What is the "Smartphone Theory of Everything"?

& are smartphones + social media destroying society?

April 2, 2025

Yesterday, NYU Professor Arpit Gupta made a thought-provoking Twitter post about what he calls the “smartphone theory of everything”:

The simplest explanation of the “smartphone theory” is:

“widespread smartphone use (since 2011) is a major cause of unhappiness in individuals & larger problems across society”

But the story is a bit more complicated than that.

You could call it the “smartphone & social media theory of everything” but that’s not as catchy.

My understanding of the theory is as follows:

1️⃣ Starting around 2010, many Americans began using smartphones.

2️⃣ At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were becoming popular - particularly among young Americans.

3️⃣ These platforms are designed to be highly addictive, and tens of millions of people began using their smartphones to use social media for several hours daily.

4️⃣ In just 10-15 years, social media & smartphone addiction have led to a mental health crisis among young people (see below)

Why is social media & smartphone use so bad for the mental health of young people?

I see two main problems:

• Social media use leads to excessive self-comparison

  • In the past, you would compare yourself to your high school classmates.

  • Now, young people are looking at (and comparing themselves to) pictures of supermodels & professional athletes

• It also leads to less real-life socialization (see the charts below)

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively on this topic over the past decade. (you can find his Substack here)

In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt argues that we have moved from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” and that this has harmed young people immensely.

For Haidt,

“children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.”

The move away from this has led to a:

“great rewiring of childhood” [which] has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Haidt is a fan of Professor Gupta’s tweet.

And this doesn’t even touch on the other aspects of the “smartphone theory of everything” that Professor Gupta identified in his Tweet:

• Nearly half of American men now have an online gambling account

• The literacy & numeracy skills of young people are getting worse (see below)

• Social media has created ideological “echo chambers” that worsen political polarization

People have been aware of the addictive nature of smartphones for some time.

Just look at this New Yorker cartoon from 2013, when smartphones were still relatively new.

But it is only in the last few years that we’ve realized:

• how bad smartphones can be for young people, and

• how social media can contribute to societal problems like gambling & political polarization

People are taking the matter into their own hands by keeping their kids away from smartphones or banning them in school.

But for many young people around the world, the damage has been done.

I’ll conclude with an insightful quote from academic Adrian Monck about the “smartphone theory”:

What separates smartphones from previous technologies is their intimate, always-available nature combined with business models that profit directly from maximising engagement.

The resulting attention arbitrage system doesn’t create human weaknesses – it methodically exploits existing ones with ruthless efficiency.

So while I think [Professor Gupta] is onto something important, the “Smartphone theory of everything” might be better expressed as “the systematic exploitation of human psychological vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale and precision.”

Less catchy perhaps, but more accurate.

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ART OF THE DAY

Saint Jerome in His Study by Antonello da Messina. 1474.