Changing Our Relationship to Technology Will Require Collective Action

Many of us are making individual efforts to use our phones less, or to avoid A.I. But we will need to work together. At noon, at six-thirty, and at ten at night, before I shuffle off to bed, my phone automatically shuts off access to all social-media sites. If I want to restore my ability to mindlessly scroll, I have to walk sheepishly to my kitchen and press my phone up against a little plastic square that sits on a high shelf. This humiliation device, called the Brick, limits my screen time to the apps that, in an earlier moment of clarity, I deemed essential: text messages and Apple Books, which, during these Bricked hours, I have been using to dutifully reread " The Brothers Karamazov," prompted more by a sense of shame than by a sincere interest in revisiting the great novels.