Of course there are some downsides to smartphones. I'm not denying that. But all too often, critics of phones—or of any new technology—have a tendency to romanticize the past in an attempt to make our tech-enabled present look worse.

Case in point: this recent piece by Paul Greenberg in TIME magazine, which commemorates the release of Apple's iPhone 17 by asking, "Do We Really Need Another iPhone?" Greenberg opens with an extended anecdote: He is 19 years old, stuck in Luxembourg unexpectedly, and starts chatting with another teenager at a youth hostel. They decide to go off in search of a discotheque, and wind up wandering all around the city. They never find a dance club, but they chat with a lot of strangers, get to know each other, and wind up having a nice dinner together. "We don't

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