When Rome fell, barbarians pillaged her cities.
The Visigoth conquerors ransacked the grand mausoleums, destroyed buildings around the Senate Plaza, and burned the great courthouses that were symbols and agents of progressive Western justice. The images of Roman triumph, marble statues and paintings were torn down. The sack of Rome wasn't complete until the once-solid, but now shaky institutions of order, justice, and wisdom were unrecognizable in the dawn of a new post-Golden Age of Romanic rule.
Before Rome's fall, the court of law was the arbiter of justice, the Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) was the first democratic government, the family was a pillar of social order, and Latin was the lingua franca (trade language) of Europe.
These institutions and innovations endured and matured as the cornerstones of western society today because of their ability to remain the control mechanisms of society, despite a geographical invasion and destruction. In the rebuilding and restoration process, their application led to a new golden era that pushed prosperity further west and through time to amass in the new world of Columbus and Washington.
As control mechanisms, these institutions act to distribute punishment and repayment (courts and legislature), to vet information and truth (schools and religion), and to establish trade and wealth (language, media, and markets). Sometimes they do this by blatantly denying access to information or regulating resources, but more often accomplish their ends by lending less weight to some knowledge and more to others.
Now we arrive at the problem of the Visigoth we have willingly loosed in society:
the foundational institutions of our day are crumbling and insufficient to cope with the nature and design of smartphone technology in its current state.
Our smartphones have created a state of mind within which we all live and act. Its bread is unlimited information, its water, the deification and goal of technological progress.
Like the Romans who became greedy and arrogant at being the pride of the western world, our technological world has created the invisible, often-lauded problem of information glut (usually called Big Data).
The supply of information increases every second on the ever-growing, worldwide web.
The equitable spread of information and access has been good for righting many wrongs in historical representation, educational inequalities, and wealth disparities, but bad for the bedrocks of social order.
The role of smartphones in this is equal parts complete and ever-unfolding.
The iPhone gave legs to search engines and media outlets running into the wall of time-on-screens in their profit equation (because potential profit equals advertising rates multiplied by consumer eyeballs). Unlocking life-hours untapped by television, radio, or computers, smartphones allowed data and ads to proliferate while citizens were away from home, in their private spaces and nature.
New influences, sources, and ideas spring from everywhere and nowhere to strain those control mechanisms that once held society together. The strain leads to new control mechanisms (Google, content moderation, platforms around niches), which further increase the supply and create dissonance between institutions and individuals.
Here we see the most consequential movement of distrust in the media, doubt in the power of officially elected positions, and a devaluing of the institutions of family, universities, libraries, post offices, and banks (and currency with the rise of crypto).
My point is not that we should place absolute faith in these entities (for many, and maybe most of them can be corrupt, bloated things). Nor that we should halt culture's evolution to rebuild systems long antiquated for an "enlightened, enriched" society.
My argument is that all institutions are failing because of smartphone technology, despite any good they bring to society, so that those who want reform over removal will see the end of any beginnings before they realize their device's hand at play in the destruction.
