“People are only seeing some of the damages when it’s too late — it’s already made so much of an impact on our generation’s life,” she said. Trying to sum up the amount of money a social media company ought to pay her for the toll on her own frayed attention, Ms. Fernandini paused and then lowballed: “Maybe $50,000?”
It’s true that while the movement to challenge big tech is often compared with the suits against big tobacco in the 1990s, the results aren’t likely to be as straightforward. As lawyers and scientists went after cigarette companies, the rate of Americans who smoked plunged from 42 percent to under 10 percent. But Americans today are not quitting phones and social media en masse. There’s a complicated effort underway to find safeguards — constraints on beauty filters, nighttime blocks, age controls, two-hour time limitations.
Few are pretending the American addiction to social media is over. There is only so much that can be done to rein in Meta, because its hold on our lives is so totalizing. (“It’s a little bit more as if someone had added nicotine to the water supply,” said Jaron Lanier, a prominent tech critic.) This battle is less David versus Goliath, and more David versus God. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, testified in the trial that the problems the plaintiffs described had “no silver bullets.”
Mr. Haidt doesn’t entirely agree. Characteristically sanguine, he feels that the settlement Meta agreed to is only a fragment of the social changes that are likely to occur. “We’re now seeing the dark side of digital technologies in a way that makes it possible for a cultural rejection, a cultural awakening that we can’t live this way,” he said.
And for people of any age who have found themselves glued to screens, failing to wrench their attention back, the settlement brought a moment of release. The fixation on children’s tech addiction and attention is also, for some adults, a way of grieving their own. If you can’t log off, at least maybe your kids can. For two hours.
“Two years ago, when I would do an interview with a journalist, they would almost always start off with, ‘I see this in my own kids,’” Mr. Haidt reflected. “Beginning sometime in 2025, what would generally happen is the journalists would start off by saying, ‘I see this in myself.’”
