World Socialist Radio - The Magic Gadget IRL (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Magic Gadget IRL by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

This episode reflects on life before smartphones and social media, describing how children in the 1990s experienced the world directly, without digital pressures such as FOMO (fear of missing out), sexting, cyberbullying, and addictive “attention economy” features designed to maximize engagement. It highlights growing concerns about the mental health impacts of ubiquitous device use among young people and discusses recent policy responses such as Australia’s ban on major social media platforms for under-16s and widespread bans on phone use in schools, though evidence of real benefits remains mixed. It also notes how pervasive smartphone ownership even among very young children blurs safety with surveillance, and that regulatory efforts may simply push kids toward less regulated, potentially worse online spaces.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

Pieces Together: Tough at the Top? (2008)

The Pieces Together column from the March 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Tough at the Top?

“A study by the Bow Group, a centre-right think-tank, found that 27 per cent of FTSE 100 chief executives have contracts that continue to pay bonuses if profits rise by as little as 1 per cent above inflation. Nearly one in ten firms will still pay bonuses if profits fail to beat inflation.” (Times, 4 February)



Smile, damn you Smile

“Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. ... The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.” (Times, 16 January)

Words of Wisdom

David Attenborough in an interview said: “Every society that’s ever existed has felt it necessary to have creation myths. Why should I believe one? People write to me and say: `You show us birds and orchids and wonderful, beautiful things - don’t you feel you should give credit to He who created those things? My reply says: what about a parasitic worm that’s boring through the eye of a four-year-old child on the bank of an African river? It confuses me that I should believe in a god who cares individually for each and every one of us and could allow that to happen” (Observer Magazine, 20 January)

This is Progress?

“Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Rome, said: ‘We’re seeing more people hungry, and in greater numbers than before. We’re seeing many people being priced out of the food market for the first time. We’re seeing less crop production in many places; shorter harvest times.’ ... According to the UN world food index, prices rose by 40 per cent last year. Ms Sheeran said oil prices were driving up costs because oil was used for planting, fertiliser and delivering food.” (Times, 13 February)

Labour’s Sorry Record

“Poverty affects 3.8 million children in the UK, making ours one of the worst rates in the industrialised world. Children living in poverty are likely to have lower self-esteem, poorer health, and lower aspirations and educational achievements than their peers. Poverty also shortens lives. A boy in Manchester can expect to live seven years less than a boy in Barnet, North London.” (Times,  February)

A Brave New World?

“Here’s a vision of the not-so-distant future: Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items — and, by extension, consumers — wherever they go, from a distance. A seamless, global network of electronic ‘sniffers’ will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, ‘live spam,’ may be beamed at them. In ‘Smart Homes,’ sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets — all the while, silently reporting data to marketers eager for a peek into the occupants’ private lives.” (Yahoo News, 26 January)

Pathfinders: Fully automated luxury . . . capitalism (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

This issue looks at some models of post-capitalist society that might sound futuristic – until you realise how fast capitalism is already moving. From extraction to manufacturing, distribution and retail, changes are taking place at a startling rate as industry, sensor technology and artificial intelligence converge in a process that’s become known as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0.

Let’s start at the outlets, where people shop. That’s probably where you’ll have noticed a difference. If you’re still adjusting to the novelty of contactless card payments, you might not be quite ready for Asda’s new ‘Scan and Go’ hand scanners. You use these to scan barcodes yourself as you go along, automatically totting up your basket items and your spend and saving you time at the check-out queue. This is part of a huge global trend towards cashless and cashierless retail, but hand scanners are just the clunky overture to the main performance. Walmart and Microsoft are working on ‘Grab and Go’ stores similar to Amazon Go ‘Just walk out’ stores where you just pick up stuff and leave, the whole transaction worked out invisibly by a combination of tech that might include smartphone, QR codes, RFID tags, or (in China anyway) face recognition. One company is developing a ‘nanostore’, which is a container-sized walk-in 24/7 retail pod which unlocks when you flash your phone, uses shelf sensors to register what groceries you pick up, and automatically debits your account before locking up on exit, no doubt having invited you by name to have a nice evening and to call again soon.

Smart retail is still at an early stage, but the cost and time savings to business owners hardly need to be laboured. Amazon Go has plans to open 3,000 stores in the next few years, and sector investment has tripled since 2017. The convenience to consumers, however, is more nuanced. 24/7 accessibility sounds impressive, but not many people are likely to want to buy bread, socks or rawl-plugs at 4 am. Meanwhile, people who enjoy some human interaction in their day and don’t like to be railroaded won’t necessarily appreciate cashierless retail, which is essentially about the speed of throughput. Perhaps the appeal is more psychological. Smart retail emulates the socialist obliteration of the money transaction. It feels like it’s free, even though you know it isn’t. Perhaps in turn that helps you feel like you’re free, even though you know you aren’t. With a feel-good rush of dopamine and no price labels in sight, you’ll be keen to keep spending. You’ll be what capitalism wants you to be – a consumer junkie.

So what’s happening at the back-end, to supply the junkies with their junk? To begin with, the traditional capital and labour-intensive extractive industries are getting an AI makeover. Seismic surveying using delicate sensor equipment allows firms to zero in on likely deposits in a fraction of the time, cost and labour of older methods, while computerised drilling operations keep accuracy and efficiency optimal while increasing yield and reducing health and safety risks. Advances in robotics and autonomous ‘intelligent’ machines are widely expected to develop extraction methodology to planet-plundering perfection.

Meanwhile, the factory production line is being refitted for 5G as sensors are placed on every physical component to report on its condition and failure potential. The aggregation of this mass of data creates a ‘digital twin’ of the entire plant so that a human, or perhaps an AI, can oversee the entire production flow and anticipate weaknesses or failures before they even occur, maintaining throughput and cutting expensive downtime and service interventions. It can also run virtual tests and experiments on alternative process configurations without incurring real costs or risking damage. Where spare parts are needed they can often be 3D-printed on site or close by, further reducing costs. Smart manufacturing also involves engineering flexibility into the productive system to achieve ‘mass customisation’, i.e. goods personalised for the customer but at mass-production standards of cost and reliability.

At the same time, distribution is being revolutionised by autonomous road transport vehicles and also by ‘last-mile delivery’ technology which includes delivery robots, drones and even smart front doors, which open a panel to accept packages.

It goes without saying that none of this matters if you don’t have money to spend and you don’t constitute ‘effective demand’. But it does show how capitalism is using technology to engineer the inefficiencies (including the people) out of the productive process. It is fully automated luxury capitalism – driven by profit, of course, but entirely amenable to full-scale socialist adoption.

Meanwhile, what happens to the workers displaced by machines? According to the World Economic Forum, 50 per cent of workplace jobs will be done by machines by 2025, up from 29 per cent today. All the low-end, low-skilled jobs are disappearing, and future employability is likely to involve running faster and faster just to stand still. The WEF says that workers will on average need 101 days of retraining by 2022. Workers know which way the wind is blowing, and are desperate to get this training, even if it means paying for it themselves. A 2016 survey of 19,000 young workers across 25 countries showed that 95 per cent would be willing to pay for their own up-skilling. This must be music to the ears of bosses, of course.

To make money, capitalism panders to the needs and desires of the paying customer, ignoring as far as inhumanly possible various externalities including the needs and desires of the working employee. The paradox is at that customer and employee are frequently the same person. Thus the peculiar dualistic experience of modern workers, pampered at the weekend and punished in the week. The more stressed and desperate we become, the more we need our booze and bling and big TVs. We are locked in a cycle of abuse and excess, addicted to our luxury fixes and paying for them with poverty and slavery.

Technology is just a tool. We can let capitalism use it against us and in total disregard for the environment, or we can take it away from its elite owners and start using it democratically and sustainably across the world. We don’t have to fully automate socialism if we don’t want to, because too much leisure might become stultifying, but it’s good to know we have technological options.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: 'Smart' is the New Black (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Put the word ‘smart’ in front of just about anything these days and you are describing the techno-savvy reality of the 20-teenies. We have, or will soon have, smart cars, smart traffic lights, smart houses and smart cities like Songdo, or maybe even the Venus Project (see ‘Tomorrow’s Cities’ ). Now schoolkids can dictate essay questions into Google on their smart phones (unless they’ve got strong regional accents which the speech algorithms can’t cope with). Pretty soon they’ll be dictating into their smart watches instead, and not long after that, via their smart Google Glass lenses. It surely won’t be long before the next horizon technology, wetware, creates reliable bio-interfaces to allow subcutaneous and perhaps even cranial smart implants, and who wouldn’t want the knowledge and communication power of biblical gods? The 20th century pioneered cyberspace, but the 21st century will pioneer cybernetics. Better, faster, smarter, cheaper, Human version 2.0, or rather Worker version 2.0 is set to superheat capitalist technological development, each individual cocooned inside an artificially-tailored personal reality, and each a uniform functioning component of the global hive.

Well, that’s one possible view of the near future. The technology news right now is breathless with excitement about smart watches, but Google Glass is just round the corner and third-party developers are secretly beavering away right now to come up with ‘killer apps’ which are supposedly going to persuade today’s young generation of early adopters to start wearing spectacles even though they have perfect vision. No more embarrassing encounters with people whose names you can’t remember – just silently run a facial recognition app while you’re standing there chatting. Can’t find that obscure little café? Pull up an on-lens GPS streetmap. Unimpressed with the forlorn pile of old stones in a famous historical site? Get an artist’s reconstruction superimposed over the real thing. Want to leave a message for your friends that that obscure little café was overpriced? Dictate a piece of rude graffiti and leave it on the front door of the café, invisible to anyone but your friends, similarly glassed-up.

Socialists and other people who are accustomed to reading beneath the hype will of course ask the obvious question: does all this smart stuff make us any cleverer? The answer is equally obvious:  no. The difference between smart and clever is the difference between technology and science. Smart is having good tools. Clever is knowing how to use them. Smart will win a war, but clever knows how to avoid the war.

There is no question that capitalism is smart, far smarter than any type of society that’s gone before. Classical antiquity was a time of remarkable sophistication in many ways, but it was rigidly obtuse in its slave-based economies and as a consequence never able to see the point of science or technology. But that doesn’t mean modern society is especially committed to science or that modern populations understand much about it or its methods. But they can appreciate the labour-saving devices and the toys. Where old societies were swamped in myth and the supernatural, we are swamped in gadgets and technobabble. We congratulate ourselves that we invented reason, and yet we’re probably no better at logical thinking than a Cro-Magnon cave painter, and probably significantly less artistically talented. But hell, we have smarts, so it doesn’t matter.

Smart is also an acronym, used a lot in businesses as a shorthand mnemonic for evaluating steps in a project. The letters are usually made to represent the following: S – Specific; M – Measurable; A – Achievable; R – Realistic; T – Time-delimited. If a step or course of action does not satisfy all these conditions, for example if it is too vague, or over-optimistic, or there is no failure condition or there’s no deadline, it is not ‘smart’ and therefore it is not worth doing (you could reverse the acronym and use ‘Trams’ instead, to stop your project going off the rails).

Capitalism is ‘smart’ in this sense as well. It doesn’t do things that don’t seem achievable within a short time period. It doesn’t do things that are not measurable with ‘hard outcomes’, which generally translates as money profit. It’s always specific in its boardrooms and vague in its parliaments. It’s realistic in its assessment of where the next profit is coming from. And its bottom line is always a deadline, the month-end, the quarterly profit statement, the annual report.

There is something fundamentally wrong with ‘smart’ targets. You can be perfectly smart and still do the stupid thing. Capitalism ‘smartly’ ignores the long term problems of climate change, resource-waste, war, global hunger and deprivation. Things that aren’t specific or measurable, like quality of life, fulfilment, self-realisation, democratic freedoms, simply don’t count. Pollution is not a measurable cost to anyone specifically, and there is no deadline to stop causing the damage.

Maybe this is why a lot of workers, forced to put up with managers at work wittering constantly about ‘smart’ targets, have learned to hate the very mention of the word. Not only are these smart targets invariably designed simply to extract more and more work out of the hard-pressed minions, suffering like crushed olives getting their third pressing, there is a strong sense that there is an overall dimension missing from the concept. If they were truly smart, these targets would make the workers happy too. And so with capitalism. If it’s so smart, why is everyone so miserable in it?

What the world needs is more swots.  SWOT is another of those acronyms, only it doesn’t evaluate a step, it sizes up an overall situation, assessing the pros and cons of a big picture. It stands for S – Strengths; W – Weaknesses; O – Opportunities; T – Threats. Before you get smart, you should be a swot. Socialists aren’t always smart, worse luck, but they are good at being swots. We recognise, sometimes better than capitalism’s own defenders, what its strengths are and have been, a global smart machine that has brought us almost to the point of expansion into space. We recognise its weaknesses better too, because we don’t dismiss them immediately as unavoidable. We see the enormous opportunity of a globally-connected, smart and (yes) clever working class to drive society forwards beyond class division, and we understand better than most what will happen to the world if we don’t. That’s why we would say, if you want to get smart, swot up on socialism.

Paddy Shannon