The Worst Invention of All Time?
We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you have it in yours.
Atlanta , GA
May 14, 2026
Has any century started worse than this one?
It’s a question typical of our short-sighted, self-centered, attention-deprived age. The answer seems obvious, and can be sought by looking a hundred years into the rearview mirror.
There we see… closer than they appear… Theodore Roosevelt, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the direct election of Senators, Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, the Treaty of Versailles, the Black Sox, and Prohibition.
Peak America
But let’s give this century its ignominious due. It has its own litany of self-inflicted calamity, exacted by meddling sculptors and know-it-all painters whose only tools are jackhammers and spray guns. And, to be fair, their work isn’t done!
In retrospect, the 1990s might have been Peak America… the blowoff top of a great bacchanal. The Soviets fell and prosperity reigned. History was at an end. The party was on. The US then succumbed to what economics calls the law of diminishing returns, and approached what Calculus refers to as the limit.
After running up the credit card and hitting the casino, America raided mom’s wine cellar and ransacked dad’s liquor cabinet. Then it passed out on the lawn, empty bottles and smoldering cigarettes strewn across the yard as the morning sprinkler sprayed its face.
It’s been hungover and searching for its car keys ever since. Along the way, it’s tripped and stumbled into expensive errors. Thousands died in reckless wars. Millions were impoverished by rigged capital markets. Lockdowns closed countless small businesses while enriching big competitors. Medical mandates evicted millions from jobs.
And many Americans are just fine with this refrain of disaster that resembles a classic Bradbury book or a bad Billy Joel song. The Fourth Turning seems to be upon us. Not only is the pretense of liberty vanishing, the desire for it seems to be as well.
Live and let live is dead. To each his own is not for us.
Sunlight to an Ant
We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you have it in yours.
This century, we’ve become an hysterical people. Everything is over the top, overdone, overblown, and overreacted to. Even (or especially) regarding people we never met and would never care to meet, or things we know nothing about and about which, in a sane world, we’d not be able to care less.
The smartphone brings “news” to us the way a magnifying glass transmits sunlight to an ant. It hits us more intensely, and less beneficially, than we initially believe. It allows little or no time to think, and often leaves us worse off than had we not been exposed to it at all. We receive so much information that we usually know less than we did before. Our brains slowly fry.
Public opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks, which inevitably influences what people think they are supposed to think. The smartphone fans these flames, which often burn out as quickly as they ignite.
Silent and Listen
Social media and instant news are not conducive to subtlety and nuance, but rather to instant reaction and plenty of noise. Smartphones stunt reflection and shorten time horizons.
It’s appropriate that “silent” and “listen” are spelled with the same letters. But in social settings, our phones encourage the former yet discourage the latter. They “connect” us superficially from a distance, yet push us apart in proximity.
A random buzz, beep, post, photo, like, link, text, or tweet is sufficient pretext to disrupt a conversation or ignore someone in our presence. Digital correspondents become highest priority.
The world of the real, the tangible, and the personal fades into the background. And, after wading mindlessly thru the self-selected cheer and artificial abundance of other people’s posts, it often feels inadequate.
Don’t get me wrong. The smartphone is one of the most useful, powerful, consequential, disruptive, convenient, informative, miraculous, and remarkable inventions of all time.
But in some ways, it is among the worst. Like most anything else, it just depends how we use it.
Or don’t.
JD