Jobs’s Atlantic Vilifies Smartphones

Plus, crisis in Venezuela; a “COGE” in New Hampshire, and more

“The 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware,” according to the Atlantic, which is controlled by Laurene Powell Jobs.

The February 2025 issue of the Atlantic features a big article by Derek Thompson about what the article describes as a solitude epidemic. Instead of restaurants, there’s takeout. Instead of movie theaters, there’s Netflix. “Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965,” the article says. “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.”

Fascinating to me is what the magazine blames for the phenomenon. In a section of the article called “phonebound,” the author reports, “the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience.” Thompson reports, “phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.”

Thompson even finds a way to blame the solitude—and the phones—for Donald Trump: “Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read Harris Walz: Obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is….Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right.”

This article is only the latest in a series of anti-smartphone screeds in the Atlantic. Other pieces include “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now” by Jonathan Haidt (March 2024) and “Get Phones Out of School Now” by Jonathan Haidt (June 2023). While I was at Education Next, we published Doug Lemov’s “Take Away Their Cellphones” (Fall 2022), so I understand and am somewhat sympathetic to the argument, at least as it refers to children in school.

Yet what’s unremarked on is that the Atlantic is basically owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who made her fortune from (the “Jobs” part is a hint) being married to Apple’s Steve Jobs, the father of the iPhone. I don’t have a sense of how closely, if at all, she gets involved in the editorial decisions, or if she agrees with the coverage of “the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware.” It’d sure be something if Powell Jobs’ guilt over her iPhone-based fortune were somehow driving the Atlantic coverage, like the Rockefeller Standard Oil heirs trying to ban fossil fuels, or Abigail Disney campaigning against inherited wealth. It could also be a case of the Atlantic staff trying to test the boundaries with the ownership. Either way, it’s something to see a magazine financed by an iPhone fortune campaigning so hard against smartphones. There may be other more significant causes of the solitude—everything from the decline of religion and marriage to the Covid-era public health restrictions—but those may be less easy targets for Atlantic readers.

There are starting to be a few lawsuits trying to turn smartphones into a tobacco-like target for the negative mental health effects. If they progress, it could be something to have the lawyers try to enter, as evidence, articles from Laurene Powell Jobs’s magazine.

My own pick for the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware would be the planes the Al Qaeda guys flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon, but the century is young. The comment section is open to paying subscribers with other nominations (the Iranian centrifuges? Whatever leaked in the Wuhan lab?)

A brazen kidnapping in Venezuela: Members of Congress are raising the alarm about a kidnapping this week in Venezuela with political implications.