consequence that this collapse of right-wing reach may have for the web at large. A consequence that would be surely beneficial for everybody, regardless of their political opinions.

What I hope is that, if the surveillance and censorship of social media is really hurting them so much more than their adversaries, right-wing media will conclude that they have no other way to survive than go back to the future.

You see, there has always been a way to see all the news from all your favorite sources in one place. A way that is much more efficient, much less distracting and much, much harder to control or block than social media. Oh, and also much less expensive to for publishers, at least in the long run, than any other alternative.

That way, available for more than twenty years now, is good old plain websites, with RSS feeds and RSS newsreaders.

RSS what???

An RSS feed is a small text file that contains titles and possibly excerpts of all the latest posts or comments from the website that publishes it. EVERY website management software existing today generates RSS feeds automatically, every time it's necessary, unless its webmaster deliberately turns them off (and if he does, he should be fired right away)

Why RSS is good for people

With RSS, every web user can automatically download and read all the headlines or comment notifications from every source she wants, as one unaltered timeline, in one window, with dedicated software programs, or web services, called RSS newsreaders, or RSS aggregators. With such programs, everybody can do that without enduring any advertising, centralized surveillance or any middlemen. Even without subscribing.

Reading all the news only, say, twenty minutes per day, at whatever time is best for YOU, is as easy with RSS aggregators as it's impossible with social media that only make your world smaller and harmfully faster. Indeed, many problems of social media of today would disappear if they just removed instantness and important people could post online only two minutes per day. If everybody started reading and commenting news only via RSS, and started using "social media" or instant messaging only to share (as little as possible) really personal stuff, like "Pizza tonight?" or "Here's my holiday pics", life and politics would be much more productive. But let's go back again to right-wing media and their collapse.

Why RSS is good for all publishers, right-wing or not

That's simple: any website that manages to convert its readers to RSS can merrily tell Facebook, Twitter and every other similar platform to f * * ck off. And it can keep 100% of any advertising revenue they may find.

Of course, you may ask, if RSS is so great, why are more and more website editors and owners so stupid to not display the links to their RSS feeds to all their followers, alongside those to their social media accounts? Why don't they put the RSS feed icon before those of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what not? Doing it is extremely easy and surely not harmless, not doing it is unbelievably stupid.

The answer is, I don't know. All I can say is that the problem isn't limited to right-wing media. So many publishers of all kinds (including "most effective communicators"!) do this stupid mistake that if I wanted to list them all in the ”Snob RSS” Hall of Shame I proposed years ago, it would be a full time job.

The biggest sin of ALL media in the last 15 years is not promoting or failing to denounce Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Meloni... or the woke, or the anti-woke, or everything else you may dislike. It has been to not tell their readers, every day, "this idea of connecting via social media is totally cretin and suicidal, both for us and for you. Follow us with RSS instead".

Right-wing media, saving RSS to save themselves.

What I hope is that Breitbart, Daily Caller, Drudge Report, The Federalist, Fox News, and all the other right-wing media quoted or not in that piece are really suffering social media so much to finally realize, before their adversaries...

... that the only way to survive, that is to remain always, surely, directly visible to their followers that is already available and stable since 2002, the only way that (with the exception mentioned below) won't cost them a dime whatever kind of website they already have, is to:

• give up any hope that other "platforms" may save them

• tell all their readers, every day starting yesterday, "let's meet directly, without those damned liberals in the middle: get an RSS newsreaders NOW, it's free"

• tell all their current or potential sponsors and advertisers "give your money to us, not Big Tech", because even at cheaper rates they'd get to keep all the money

The exception is that doing so implies having to host and moderate readers' comments. To that, I answer that yes, it is a cost, but since it's exactly the refusal to pay it that brought publishers to social media, that is to their ruin, it's still a much better deal than dying.

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So, I sincerely hope that right-wing media switch back to RSS en masse, and are successful, which is NOT the same as "I sincerely hope right-wing politics win". This is only about getting a World Wide Web where politics and everything else are less hysterical, a bit more mature than kindergarden tantrums and without omnipotent gatekeepers.

If right-wing social media recover influence and financial sustainability thanks to RSS, I can't exclude that some morons will propose to outlaw RSS. The Streisand effect that would unavoidably follow would help RSS, but it's not necessary. If right-wing media recover thanks to RSS, everybody else will be forced to notice how much better a way to stay informed RSS is.

Right-wing media may help everybody to Make the Web Great Again.

Why not? Stranger things have happened. And while we're at this, let me present you...

The other web thingy that right-wing media are ALREADY doing right

Right-wing websites, and extremists sites in general, don't hide their content behind paywalls, and are also happy to pass it to AI bots. Now, I KNOW that writers must be paid (please consider a paid subscription or donations, see below!) and I am no friend of AI as it is today. But it's impossible to complain that AI just amplifies prejudices and biases, or that people are gullible, misinformed “baskets of deplorables” and so on, if only one side regularly gives both people and bots all they could read:

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

Earlier this week, Henry Oliver wrote a passionate piece to argue that smartphones are not the source of all social ills. I fully agree, but I also think that, especially as far as children are concerned, he made a bad job overall to describe certain issues and how to deal with them, for at least a couple of reasons.

First, some excerpts

Here are, in italic, six quotes from Oliver's piece, with my comments attached.

1: This is two quotes actually, separate but related:

• Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters.

• I prefer smartphones to what came before. It’s easier to be uncontactable

With all we know in 2024 about how tech companies work, I doubt they themselves would question the "attention merchants" label, and if I listed here half the bookmarks I have about the first sentence, this post would be three times longer. On the same topic, the second sentence, and the whole piece in general, doesn’t mention at all that, if it's easier to be uncontactable by humans, it's almost impossible to be untraceable by the same companies, which in the big picture is probably a bigger problem.

2: [N]ow the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that smartphones and social media have “rewired” the brains of a generation of children, which makes them depressed and anxious. ... But Haidt’s claims are not uncontroversial... The evidence is less certain than it appears.

In a world that's still arguing about stuff that's way easier to measure, from superconductivity to average temperatures, expecting any claim on social science issues like these to be really uncontroversial does not seem realistic to me, but never mind. What I am sure about, from both my own experience as parent and decades of volunteering for teenagers, is that the solutions that Haidt proposes have merits of their own, and above all that they are much, much more feasible and scalable than what Oliver suggests. I'll get back to this in the final part of this post.

3: Do we really believe that the effects of this new technology are so different to, say, the arrival of landline phones and cars?

(at least) As far as children are concerned... Hell, yes. No one, child or adult, could ever influence, or be influenced by, hundreds to millions of peers simultaneously with one phone call. As far as cars are concerned, and without negating what Oliver says about them in the next point, the same children who hurt themselves with smartphones know pretty well by themselves how stupid it is to run in front of a car, not to mention that children don't get to drive cars wherever they want, whenever they want, when they are still in primary schools.

4: The most persuasive argument isn’t that phones cause unhappiness on their own, but that it exacerbates an existing trend. Children used to be much more free to play outside and take risks. Cars ended that. It is impossible to allow modern children the run of their neighbourhoods as they had in the 1950s when we have traffic levels (with heavier, faster cars) of modern times... Similarly, teenagers began reading far fewer books decades before smartphones were invented. Phones may have exacerbated that trend, but they certainly didn’t cause it.

This part makes much more sense. Please check the "Stranger Things" part of this proposal of mine to see how I suggest to rebuild cities to fix the "play outside" problem. However, it still leaves important things out, and doesn't end looking in the right direction anyway. The last sentence is true, but not a valid reason to have a personal smartphone before one is 14 or older. Even the reading issue is true, but does it prove that smartphones aren't bad for children in many other ways? If anything, that's an argument for giving every child not smartphones but ebook readers, that is devices that would bring thousands of books right on their nightstands, but without openings to cyberbullying.

Again on cars: yes, they do make kid's lives much harder, but what ended outside play (yes, since decades before smartphones) is overparenting that suffocates children with parents' fears of everything that may lie outside, from aliens to scratches, with parents' pressures to be champions in as many fields as possible, as early as possible, and with parents attaching smartphones to their children just to control them every minute. Still, none of this justifies the confusion I'll cover shortly.

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5: Without the danger of passing cars, [her daughter] has something closer to an old fashioned childhood: free time, where she takes risks, without being constantly supervised. If we can solve that problem, many children will likely be much happier. It isn’t all about phones.

I've said myself that parents must let children play alone outdoors, before worrying about social media. This said, allow me to complete, not criticize, the "danger of passing cars": I obviously do not know how things are where Oliver lives. But I've seen lots of neighborhoods, in Italy and abroad, where the same children who wouldn't live long if they tried to play in the middle of the streets could safely walk on sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, to school or to some friend's place, if only their parents hadn't been made paranoid or snob by systemic pressures (coming also, who would have known, through smartphones).

6: And amongst all this clamouring, we risk overlooking the immense benefits of phones and social media.

1. Standing up against the overmighty state is much easier with social media.... There’s a reason why access is limited in China and Russia.

2. On a more mundane level, phones and social media give us access to the world in a way that was unimaginable to previous generations:

This is one of the weakest part of Oliver's piece. Point 6.1 is true in theory, not in a world where much top-down political control happens just through social media that government have learned how to turn into partners, or block altogether, since at least the Arab Spring. As far as children are concerned, instead, the same point is just irrelevant, because it just doesn't matter how many good things adults may do with a smartphone. To see it, take that sentence, replace "social media" with "assault rifles in every home", then go check how many of the same people who do think that's the best idea ever would give their children an assault rifle to use unattended, 24/7.

For the other point, which is one of the two main issues I have with Oliver's piece, here is how he describes that unimaginable access:

In the last few days social media has meant I booked tickets to a Sally Rooney event, discovered a new piano recording by Vikingar Ólafsson, watched the science explainer videos of Sabine Hossenfelder, messaged a scientist on Twitter and been sent their research paper, discovered and read a short story by Somerset Maugham, learned that Beethoven had a low genetic predisposition towards musical accomplishment, discovered a magazine of Nigerian literary criticism, and watched a video with my children of a komodo dragon eating a pony whole (recommended). Other things I have done include reading a poem by John Donne, using AI to explain a technical article I didn’t understand, chatting with subscribers to my Substack about Shakespeare, and writing about how late bloomers find their calling in life. And this is not to mention the pictures of my baby nephew that I get sent on WhatsApp.

The problem here, that Oliver himself lays out very clearly, is that he is not a meaningful sample on which to base any conclusion or policy on these issues. Not at all, and I say so as a compliment. Oliver is a successful writer with, quoting the first endorsement on his own website, "a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful".

In the same days when Oliver and every other adult with comparable natural skills, birth lottery luck, education and income as Oliver were doing all those marvelous things above, many more human beings of all ages, as in "one to ten thousands times more", were using the same phones and social media for little more than losing sleep to kitten videos, conspiracy theories, culture wars and so on.

Oliver himself tells us that he homeschools his children, that is that his children are automatically shielded from all the pressures or worst they'd have to endure in a classroom full of peers with smartphones. Again, good for them, but hardly a valid sample for general conclusions.

The other example Oliver makes, a woman evidently born with all it took to make "her passion become her career" as a social media strategist (that is an active user, among masses of passive ones of phones and social media) further strengthens the same point: what Oliver and everybody else like him can achieve only thanks to "phones and social media" is wonderful, no doubt. But it's no evidence on which anybody should base any policy or advice for the other 99 point something per cent of human beings.

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The main problem: misunderstandings promoted to laws of nature

Yes, of course adults and kids who lock themselves inside smartphones wouldn't do it if the rest of their lives didn't suck. We can also accept, at least as first approximation, that "phones and social media" just exacerbated pre-existing negative trends, rather than creating them. That's nothing else than the very nature of everything digital: it greatly, greatly amplifies and accelerates everything it touches, both good and bad.

But there is digital, and then there is digital. In his piece, Oliver does outline the solution, that is "find ways of maximising the benefits and minimising the negatives - as we do with many things", but doesn't tell, or see, what the most effective ways are and why.

Here is the most important point that is completely absent from Oliver's piece, and so many still fail to see: the internet, the Web, social media, personal "stationary" computers (including laptops) and smartphones or tablets are five SEPARATE things, that must remain as separate as possible, at least in the minds of parents, educators and policymakers. The dumbest tech-related mistake done in the last 15 years may be just the equation internet = smartphone, which reached the status of law of nature for NO reason whatsoever, except digital ignorance.

Look again at all the wonderful things that Oliver did with “social media”: first of all, none of those things requires social media to work in ways that, no matter how personally immune Oliver is, are designed to be addictive. But even if social media were not addictive and were able and willing to filter out toxic content, the most important truth to grasp is that:

• anybody, children included, can do all those things with a stationary device placed in one's kitchen or living room, instead of a smartphone

• and that that mere change of device makes a world of difference

To see how big that difference would be for adults, imagine a world with all the same social media and online services as ours, but without smartphones, just with camera-equipped good old cellphones. That is, a world where you'd still be reachable wherever you are, and able to do everything Oliver wrote, but... in order to engage in flamewars, or share on Instagram all the food pictures taken in some fancy restaurant, you'd have to wait until you're back home, where you could attach your camera to your computer. In such a world, would you waste more or less time and stress than today?

Back to my main beef with Oliver's piece, that is Haidt and children with smartphones: regardless of the validity of his data, Haidt is not saying that smartphones, the internet or even social media should disappear. When you cut to the chase, the main if not only thing that Haidt says is only that giving uncontrollable personal smartphones to children less than 14/16 years old was a huge mistake that should end yesterday.

But this does not mean at all to give up all the good things children can do online. There is a lot that children can and should learn since primary school about the internet, the web, online communication, digital creativity and so on. But NOTHING of that requires a personal smartphone, with its intrinsic illimitability. This is what Oliver seems to completely ignore, or at least to completely fail to communicate, when he writes that "As with so many of the things teenagers start discovering, the aim should be to teach them the best use of it". What's the point of teaching or promoting the best use of the internet... just with the one tool that is much more dangerous than all the others, but not necessary at all?

What to do then?

The right thing to do is just what Oliver himself leaks out in a couple of sentences, that get hidden by all the rest. The first is when he writes to be "appalled that my thirteen year old brother has a smartphone and is allowed to waste so much time on it."

That's where the solution is. The difference between giving children a family computer they can use, possibly while other family members are around, only between homework and dinner, and a smartphone is very simple. It's the same difference there is between telling a child "hey come here and help me cut the bread with this knife", and giving her the same knife to carry around, 24/7 unattended, to use in any way hers or some stranger's brain may suggest.

In the first cases, the children get to learn and do cool, useful things, with almost no risk. In the others, "what could possibly go wrong?" is not even funny.

Adults are another story for another day. As far as children go, the reality we all actually live in is the one in which:

1. almost all real children less than 14/15 years old do not have the skills AND the education AND, above all, parents with enough skills AND time to help, to use smartphones without harm (ditto for teachers, in case you're thinking schools could or should ever do enough)

2. therefore, the children for whom a smartphone is at best an expensive ballast, at worst a mental health polluter and always an electronic tag are surely many more than those who can and do use smartphones to enrich themselves without any negative consequence

3. both categories of children could do almost everything Oliver does from a normal computer in their living room, which just by its own nature, location and built-in "time limits" would eliminate almost all the dangers

Corollary of all of the above: at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter how accurate Haid's data are. Or, as I wrote four months ago, it doesn't really matter whether "social media" is good or bad for "kids". Even if all THIS critic of Haidt's work, newer than those linked by Oliver, was all true, there is nothing to lose and lots to gain (even financially...) from giving children less than 14/15 years old only stationary home computers and broadband, NO smartphones. Only the first devices give access to pretty much everything positive children could need or want, age too quickly but still much slower than smartphones but block, just by being stationary where relatives can walk by, a BIG LOT of exposure and opportunities for negative outcomes.

So, please learn to distinguish between "smartphone" and "internet" or "social media". Give children stationary internet soon, but delay as much as possible the uncontrollable, unsuperviseable access to the whole internet and to the continuous, digitally distorted pressures from equally unprepared peers that smartphones couldn't avoid being, even if their makers wanted.

Who should do it? Easy: follow Oliver, again, when he writes "I don’t want to ban my brother from using... the internet wisely." This is NOT something that laws or mandatory "age verification" schemes that would never work as advertised could or should do. Thanks, but no thanks. Not giving children a smartphone before they are 14/15 years old is something that only parents can and must do. It's as simple as that, really.

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