I think the reluctance to blame phones is not just that people have a personal, dopaminergic fixation on them.
There are a couple of other factors at play:
1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad."
2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it.
But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.
There are a couple of other factors at play:
1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad."
2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it.
But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.