Your phone isn't a drug. It's a portal to the otherworld

As I write this, my best friend sits across from me in my living room, staring at her phone.

- Zoey Kim/The New York Times

She's in a trance, her attention on nothing in particular just the screen. Is she working? Wandering? Speaking to someone, or being spoken to? I don't know.

My toddler calls out to her, "Tía! Tía!" and without looking up, she coos his name.

For more than a decade, the language of addiction has shaped how we understand our relationship with the Internet. We talk about dopamine hits and rewired brains. We count the hours lost online as if they're milligrams of oxycodone. We prescribe digital detoxes and "tech sobriety," and we confess to falling off the wagon when we re-download Instagram.

In an odd way, the addiction metaphor is comforting. It promises that what we're experiencing can be neatly diagnosed, treated, even cured.

And the addiction story does capture something real about our experience of tech the compulsion, the phantom buzz in your pocket, the reflex to check your phone when you know nothing is there. But while it tells us we've gone too far, the story fails to help us move through the world the Internet has remade.

At some point, we have to accept that we will neither quit the Internet nor live in a world untouched by it. Ban phones from every school, movie theater, library and third space you like we will never be able to travel back in time, or to an alternate reality, where this technology was never created, where it was never put in the hands of every person on earth. Before long, we'll have to accept that the same thing is true of artificial intelligence.

Refusal isn't an option. Adaptation, however, is.