Phones Ruined Everything

Source: Phones Ruined Everything, Horses, 33:34, uploaded 2025-07-15, Watch Later position 422.

Horses begins with a broad accusation. Modern technocrats appear brilliant because they have built empires and inventions, yet the video sees a simpler motive beneath that success: the pursuit of money and power through the capture of human attention. Social media has already been blamed for damage to attention, confidence, and mental health. The larger cost, the video argues, reaches into political trust, shared identity, and the ability of a society to choose its own direction.

From useful phone to attention machine

The smartphone enters the video’s history as an ordinary tool. The first iPhone, announced in June 2007, looked like a phone with a few useful functions. The decisive change arrives with Apple’s App Store in 2008. It launched with 500 applications and grew to more than a million by 2013, helped by Apple’s software development kits, which let outside companies build and sell applications for the iPhone.

The App Store created a market in which large technology companies could spend millions making their applications more persuasive. Advertising supplied the business model. An application that held a person’s attention for longer could show more adverts and earn more money, so companies competed to keep users inside the application for as much time as possible. Horses presents this as a race to manipulate attention, with children as the easiest group to influence.

Facebook’s like button, introduced in 2009, and Twitter’s retweet feature turned each post into a small public score. Facebook’s algorithmic news feed added the possibility of a post becoming viral. The platform had begun as a way to reconnect with lost friends. It became a performance in which success could be counted through likes, reposts, and followers.

The video reports that this period added about three hours of screen time each day for an American child. It then cites Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which connects social media use to changes in young people’s friendships and attention. Friends interrupt conversations to answer push notifications, which makes the phone appear more important than the person in front of them. Horses gives an average of 192 notifications per day and links the resulting loss of focus to worsening ADHD rates and symptoms. The video treats that relation as causal, although it does not provide the underlying studies.

Horses has little interest in repeating the familiar list of harms. The argument turns from the individual to the collective. People live together and need to work towards some shared future. A phone that absorbs one person’s attention also changes what a population can notice, value, and do together.

The work hidden inside leisure

Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? gives the video its economic frame. The internet once looked like free information, yet that description loses its force once information becomes part of the economy. Social networks and the data moving through them carry money, labour, and power.

Scrolling appears to fill idle time. During that time, advertisers and platform owners earn money from the person’s attention, while every tap, video, and swipe supplies more material for the platform and its algorithms. Horses calls this unpaid labour. It combines work and leisure whilst giving the user the rewards of neither. The person earns no capital, and the time no longer offers the quiet that lets someone think about who they are.

The video lingers on the moments before sleep, when a person lies alone with their thoughts. Those moments can feel uncomfortable because serious questions rise up without the distractions that usually keep them away. They also give a person the chance to reflect and discover something about themselves. Notifications and feeds interrupt that empty clarity and turn the person away from their own mind so that someone else can become richer.

Goals, starlight, and the faulty GPS

James Williams’s Stand Out of Our Light offers a way to describe the loss. Williams asks the reader to imagine a GPS device that accepts a destination, gives directions, and repeatedly delivers the driver somewhere else. A single wrong turn might be a glitch. A device that sends the driver to a golf course or cinema every time would be abandoned.

Horses applies the example to a person’s life. A person has to decide where they want to go and what they want to become, then ask whether Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google, and Apple share that destination. The video answers that their business goals point elsewhere. These companies make devices, and they also make users by training people to replace their own values with the values that keep the system profitable.

Williams calls the ability to navigate by one’s own goals and ambitions “starlight”. Social media trains people to chase immediate satisfaction, which places clouds in that inner sky. Likes, reposts, and followers begin to look like evidence of fulfilment. Rest, contemplation, and reflection give way to the next small reward even after the person puts the phone down.

The result appears in public life. A governor’s joke about Donald Trump can receive more attention than the ordinary work of political administration. Americans can choose a president after weighing short-term promises against conduct that violates moral values they otherwise claim to share. People buy from corporations whose labour practices and environmental effects they know to be harmful. Horses links these decisions to a deeper loss of identity. Political disagreement becomes a division over who people are and what they share, rather than a disagreement about a single policy.

The video invokes Rousseau’s warning that a population can be misled by elites and split into opposing groups until its members lose their sense of belonging to a larger whole. Lost starlight means lost goals and a lost story about what a community is trying to become. People then feel close to events and personalities outside their lives whilst becoming distant from neighbours and friends. The video compares this with living in a crowded high-rise without knowing the people who pass one’s door each day.

The big machine

Money follows money through the social-media world. The networks hold enough wealth and power to rearrange the culture around them, and Horses describes technology leaders seeking favour from the administration in power because political access promises further growth. The new gold rush concerns data. Data can produce capital, so companies, politicians, and investors compete to collect it.

The video calls this outlook dataism. It quotes a passage attributed to Chris Anderson in the New York Times, which treats measurement as a transparent way to remove emotion and ideology and to understand the past, present, and future. Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics supplies the next step. Big data, big business, and Big Brother once described separate forces. Horses says that they now form a single “big machine” that watches consumers, gathers their information, and trades it for profit.

Within this machine, people become commodities with grading systems. Horses names Axiom as a data-brokerage company and says that it trades the personal data of 300 million US citizens. The video claims that Axiom sorts people into 70 categories based on market value. The most valuable group is called “shooting stars”. People with the lowest economic value are placed in a category called “waste”. The claim makes the machine’s view of a person plain: a life becomes a market rating before the person has any chance to see or challenge the classification.

Politicians want the same supposedly objective knowledge. They buy data with money taken from the public and tailor campaign messages to individuals. Horses asks what free elections mean after a candidate has spent two years using personal information to bend each voter’s environment towards a desired choice. The video compares this with a mouse that receives cheese whenever it presses a button. The mouse remains free to stop pressing. The reward still gives the choice a direction.

Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious extends the argument. Each person has desires that they cannot fully identify, and a culture can display patterns that its members do not consciously understand. The big machine can detect those patterns through data mining. It may even form a more accurate picture of a population than the population can form of itself. Since the companies that gather the data have no reason to share what they learn, they can use those discoveries to make money and exercise power. The resulting manipulation can change the direction of a society without the society noticing.

Counting a life

The big machine also becomes a small machine carried by one person. Phones and watches can record sleep, steps, and resting heart rate. These measures can help someone understand their health. Social media supplies a more empty form of measurement: the number of likes on a photograph, friends on a profile, or direct messages received in a week.

Those numbers cannot answer the question of who a person is. They can pull a person away from answering it by making the self appear as a set of scores. Han’s distinction matters here. Data counts numbers. It does not revisit an event years later with the perspective that comes from living through more of the world. Self-knowledge grows through serious reflection and reconsideration, while a dashboard invites a person to judge themselves from outside.

Horses describes this as a prison built through self-improvement. The person measures their life, makes decisions from the resulting numbers, and finds that the measurements bring neither peace nor happiness. They become both guard and inmate.

The machine also fails to understand the human experience. It can measure a relation between A and B, including a possible causal link, whilst leaving out C: the human spirit in which both variables exist. Human beings introduce a chaotic and difficult-to-predict element. The machine predicts what is predictable, then struggles with the events that change a person’s life or realign a society. Those events arrive without permission, and the machine feeds on the disorder afterwards like a vulture.

Why putting the phone down is not enough

“Stop using your phone” sounds like an answer because it gives the problem to one person. Horses thinks that answer ignores the material conditions around the phone. Parents give children phones because they need to know where they are. The risks that worry parents have also moved into the digital world, so a device can look like a safety measure even while it exposes a child to new dangers.

Children also face the social cost of refusing the device. Friends talk about social-media culture, and a child may fear becoming an outcast without access to it. When one parent gives in, the pressure reaches the other parents. Sending children outside carries its own social risks in a culture that can treat an unsupervised child as evidence of parental neglect. Horses admits that it is speaking without being a parent, then keeps the point narrow: parents and children face a system that makes withdrawal difficult.

The companies behind the applications spend billions of dollars and years of research to capture attention. The video asks whether anybody can reasonably expect a sixteen-year-old to defeat that system through individual willpower. Children also receive two incompatible pictures of the world. Their phones show global catastrophe, pornography, cruelty, and adult desire, while school presents information as an orderly sequence of lessons and subjects. Horses thinks this split damages the ability to understand information and calls for tools that teach young people how to live inside the changed environment.

Concessions and possible exits

Horses names two weaknesses in its own case. Social media can provide community, self-expression, and relationships, especially for people who are marginalised by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. The video then says that hard evidence for a lasting benefit remains scarce. It cites Haidt’s account of a mental-health crisis among young people and argues that online company may ease loneliness from a very low baseline whilst replacing stronger in-person relationships.

The comparison with cocaine and physical violence makes the speaker’s position clear. A harmful thing can produce a pleasant sensation, and that sensation does not make the thing good. Horses then turns the accusation towards itself. The creator participates in the social-media system whilst criticising it, and admits that the contradiction offers no clean excuse.

The useful question becomes whether people work for the platforms or make the platforms work for them. Horses hopes its videos can encourage people to examine both the world inside social media and the world outside it. The proposed response reaches beyond private habits. Governments could regulate the companies, establish oversight, and raise the online adult age from 13 to 16. Parents and communities could also reconsider what childhood independence means, since fear of physical risk has helped make the phone seem necessary.

The ending places some hope in cultural change. Cigarette use once appeared ordinary, civil-rights movements have won major gains, and environmental action has achieved concrete victories despite the scale of the remaining problems. A future generation may decide that being permanently online looks old and uncool. Horses treats that possibility as a cultural shift that young people can make for themselves.

The video ends by giving the young a political role. Older people in power struggle to understand how deeply media has changed everyday life, while young people have the experience and intelligence to see that change. Horses rejects the recurring claim that youth are stupid, calling it the arrogance of ageing minds. The youth of today will control the world of tomorrow. They can rebuild the systems that shape their lives so that those systems give them joy and room to act.

Limits

This note reconstructs Horses’s argument as presented in the video. The description contains a Ground News sponsorship, a link to horses.land, and the statement “sources provided in video”. It supplies no bibliography or chapter markers. The transcript names the Reuters Institute, Joe Rogan’s 2024 interview with Donald Trump, Jonathan Haidt, Jaron Lanier, James Williams, Rousseau, Carl Jung, Chris Anderson, and Byung-Chul Han, yet it gives no links or full citations for the reports and studies behind its numerical claims.

Claims about 192 daily notifications, additional screen time, ADHD, Axiom’s categories, political targeting, the effects of social media on mental health, and the Reuters Institute’s news figures remain claims made by the speaker here. The dataism quotation is attributed to Chris Anderson and the New York Times in the transcript. The video does not identify the article, so that attribution remains unresolved in this note. Horses also makes a strong argument from its own position as a creator who depends on the same platforms it criticises. That tension qualifies the conclusion without cancelling it.

Further reading / references

• James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 2024.
• Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
• Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso, 2017.
• Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2024: United States, the report named in the video.