And who detaches us adults?

1. One day, while scrolling on Instagram, Fèlix Colomer, one of the good documentary directors we have, appeared to me, explaining that he quit social media two months ago. At 32, he has recovered time as his most precious asset. The reasons that led him to make this drastic decision are surely ones we can recognize. “I notice that what I used to do, I can no longer do. I could spend four hours working, writing, or editing videos, and now I can't. Every twenty minutes, half an hour at most, I have to check my phone, see what's happening, I have to go on Twitter. I notice that I am much less productive and efficient.” I couldn't identify with it more. With one difference. He was able to quit. There are many of us, however, who lack the willpower and remain hooked on the business of idlers.

2. It is, in every way, an addiction. We have given away our data and our tastes to the applications and, in return, every few seconds they give us a stimulus that suits our philias and phobias. The football ones, the gastronomic ones, the musical ones, the political ones... It mixes them all together and spits them out at you, one by one, with artistic proposals, with breaking news, with banal anecdotes, with covert ads for caps that are ideal for bald people. Because they also know that about me, because one day I must have spent more than ten seconds looking at one. The reward is so immediate that you always want more. And when you are doing nothing, you look at your phone and take a peek. And suddenly some time has passed while looking at a little screen that might not have made you any dumber or wiser, but it has surely made you more addicted.

3. This is a dog chasing its own tail. We are so used to watching short things that reading for a long while is already difficult for us. Or it takes much more effort than before. The impacts are so fast and continuous that the capacity for concentration is much lower than years ago, when we did not have this dependency. They called them smartphones and they have turned out to be a trap to make us collectively dumber, more easily influenced, and more controllable. They not only set our political agenda—increasingly polarized between good and bad—but also determine our personal agenda, victims of the algorithm. When Mark Zuckerberg, the lord of Instagram and Facebook, decides that Meta will pay 17 billion dollars before going to trial to settle the lawsuits for the addiction he has caused in minors, it is because he knows what the devastating consequences of his gadgets are. If you believe you are innocent, you do not pay that fortune preventively.

4. When the results of the PISA report were published, the world was shocked and, immediately, analysts appeared who claimed that the low level of reading comprehension is not the fault of the mobile phone or this industry of compulsive stupidity. Not only that, of course not. We could make a catalog of diverse causes that would include the surrender of the culture of effort, the isolating pandemic of 2020, or the haphazard educational model, but it is undeniable that one of the consequences of so much brain candy, through platforms, is that the capabilities of young people are diminishing.

5. Better late than never. The European Commission, faced with the serious mental health problem we are dealing with, has decided to act. It will ban—finally a definitive verb—social media for those under 13 years old. From 13 to 15, infinite scroll will not be allowed, accounts can be used for one hour a day and will have to be supervised by parents. Parents who, perhaps, will find it difficult to lead by example. Until eighteen, the bill also includes measures that will need to be defined to mitigate the impact of all this. But what about adults? Who will rescue us from this authentic addiction? We have been abandoned and, today, we are already digital zombies.