All my Gen Z friends want to ditch their smartphones. But there's more at stake than they think. My friend Lilah is the crunchiest person I know. She refuses to kill bugs and rats. She once made me try her homemade wine (disastrous). A few years ago, she quit her food-justice nonprofit job to live in a yurt, and after that she went to grad school and moved into an attic, where her roommates were squirrels. Against her will, she did own an iPhone for a time.

Imagine: It's 2012 and Matthew Wegner is sitting at his desk in the back of a one-bedroom apartment in Tempe, Arizona, pounding away at a keyboard. It's night but thick black drapes are pulled over the window; the room is suffused with dim yellow light, casting sickly shadows over the papers tacked to the walls. Most of them are emblazoned with the name Aztez, depicting bloody battles among ancient Aztec warriors. Wegner's fingers fall still as he closes a line of code and reviews his work. A ball of blinding white light suddenly explodes in the middle of the room, shooting sparks to the ceiling and singeing the carpet -- Wegner jumps up and stares, wide-eyed, at the intrusion.