What We Talk About When We Talk About Screens

Review: "The Tech-Exit," by Clare Morrell

Not long after my own book on technology, Digital Liturgies, released in 2023, a friend of mine congratulated me on its publication, and then added: “But you know books like this never change anything.” A better author might have taken offense or insisted to the contrary. Instead, I acknowledged his point. Why? Because I knew he was right.

I had written the book, and even after all the research, reflection, and writing, I still knew my own relationship with my smartphone and social media apps was frequently unhealthy. The same seemed to be true for the people who had read and expressed appreciation for the book. “I was really challenged by this,” they’d say, before admitting they had no strategy for how to actually make the changes they wanted.

This might be a reflection of the poor quality of my book. But I also think my friend had a larger point: When was the last time any of us read a book about the formative powers of our digital technology and then actually got rid of stuff? Sales of flip phones are not surging. Instagram and X are not hurting for active users. The top streaming services have more money than ideas. It’s clear that even as the market for tech warnings booms, the market for hyper-connectivity booms right alongside it.

That’s part of why any reader will gravitate toward Clare Morell’s book The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens From Smartphones. “The Tech Exit” is a splendid title, promising a destination, not just a path, and that’s what Morell offers here. When it comes to underage users, Morell is not interested in controls, limits, nuance, or balance. This is a book about freedom: total, unequivocal divestment from screens big and small.

There’s a kind of divine discontent in Morell’s project. The time for patience is gone, because it failed. “Harm reduction is always and fundamentally the acceptance of some harm,” she writes, and the harm being accepted by dilly-dallying calls to using tech wisely or moderately is too great. Instead, Morell calls for a new Prohibition movement: An organic uprising against smartphones, social media, TV, and video games.

If this sounds quite sweeping, it is. Maybe the most important moment in Morrell’s book is her rejection of a common metaphor for digital entertainment. “Digital technologies are not like sugar,” that can be enjoyed in carefully moderated amounts. Rather, as far as kids are concerned, phones, social media, and video games are “more like fentanyl.” It’s this conviction—of the absolutes toxicity of digital mediums—that drives everything in The Tech Exit. And yet, it becomes apparent that the actual methods and strategies Morell presents can’t fully support the weight of her narcotic metaphor.

Evaluating this book is difficult because most of it is, in my view, indisputable. And most of it is not really new. Indeed, while Morell comes up with a helpful acronym to sum up The Tech Exit philosophy (FEAST), the principles themselves—community, convictions, and alternatives—are same core insights that most tech-skeptical books, including mine, have been talking about for a while now.

For that reason, this review won’t spend time rehearsing the strengths of The Tech Exit. This should not be interpreted to mean such strengths don’t exist, because they certainly do. What separates The Tech Exit is its urgency, its absolutism, its categorical opposition to parenting with screens. To that end, my sense is that, while its urgency is warranted and its absolutism is logical, the book ends up writing a check it can’t cash. More importantly, I’m concerned that the Tech Exit’s program may do two unfortunate things: 1) Give up on low income families, 2) unnecessarily divide communities, and, perhaps worst of all in the long run, 3) let the real villain—the Internet—off the hook.

FEAST or Famine?

Morell uses the acronym “F.E.A.S.T.” to sum up the methods of the Tech Exit—i.e., the household prohibition of video games, tablets, smartphones, social media, and TV (with one exception). This stands for:

· Find other families

· Educate, Explain, and Exemplify

· Adopt Alternatives

· Set Up Digital Accountability and Screen Rules

· Trade Screens for Real Life Responsibilities and Pursuits

One of the things I admired most about Morell’s book is how much she foregrounded the need for community involvement. Most books about tech do talk about community, but as a kind of accessory; i.e., an accountability partner here or there, or maybe a small group of friends to encourage each other. Morell’s definition of community is much more sweeping. She’s talking about entire churches and neighborhoods, large blocs of people committed to the same screen-free principles, and therefore standing ready to fill in the gap for one another.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

“The river of screens has been flowing in one direction: into childhood,” she writes. “The only successful approach to pushing screens out of childhood is to stand with others and build counterpressures through communities.” For Morell, the counterpressures do two things. First, they create an informal social stigma against childhood technology. Second, they function as gatekeepers of friendship between families. In other words, tech-exit families expect to play and spend time with other tech-exit families.

I’ll say a little more about this second aspect shortly. For now, it’s valid to observe that nearly all of Morell’s examples of tech-exit communities are close-proximity suburbs, the kind where kids can and do walk safely to each other’s houses, the kind where it’s normal and expected for parents to know just about everyone on their street. This makes sense: Morell lives with her family in Washington, D.C., and affluent suburbs show up frequently in her conversations with other Tech-Exit parents. To be sure: This doesn’t mean that screen-free communities are only possible in walkable, high income areas. Yet the task of finding other families is certainly deeply intertwined with the economic and social realities of housing.

It’s important to note again that Morell doesn’t believe in screen moderation. “Parental controls are a myth,” declares one chapter. In another, Morell strongly suggests that exposure to screens, including television, can cause ADHD and autistic symptoms. She cites psychologist Victoria Dunckley’s work on “electronic screen syndrome,” which describes dysregulation, over-stimulation, and other behavioral struggles among kids with early exposure to screen time.

While I don’t have the expertise to comment on this research, my wife and I are parents of three kids under 10. We’ve seen firsthand some of what Dunckley is talking about: Moodiness, anger, lethargy, and listlessness on days where screen time has gone over normal limits, and some days where it hasn’t. The emerging research on the objective psychological effects of screen time on kids is a massively important topic that deserves a lot more treatment.

And yet, this puts many parents in a conundrum. For example, tens of millions of American children live in apartment housing, and a large percentage of these apartments are in communities where free play just isn’t possible. It’s not Morell’s job to come up with a parenting plan that works across all socioeconomic lines. But given how sweeping her strategy is, and how thoroughly she rejects moderation and parental limits in favor of absolute prohibition, it’s not hard to see how low income or (maybe especially) single parent households might feel caught between a screen and an unsafe place.

Of course, Morell would likely respond that difficult situations should not determine standard norms. True. But then this formula could be turned around on the book’s thesis. Should the worst, most intense, and most obvious examples of screen-caused dysregulation be used as a normative case against moderation? Again, it’s important to keep in mind that Morell herself explicitly rejects the idea that parents can allow screen time in small enough doses. Hers is a total case (although later chapters seem to walk this back). In my mind, an argument for total tech prohibition should come equipped with powerful and persuasive details for how the families who most need this message can live it out. It’s that element that’s lacking form The Tech Exit. One comes away with the impression that the families most able put this book into practice are the ones who need it the least.

Solidarity vs. Silos

On a related point, I came away from The Tech Exit a little concerned about how casually Morell seems to treat the idea of tech-exit families separating from different kinds of families. Morell helpfully sketches out the importance of a physical community in replacing screen time. Parents will resonate longingly with some Morell’s descriptions of neighborhoods filled with kids in the backyard instead of in front of the TV or laptop.

But there are some textures to her argument that will make pastors nervous. For example, in the chapter “Find Other Families,” she relays how one tech-exit family, who had managed to convinced some of their neighbors to embrace the lifestyle, refused to sell their house to another family, because the latter had the made the mistake of mentioning video games during an open-house. Another family came and looked at the house, talked about the woods in the back, offered less money than the first family, and got the house.

Morell recounts this story positively, and one struggles to come away with anything other than a sense that the first family simply didn’t deserve to live in such a rewarding neighborhood. This took me off guard, for two reasons. One, it feels like family habits with technology could become the sort of thing that could easily divide churches and communities, similar to how debates over public school already have. Second, the idea of custom shaping entire neighborhoods to exclude video gaming families feels like a step backward in terms of the friendship and persuasion that are often necessary to institute cultural counterpressures.

Will the Real Villain Please Stand Up?

Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash

But I think the more serious consequence of some of The Tech Exit’s blind spots is that it lets the internet off the hook. By focusing on “screen time,” the book collapses distinctions that are critical for understanding the particular epistemological and spiritual dangers of the digital era.

The Tech Exit’s manifesto blurs, and arguably eliminates, the differences between 30 minutes watching broadcast television, 30 minutes playing an offline video game, and 30 minutes browsing the web. For one thing, this flattening seems unnecessary given the presenting crises in the opening of the book. The two main enemies mentioned in the book’s opening are pornography and social media. This is what she means when she writes that screen-time limits “aren’t working out.” In other words, limits are not protecting kids from porn or addiction. That’s true! But could that be because it’s not the glass itself that’s the problem, but the open-door nature of online connectivity?

I grew up in a household without online connectivity but with video games and TV. Like most families, my parents probably struggled to monitor and limit our time on those entertainments (but I assure you regular moderation happened!). But the difference between playing The Legend of Zelda or watching Hey Arnold from 3:30-4:00, and checking a Facebook feed for new notifications or a endlessly browsing YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, is very serious. The spatial requirements of console gaming or broadcast TV mean you have to be sitting at a particular spot; the experiences don’t follow you everywhere you go. Novelty, the thing our dopamine receptors most crave, is intrinsic to the web in a way it’s not to offline screen time.

Why does this matter? Because of the move Morell makes late in The Tech Exit, where she appears to exempt adults from her arguments. “Parents, we don’t have to have the exact same tech practices that we require of our children,” she writes. “There are differences between children and adults.” Morell calls on adults to “exemplify responsible tech use” to their kids by implementing habits like time away from the phone and limiting social media use. These are all very wise insights. But they are the type of insights you’d expect to hear someone use when talking about sugar, and not fentanyl.

In fact, what I think has happened in The Tech Exit is that Morell has written with passion and urgency about “screen time,” but written with modulation about the Internet itself. I think this is backward. Protecting kids and teens from drowning in tech is a crucial task, but the spiritual and intellectual effects of uber-connectivity rise higher than the risks of too much video gaming or excessive TV and movies. And this is an uncomfortable truth precisely because it confronts adults about their own habits.

My conviction is that always-on Internet connectivity has been the single biggest force multiplier in our world for addiction, depression, anger, boredom, and moral ambivalence during the last twenty years. Read Nicholas Carr on its epistemological effects. Read Byung-Chul Han on its sexual effects. Read Justin Smith on its privacy effects. Read Jean Twenge on its social effects. The Internet’s transformation into an ambience is at the heart of so many cultural crises that the mind despairs even of keeping track.

I worry that the important and timely insights Morell makes in The Tech Exit are spread too thin in the direction of the less urgent and more controllable neuroses of contemporary life. I think Morell has identified very real problems and come up with an effective solution, but I fear that even the solving of the problems she’s identified won’t really address the illness as much as a few of its temporary symptoms.