What Happened in 2007?
65 comments
·October 19, 2025nkoren
JKCalhoun
Agree. Might as well start with internet adoption, but the phone allows us to carry that weight with us all day. To be sure it started a bit sooner.
cmrdporcupine
Exactly, I've been net-addicted since .. uh, BBS culture in the late 80s, and I almost never use my smartphone but have my laptop or computer screen in front of me most of the day. I don't feel much better held together than my teens with their phones.
throwmeaway876
Exactly this.
I am convinced about the premise but for the love of god zoom out those charts.
ajross
Also worth noting that a lot of the graphs (the ACT scores in particular) are constructed to show a downward trend but really seem to be measuring the COVID pandemic more directly.
jwagenet
The SAT and ACT plots indicate an accelerating downward trend beginning in 2018 though, later exacerbated by COVID.
Fade_Dance
>limiting life outcomes of millions around the globe
The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such are extremely US centric.
Smartphones were a positive revolution for so much of the world. Consider the hundreds of millions of children (more than the entire US population exclusively used in this argument) growing up in rural poor households surrounded by illiteracy. They suddenly had access to the wider world. They had the opportunity to take initiative in ways they didn't have before. They had access to limitless education, and an easy way to pick up a global language. When kids left the village for a city they could video chat with family instead of going months of no contact.
To some extent, I'm talking about the final leg of the internet revolution, not phones specifically, but in many areas of the world where electricity is intermittent, it was phones that finally drove wider internet penetration.
Are there downsides? Certainly. is smartphone addiction and social media a problem? Research says that it probably is, but for a long time I've felt that the positive impacts on a global scale are being downplayed, especially in the US. Not everyone who gained cell phone connectivity had a PC at home with a steady power supply as a baseline, and schools stocked with computers. We have a huge wave of new people growing up who had access to far more information than the previous generation. If I'm going to make a casual, broad-sweeping generalization of impact, I'll hazard to guess that the positive impact is being greatly underappreciated globally.
JKCalhoun
You sound like a spokesperson for MIT's Media Lab and Nicholas Negroponte. I was skeptical of their message then, even more skeptical now. You acknowledge the downsides but I think we disagree wildly as to whether these outweigh the upside.
I'd rather see a One Book Per Child global initiative. (Maybe Dolly Parton is on to something—Nicholas Negroponte should take note.)
DiscourseFan
Its all very dialectical or whatever
dash2
Are poor people more likely than rich people to use smartphones for literacy and education? My wife comes from a poor household in a developing country and the kids there are mostly playing games on them.
Fade_Dance
Intuitively, kids are kids, and kids like to play.
That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before.
Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify.
For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide).
Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago).
Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc.
The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift.
If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)
fleischhauf
keyword is mostly here. it opens up the opportunities where there was really nothing before.
alphazard
The reverse Flynn effect should be by far the most concerning thing on this page. As others have pointed out, some of these trends are specious, but the Flynn effect has held up for a while, and is highly replicated. Even just the disappearance of the Flynn effect would be significant.
An adjacent phenomenon that needs investigation is "Adult ADD". Extending the theory of adolescent ADD to adults doesn't add up. It's surprising that these are considered by default to be the same condition, especially in people who didn't have issues during adolescence. The increase in prevalence demands a non-genetic explanation. Better explanatory theories are: 1. We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults. 2. It's a fad (when will prevalence decrease?), and 3. It's the smartphones/apps.
Personally, I think it's mostly 3, with the infinite scrolling apps having a huge effect on attention and executive function, but also some of 1 given the information economy.
This should go without saying: if an intervention is working for you, or a disease theory has given you explanatory power, you should stick with both.
ZeroGravitas
I thought to be diagnosed as ADHD you needed to have the symptoms from childhood, as many other things cause similar symptoms?
Your next sentence seems to suggest you think ADHD only affects children?
alphazard
The theory of disease for ADD/ADHD in children has explanatory power, which means that the understanding must be at least partially correct. It's impressive that many children outgrow their ADD, and that temporary use of amphetamines during development can help them outgrow it, so they don't regularly take drugs as adults. Some kids don't outgrow it, and continue to medicate as adults. That's also fine, if it helps, it helps.
What doesn't add up is people with new problems with executive function that start as adults, and suspiciously as they have more control over their screen time, and more money to spend on technology and apps. They get an amphetamine prescription, which definitely helps, but they also get a bad explanation. Something like: genetics, or a story about how their brain was better in the ancestral environment or whatever. Doesn't explain the onset of the condition, doesn't explain why it became a problem completely after development.
ericrallen
This seems to completely ignore, and maybe even dismiss, the lived experience of all the kids who weren’t diagnosed or treated but who developed coping mechanisms to survive school and adolescent life, then found those mechanisms incapable of dealing with the ever-increasing burdens of adult life and finally sought diagnosis as adults after years of struggling to understand things that have been complicating their lives all along.
This kind of dismissive rhetoric increases the stigma around seeking a diagnosis as an adult, which is already hard enough because an entire system of caregivers, teachers, and institutions already failed the undiagnosed person throughout their life and navigating the health care system, especially for mental health, is extremely frustrating - and challenging from an executive function perspective.
balamatom
"We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults"
Damn, now I want this as a spoken word sample on a house music track
cmrdporcupine
Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue in the same way as "Feel My Motherf'n Bass in Your Face" though, does it?
simpaticoder
Even more important than first order effects are any positive feedback loops we can identify. For example, a stressed person escapes into a screen to quiet their own thoughts, and the screen's contents stresses them out. This feedback loop is common to all forms of addiction, but screens are unique in at least three ways. First, they are legal for all ages. Second, they are personally customized to increase usage. Third, unlike drugs which distort reality, screens effectively replace it for the user. It is to be expected that this would have strong cognitive and even epistemic effects on users, and that these effects are self-reinforcing.
Neoliberal capitalism is not equipped to either identify or solve these problems. Some attempts are being made ("Calm" apps, self help books, etc) but these are sand castles trying to stem the tide. Society as a whole must recognize that screens exist in a superposition of "encyclopedia", "cigarette", "panopticon", and take steps to regulate their use. A bummer for libertarians, but life-saving for society.
null
owisd
2007 seems a bit early to be looking for an effect. Smartphones were a luxury/tech-nerd/Apple-fanboy purchase in 2007, they didn’t start to see widespread adoption till the iPhone 4/4s (2010-2012) closer to when most of the graphs have their discontinuity. In the US, 50% smartphone ownership didn’t happen till 2014 for adults and 2016 for teens.
Arch485
I definitely believe that the modern internet, computers, and phones are bad for us, but this argument is entirely unconvincing. Most of the data _seems_ to be U.S.-specific, which means that this data does not indicate if this is a global phenomenon. Further, a lot of the trend lines don't start in 2007 and could be easily attributed to other causes.
Faelian2
Thanks for putting this site together. Despite all the comments here, I find your point pretty convincing.
AJRF
Thanks - I don't really take the comments as entirely negative, people want rigour and I agree the point could be made more convincingly.
I would love for a proper study of this hypothesis to be done.
_aavaa_
Basing your site on wtfhappenedin1971 is not a positive signal.
hollerith
You dont like margins on your web pages?
AJRF
Sorry - that looks terrible on mobile.
I added a little 16px margin now - hopefully that is better. Thanks for checking it out!
newsclues
Smartphones + Social media
And then COVID appears to have had a massive impact.
On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old, was a key date IMO.
AJRF
Thanks for that, that seems worth adding.
wat10000
This is also when traffic fatalities on the US halted their decades-long decline and started to increase again.
superkuh
Nodding along with the site until Fig 8. "Internet Addiction". If it has made up graphs like this with included the rest of the argument is likely made of false premises too.
dash2
It wasn't a made-up graph. It just looked at academic articles and citations on the topic. That's not an entirely stupid approach.
AJRF
This point is exceedingly hard to get data on! I thought a good proxy would be the prevelance of people acknowledging it as real, but maybe not. I will try replace this. Thanks for the feedback.
superkuh
Yes, it's hard to get data on 'internet addiction' because it's a meme, not a pathology. It's been brought up in committees in the DSM and other places over and over and over because the public demands their meme be addressed. And each time there are null findings. There's no such thing. It's just a commercial/scam for 'treament centers' and people's natural tendency to fear the new.
Making a plot of the trajectory of this scam is nice, but it should at least be labeled properly. Talk about a thing does not a thing make.
Not explicitly arguing against the thesis of the website, but showing trend lines which allegedly started in 2007 with data that starts in 2006 is... Not convincing.