SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
social media
Imagine a World Without Your iPhone—I Dare You
Will turning off our smart phones—even for a few minutes or (gasp!) hours per day—make the future any different or better? We won't know unless we try.
Jun 08, 2025
Recently, I’ve been turning off my iPhone — all the way off! — for 10 to 30 minutes at a time. I leave it somewhere in the house, while I try to live IRL (“in real life”), washing dishes, hanging up laundry, or even going for a walk, phoneless.
In this hyper-connected world of ours, doing so, even for such a short time, often feels like an enormous act of self-deprivation — no podcasts, no long-distance communication with those I’m closest to, no social media, no para-social relationships, no steps of mine being counted, or micro-health-tracking going on. So much, in other words, missing in action. I’m not a digital native. In fact, I am what they call a late adopter. I didn’t get a cell phone until the fall of 2003. So I remember when it was normal to go about your business without a powerful computer attached to your person. Even with that perspective — recalling the not-so-long-agos of answering machines and public phones with grubby buttons and Internet cafes — I feel unsettled when I’m untethered from my digital leash and experiencing what might pass for freedom, even for a few minutes.
But as unsettling as it is, I also want to start new patterns. Lawyer friends tell me that activists often turn their phones off for the first (and maybe only) time as they commit acts of political property destruction. It’s almost a rite of passage for the newly politicized, and it’s as incriminating as the massive data trails that other activists might leave.
Did you hear about the Tesla saboteur? Home from college in Boston for spring break, the 19-year-old wanted to express his rage at billionaire Elon Musk’s government takeover. He went to a Kansas City Tesla dealership in the middle of the night and used a homemade Molotov cocktail to set a Cybertruck on fire. The fire spread, destroying charging stations and setting a second truck aflame, causing more than $200,000 in damage. He was caught in the act — at least in data terms. The cameras at Tesla (and inside Tesla vehicles themselves) pinpointed the time of the property destruction, while images of someone who looked like him were caught on multiple cameras in the vicinity.
As for new patterns, turning off my cellphone for a period of time every day means a small window of datalessness that offers a twenty-first-century version of rebellion. It dams up the stream of free data that flows from my device with every tap-tap and swipe. By doing so, I create a tiny space for surprise, for rebellion, for precious secrecy.
I don’t have any plans to sabotage a Tesla showroom, nor am I in a current conspiracy with anyone trying to stop a shipment of U.S. weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces for its genocidal campaign against Gaza. I’m not trying to organize a workers’ strike at my kids’ school or local grocery store. To my shame, I’m not actively planning any of these actions. For those who don’t want to make rookie activist data mistakes, the Internet (and here’s a nod toward the irony) is full of crash courses on security culture and avoiding self-incrimination or entrapment through careless reliance on tech.
As I power down that ubiquitous device, I remind myself of my own power, too. Yes, I still know how to get places without a map app. I know the answers to the random trivia that comes into my mind any day. (Who sang that song? Who was president in 1954?) Or I can live with the not-knowing. Amazingly enough, I’ve discovered that I still know how to live in my own mind alone, without being distracted or entertained by a podcast. I’ve realized that just because I have the urge to reach out to so-and-so, it doesn’t actually mean that it has to happen that very second. It’s bracing and helpful to remember I can live without this device.
Dehumanizing Technology?
I’m well aware of the research on how bad the online world can be for anyone, especially young people. And believe it or not, my kids — 11 and 12 — still don’t have cellphones and don’t live online. They don’t play video games on and off all day long or have access to their own devices at home. But that doesn’t mean that they’re living some Montessori or Waldorf fantasy of Luddite delight. I kind of wish they were. But that life is for a much higher income bracket than mine. It’s worth noting that many in the tech world take great pains to shield their children from this technology. Every other kid on my daughter’s bus undoubtedly has a phone and I’m sure she’s craning to look over someone’s shoulder whenever she can. My son’s friends all have phones — no surprise in this world of ours — and play video games regularly. He’s a little left out of the chatter about this or that gaming platform, but I’m not giving in just so he can fit into a culture that I don’t think is all that healthy to begin with.
As a parent, I think a lot about the kind of world I’m preparing my kids for. And I guess there’s an argument to be made for preparing them for a world lived largely online, since that’s where we are these days. But I’m going to try and hold the line and reject that very world as much as humanly possible. (Humanly indeed!)
I want my kids running, swimming, noticing the world around them, creating art, hearing bird songs and cries of warning, reading good books (or even not-so-great ones) — almost anything but playing video games and diving into the deep end of a cyber-cesspool of bullying, eating disorders, and a fixation on looks.
I read about the connections between video games and war fighting today and in the future. And it’s strange (at least to me) to imagine war as a video game and the degradation that goes with it. After all, dehumanization is the name of the grisly game these days for the Israeli Defense Forces. Soldiers are taught that the Palestinian people — even children — are less than fully human. Technology may not make them feel that way, but it certainly does make it easier to execute orders involving collective punishment, total surveillance, technological harassment, and ethnic cleansing.
Spending Time with Jennifer Lopez
On Wednesdays, my kids walk to the library, where they can log onto public computers and watch unboxing videos or tutorials on contouring (whatever that may be!). And then they have to walk home in time for dinner. It’s a little over a mile round trip, and I figure it’s a good trade-off. I tell them that they can have a smartphone when they can pay for it themselves, but in my dreams what I’d really like would be a communications device that, in order to use, they had to power with a bicycle or a hand crank. I would want it to feel like work. Because it’s not a value-neutral object and the network it relies on is not value-neutral either. At every juncture, this technology that we take for granted has a high labor, material, and environmental cost.
My daughter Madeline is 11. I notice her putting ever more attention into her appearance, primping and carefully considering her outfits. Still, she smiles when she looks in the mirror, delighting in her strong sense of style and dancing to the beat of her own drummer. Her once-a-week plunge into YouTube hasn’t dissipated her sense of self the way daily (hourly?) immersion would. She plays softball, runs at recess, and has a healthy appetite. She isn’t isolated from the world, and she and I talk about body image, aging, and the way old-fashioned media, social media, and AI create impossible standards for women.
Recently, we watched an ad featuring the multi-hyphenate Jennifer Lopez who, at the age of 55, is acting, singing, dancing, and representing high-end brands like a full-time mogul model. “Gosh, Mom. I can’t believe she is older than you,” Madeline said with the unalloyed frankness of the young. She didn’t have to mention my wrinkles and rolls and masses of white hair. It was all implied in her incredulous tone.
“Well, my Love, it’s not my job to look a certain way,” I replied.
Jennifer Lopez is, of course, a knockout. I have loved her since Out of Sight and Jenny From the Block. As a public figure and a professional beauty, she’s in a position to maintain her looks, no matter what the cost. She undoubtedly spares no expense when it comes to trainers, treatments, makeup, and clothes to keep that look (or at least something close to it), and then computers and lighting do the rest.
Believe me, it’s good to have these conversations with my kid, to have her understand the effort and cost that go into looking like Jennifer Lopez, or any other celebrity. As I pointed out to Madeline, I don’t have a deal with a face-cream company or a clothing line or a perfume outfit or some kind of alcohol company that requires me to devote myself to my persona. And in her own fashion, she heard me.
As I reflect now, I realize that, without such conversations, she might think she’s supposed to look that way, too, and that there’s something wrong with her if she doesn’t. That degraded sense of self is easy pickings for our consumerist culture which sends unrelenting messages that this or that product will fill the hole.
Making the Future Different?
All my yellow thumbs up, all my mindless clicks and swipes, the time traps I fall into — full disclosure: it’s videos of thrifters on the hunt for deals and the posts of the hauls they buy to resell that grab me every time! That’s my weak spot. But every minute online is captured in a huge data profile of ME that I can’t contest or contrive or unravel. But I can turn away. Turn off the iPhone. Turn away from the screen. Disconnect the stream of data. This pervasive technology and its promises of ease and a frictionless existence are a downright lie. After all, the same technological framework powers DoorDash and the weaponized drones that are now raining terror down on children just like mine in Gaza.
I live far enough away from Gaza (in so many senses) that I could mindlessly embrace DoorDash while rejecting killer drones. But now that I’ve made the connection, I can’t un-make it. So I am going to say as big a NO as possible to both.
As the world gets more networked and more automated, the basic knowledge of how to survive in it gets lost, commodified, or controlled. How to find and purify water, how to grow and prepare food — lost! The “cloud” won’t bring rain to end drought conditions. The Internet is not going to feed us in a supply chain collapse. These are the things that keep me up at night, so without freaking out too much, my kids and I work on life skills together. Eye contact, stamina for walking, tolerance of discomfort, strategic decision-making, map-reading, determining threat levels, and assessing someone’s trustworthiness. These are all skills that will help my kids in a distinctly precarious future.
A few years ago, an artist named Simon Weckert borrowed a few dozen iPhones from friends, put them in a red wagon and took a walk through the streets of Berlin. With just an hour or so of lag time, Google Maps showed all the streets and roads he had walked on bottlenecked in traffic jams. Video of his mobile art piece shows him strolling down the center of empty roads. It’s absorbing to watch that video, a split screen of him in a yellow jacket with the jaunty gait of a wagon puller and those red-lined Google Maps. Weckert’s performance demonstrates how our sense of reality is mediated by, filtered through, and dependent on a technology we simply don’t fully grasp or understand.
What we see isn’t what is real. In these dystopian Trumpy days, deep in our bones, we know that. Trump rants about White genocide and radical-left judicial monsters and tweets out AI-constructed images of himself as the Pope, a Jedi master, a golden statue in a renovated Gaza resort. What we see isn’t what’s real. And yes, I am in awe of it. I am afraid of it. I know it cannot feed me. I know it is trying to cleave my attention from the question of how we survive this violent present and make a different and far better future.
Peter Maurin, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day, was fond of saying that we make the future different by making the present different.
So, I am turning my iPhone off. It makes my present different. Will it make the future any different?
It won’t hurt to try!
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Administration Orders Pause on All New Student Visa Interviews
The move comes as the administration plans to expand social media vetting for all noncitizen student applicants.
May 27, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to temporarily suspend scheduling of new student visa interviews as the Trump administration weighs requiring all foreign students to undergo social media vetting.
Politicoreported that a cable signed by Rubio on Tuesday said that "effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor... visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued."
While social media screening isn't new, previous efforts were largely focused on returning students who may have taken part in protests against Israel's annihilation of Gaza. The State Department cable does not specifically state what the expanded social media screening will look for, although it alludes to President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at combating terrorism and antisemitism.
Trump's January 29 order titled "Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism" authorizes the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of a task force to surveil immigrants' social media posts, including those of around 1.5 million foreign students, for alleged antisemitism. While DHS did not say how antisemitism would be defined, critics note that the Trump administration has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, which conflates opposition to Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—with hatred of Jews.
Earlier this year, the State Department also
launched a controversial artificial intelligence-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
Rubio has invoked Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to designate for deportation pro-Palestine international students who the government admits committed no crimes. These include Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung—all permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Ranjani Srinivasan, and others.
The Trump administration's dubious legal arguments have not fared well in courts, as several judges have temporarily blocked the administration from proceeding with deportations of foreign students.
Earlier this month, for example, a federal judge ruled that Öztürk—who was snatched off a Massachusetts streets by plainclothes federal agents and flown to a notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in Louisiana—had been illegally arrested and ordered her immediate release.
Under mounting legal and public pressure, the Trump administration recently reinstated the legal status of hundreds of terminated foreign students. However, for some, the move came too late, as they have been banned from entering the United States.
Meanwhile, the administration's draconian treatment of international students has put many off of studying in the U.S., a situation universities in other nations are exploiting in a bid to attract applicants who are rejected by—or choose to eschew—the United States as a higher learning destination.
On Tuesday, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick cited figures from the Association of International Educators showing that noncitizen students studying at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion to the nation's economy and supported 378,175 jobs during the 2023-24 academic year.
"If the United States stops taking foreign students, the economic impact would be catastrophic," Reichlin-Melnick
said on social media, adding that the Trump administration's pause on international applicants "should be seen as a deliberate attempt to crash the U.S. economy by destroying higher education."
Keep ReadingShow Less
It's Time for Young Men to Be Allies in the Fight Against Online Misogyny
The fight against misogyny requires active engagement from all corners of society, including those who have the privilege and responsibility to challenge these harmful ideologies.
May 16, 2025
Earlier this year, the University of York released a sobering report: 90% of secondary school teachers in the U.K. said their male students are being heavily influenced by online misogynistic figures—often quoting or defending toxic masculine personalities in classes. Girls, meanwhile, are withdrawing from discussions, leaving classrooms quietly divided along gender lines.
This is not just a school issue; it's a society-wide crisis forming in real time, and it's happening worldwide. Boys are learning that dominance is power and empathy is weakness, lessons they carry with them far beyond the walls of a classroom. Online misogyny thrives not only because of those who perpetrate it but also due to the silence of many men who choose not to confront it. This passive complicity allows harmful narratives to flourish, shaping a digital culture where toxic masculinity is normalized and women's voices are marginalized.
There is a better way forward. As a human rights advocate with extensive experience in promoting positive masculinity at RWAMREC, Rwanda Men's Resource Center, I have witnessed firsthand how transformative male engagement approaches can challenge gender-based violence and reshape harmful cultural narratives, both online and in the real world. But, despite their demonstrated successes, these programs are vastly underutilized. Many campaigns focus exclusively on empowering women to protect themselves, rather than mobilizing men to take collective responsibility for change. To truly create lasting change and address online misogyny, we must invest in programs that equip men with the tools and confidence to act as allies.
Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.
Content creators promoting hypermasculine personas characterized by control, dominance, and anti-woman rhetoric have amassed audiences in the tens of millions across platforms like X, TikTok, and YouTube. Such creators often blend self-improvement themes with misogynistic and conspiratorial messaging, making their content more appealing and harder to critique. A U.K.-based survey of secondary school teachers revealed that 90% observed male students mimicking or defending online personalities who espouse these hypermasculine ideologies, demonstrating their real-world influence in shaping gender attitudes among youth. Too many boys view this kind of hateful content with complacency, fostering environments where such attitudes are normalized. But a recent study presented compelling evidence supporting the effectiveness of male bystander intervention in reducing sexist behavior. The research found that when male bystanders actively confronted instances of gender prejudice, female victims experienced increased feelings of empowerment and a greater willingness to confront the perpetrator themselves.
By encouraging men to reflect on their behaviors and understand the impact of their words, the toxic patterns that often go unchecked in digital spaces can be dismantled. Educational campaigns that include men in honest conversations about gender equality have led to more respectful engagement on social media, gaming platforms, and online forums. Participants are more likely to recognize misogynistic content, challenge harmful narratives, and avoid contributing to hostile online environments. These efforts not only reduce the prevalence of online abuse but also shift cultural norms around masculinity, making empathy and accountability part of the standard.
Of course not all boys and men endorse or participate in misogynistic behavior online, and many already stand as strong allies in promoting gender equality. However, the pervasive nature of online misogyny calls for a collective response. While male engagement is essential, it is not enough on its own. Tech companies also play a critical role, as their platforms often become spaces where misogynistic content thrives. These companies must take responsibility by implementing robust policies, monitoring harmful behavior, and holding users accountable. Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.
The fight against misogyny requires active engagement from all corners of society, including those who have the privilege and responsibility to challenge these harmful ideologies. By standing up and speaking out, men can help disrupt the cycle and create a safer, more inclusive online environment for everyone. We need increased funding for initiatives that engage men in preventing online misogyny. We also need media literacy education in schools that arm young people with tools to recognize and challenge harmful online behaviors. Men's active involvement in challenging misogyny is more than supportive, it's revolutionary. When boys and men confront sexist remarks, push back against harmful gender stereotypes, or simply opt out of disrespectful conversations, they break the cycle that normalizes misogyny in everyday life.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular