The smartphone is our era's cigarette – and just as hard to quit | Ross Barkan

This single piece of technology has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction

In the long lost year of 2011, I managed to graduate college without owning a smartphone. Even then, four years after the birth of the iPhone, I was not yet an unreasonable outlier. All my immediate friends owned flip phones. The pressure to join the future had not yet overtaken us.

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