The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell

The cloying moralizing didn’t really become clear until chapter 10. I should’ve known back in chapter 2 that the strident, clutching-at-pearls, “won’t anyone think of the children?” point of view was a tad hyperbolic.

She’s right in one regard: the Internet is a casino in a strip club in a strip mall designed to keep you gaming for the next dopamine rush. Social media apps are the fentanyl to the heroin that is the Internet. Tiktok is carfentanyl. That doesn’t mean we all must abstain from technology. That Purityrannical view is a different problem.

Instead, as she so briefly mentions, there is the original intent of creating a community of linked people, machines, and commerce: problem solving. People, because children are people too, can be trained to build new solutions. To be creators instead of consumers.

Were it not for the disposable, single use, capitalist version of morality she supports, she might see that the plethora of distractions and traps the current media environment offers is the obstacle — a characteristically American obstruction. Seeing beyond the bright lights, the flashy colours, and all the porn, there is an infinity of forms. The tech exit forecloses on that creative potential, relegating it to the same tech lords her preferred President serves.

This book is only moderately useful. Sure, I agree, delay smart phones and social media until your kids can smoke, drink, do drugs, and join the military. But that’s a pamphlet that does the job of this book.

Go read Johnathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” instead.