On the Train, On the Platform
On trains, on station platforms, at crosswalks waiting for the light—everywhere you look, almost everyone is staring at their phone. Plenty of people are looking at it while walking, too. Most of us have seen someone so absorbed in their screen that they nearly missed a step on the platform.
We usually call this “phone addiction” or “smartphone dependency.” As if it were the same as alcohol or nicotine—something that happens because a person’s willpower is weak.
But is that really what’s going on?
Where the Word “Addiction” Points
“Addiction” and “dependency” share something in common: they locate the cause of the problem inside the individual.
“You’re weak-willed.” “You can’t manage yourself.” That’s what these words imply. And so the proposed solutions stay stuck at the level of personal effort too—”cut down your screen time,” “try a digital detox.”
But look more closely at what actually happens every time you open your phone.
A notification arrives. A red number appears on the badge. You scroll, and scroll, and the content never runs out. Little mechanisms designed to make you think “just a bit more” are embedded everywhere.
None of this is accidental. Some of the world’s most talented engineers and designers built these systems deliberately, with the explicit goal of making it hard for people to put their phones down.
The Real Relationship Is Between You and the Service Provider
What someone glued to their phone is actually engaging with isn’t the device itself. It’s a relationship with whoever is on the other side, providing the content and the service.
And that relationship was never equal to begin with.
The timing of notifications, the colors used, the order in which videos autoplay—all of this is designed by the service provider. The person using the phone is closer to being reacted upon than reacting freely.
Calling this “addiction” makes that asymmetry of power disappear. The problem gets quietly reassigned to individual weakness, while the party that actually holds the power—the one doing the designing—gets to remain invisible, its intent unexamined.
The Deception of Calling It “Manners”
Accidents caused by walking while looking at a phone, falls on train platforms, car accidents caused by drivers distracted by their screens—these are real, and people are genuinely hurt.
In response, phone companies and railway operators tend to offer the same thing: posters and PSAs urging people to mind their manners and stop using their phones while walking.
But think about it. Locking the screen while someone is detected walking, switching notifications to audio-only—today’s smartphones could implement features like this without much difficulty. In fact, some phones already limit notifications while driving is detected.
Doing the same thing while someone is walking is a choice service providers simply haven’t made.
Why not? The answer is simple: the longer people look at the screen, the more advertising and other revenue comes in. A design that reduces screen time for the sake of safety runs directly against the provider’s own financial interest.
Framing this as a “manners” problem is, in fact, the most economically convenient option available. A single poster creates the appearance of “doing something,” at zero development cost and zero impact on revenue.
This Design Philosophy Goes Back to the Birth of the iPhone
This inaction may well have been built in from the very beginning—from the moment the first iPhone was introduced to the world.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, the story he told was “this will change your life,” “this is what you wanted all along”—a narrative built entirely around desire. Safety was barely mentioned, if at all.
The contrast with the automobile is instructive. Cars, too, were unregulated at first. But as accidents became a recognized social problem, a “story of safety”—seatbelts, airbags—became woven into the product itself.
Smartphones have not yet reached that turning point.
A Future Where AI Reaches Into the Body
Now, as AI converges with wearable devices that track heart rate, sleep, and other biometric data, this structure is pushing even further.
Until now, the phone pulled attention from the outside. Going forward, a person’s heart rate, facial expressions, even the tone of their voice may be read in real time, with a response offered before the person has even decided how to respond.
What’s actually lost here isn’t time. It’s the space of hesitation—the blank interval before an answer has been given.
Whenever a person responds to something, there’s always a small gap: a moment to think, to hesitate, to stay silent. It’s precisely that gap that makes the response genuinely one’s own.
Technology that anticipates and hands you a reaction before you’ve formed one fills in that gap. It paves over the blank space that belongs to no one yet—the space just before a response is born.
And Yet, There Are Ways Out
Not every design closes off the same way.
Android phones, for instance, still retain—at least structurally—the freedom to swap out apps or rebuild the system itself. The iPhone, by contrast, pursued Jobs’s vision of a “seamless, perfect experience” so completely that it left no handle by which to climb out.
That difference matters. Whether or not there’s room to drill a hole in the wall of a closed box is also, in a sense, a question of whether the person using it can remain a responding subject—rather than simply a component inside someone else’s design.
Toward Reclaiming a Body That Responds
Dressing the way you like. Taking a walk with no destination. Choosing your words slowly.
These acts might seem to have nothing to do with the problem of phones. But I think they are, in fact, all practices of reclaiming that gap—that space of ma, of in-betweenness.
Responding in your own time, rather than reacting instantly. Receiving something with the body, rather than processing it efficiently.
This isn’t just a matter of hobbies or lifestyle flourishes. In a world being steadily converted into data, it may be a quiet form of resistance—a way of holding onto yourself as a responding subject, rather than a variable that merely reacts.
The word “phone addiction” looks away from what’s actually happening.
The problem isn’t your weak will. What’s really going on between you and the vast design that’s trying to enclose you—that’s something we still don’t have the words to see clearly.