PAINFUL TRUTH: Beware the distraction engines

Evidence that we’re turning away from people, towards screens

PAINFUL TRUTH: Beware the distraction engines Published 11:45 am Sunday, July 12, 2026 Boredom has been vanquished from our society, and we’re starting to see the effects of it. For one thing, we now have some empirical evidence that lack of boredom – or rather, distraction – has caused the birthrate to drop. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research in the U.S., with the provocative title of “Is the iPhone birth control?” suggested that a significant and sustained drop in the American birth rate could be laid at the feet of smart phone use.

Between 2007 and 2011, only people with an AT&T phone plan in the U.S. could access the iPhone. Because AT&T didn’t cover some large areas of the country, researchers could compare birth rates in different areas. They found that the iPhone was responsible for between 33 and 52 per cent of the birth rate decline.

Now, I’m not panicking about the birth rate. I think we’ll be fine with a slowly growing population, or even one that shrinks for a while. Booming and shrinking populations each have their benefits and costs.

This is fascinating, because related studies have shown that one of the big changes created by smart phones is that they reduce in-person interactions (which ultimately reduce relationships and family formation). They’re distraction engines. I don’t want to just single out smartphones here.

I’ve previously argued that television ought to be looked at suspiciously. You could make similar arguments for social media, particularly algorithmically driven video-based sites. If you wanted to be really pessimistic, you could say that reading a book alone is technically an anti-social act.

It seems that once humans escaped from the endless cycle of hunger and survival, and developed a complex society, we have been driven by two urges: the search for novelty and sensation, and the need for a place of privacy. The second one – privacy – we got from increasing technology and wealth. More people than ever are living alone, and almost everyone in an industrialized country can have at least their own bedroom.

The first goal got sidetracked, I think. Yes, we want novel experiences and entertainment and excitement, on our own terms. But what we got was technologically mediated entertainment.

All of the theoretically isolating distraction engines can be springboards to social experiences. From book clubs to multiplayer video games to arguing about movies, we love to see cool new things and then share them. But the stats show that, increasingly, we’re not sharing.

We’re turning inward, away from one another. I don’t know how worried to be about this. We certainly face bigger threats right now.

But I can’t help picturing a world where the robots don’t have to rebel to take over. They just have to stay out of the app store.