Karl Marx has been famously quoted as referring to religion as the opiate of the masses. His point being that religion, offering a future, better life in the by and by, narcotized people to endure the difficulty of their lives and work, rather than rising to demand change in the here and now. Religion now lacks the force or mass participation of the past, but it’s also pretty clear to me that it has been replaced as the critical agent for peoples’ pacification by the ubiquity of smartphones.
It’s impossible to ignore, so don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed this phenomenon as well. Some might argue that this is a teen issue. There’s heavy breathing around the United States about blocking cellphones from schools and classrooms and the reported benefits of these restrictions in attention and participation. Others might claim this is a relief from boredom. Waiting for airplanes or in lobbies almost anywhere these days, I sometimes find myself counting the number of people, old and young, who are buried deep in their phones. It’s always a majority, and frequently it’s nearly unanimous, as I find myself an outlier.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite. Smartphones are amazing. They allow us to maintain almost constant communication, which is a good thing. We can keep up with our email almost everywhere we go, allowing us greater mobility. Even social media continues to have value, especially in our work given the frequency our members around the world are able to communicate cheaply with Facebook and WhatsApp. I read that the great contemporary novelist, Zadie Smith, and others have forsaken all social media, as has one of our family members, in order to prevent distractions and maintain their focus. I don’t know how they do it, but I know I couldn’t hold onto my job, if I went that direction. Of course, I don’t use social media or my phone for news, games, video or the like, which I’ve observed can be quite addictive, as well as dangerous for many, according to researchers and our civic stability.
As an opiate for the masses, it’s unparalleled. In Mexico City on vacation, I see delivery drivers, waiting for a job, clued to their phones watching videos. I watched security guards at Viveros de Coyoacan park glued to their phones at each gate. One held her phone in front of her even as she answered a question from a visitor. Grocery workers and store clerks in the middle of tasks stop to attend to their phones. Counter workers waiting for customers are often glued to them. I’ve seen the same in the US and one country after another. Workers doing soul crunching work to make it past a shift are near constantly on their phones, at least whenever opportunity presents. I don’t begrudge any of them for grabbing the relief from the monotony such jobs entail, but I can’t pretend this is not like an opiate, distracting them from demanding something better from their work.
If you frown and claim they are “stealing time” from their work, I would also make the same point about workers’ formal breaks. In organizing unions, we would counsel our organizing committee members to take advantage of breaks to build the union and talk to their co-workers about issues and plans. To the degree that other conversations from romance to sports were allowed, this was protected activity, where they could engage others without recourse from the bosses. Now, many breakrooms are funereal, as workers grab their phones to catch up, get a laugh, play a game, or watch the sports highlights. This is a substitute for building the kinds of bonds that might have been possible on free, unsupervised time outside of an employer’s control.
I don’t have a solution. We employ what patchwork we can by also posting on YouTube, Reels, Facebook, X-Twitter and the like, but even at our best, these are drops in the ocean of content, and more readily sought by adherents, than potential members. I don’t think we’ve touched the surface yet, about how smartphones and their tech enablers are pacifying the population. For all that claim that Twitter or Telegram or whatever might have enabled protest, the silence of smartphones seems more powerful in preventing people from rising for change.
