In 2008, after I’d written a book with the subtitle “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future,” I was labeled a “Luddite” more than 50 times in various lectures, panels, and radio interviews. I argued that social media, multitasking, and computers in the classroom were threats to knowledge, taste, and bookish habits, and so came off as a clueless Boomer. The same thing happened when other tech skeptics of that era spoke out against the spreading digital zeal in those heady days of Web 2.0.

Back then, all the momentum was with the digital breakthrough, particularly in K-12 education. In 2000, the state of Maine initiated a program to give every middle schooler a laptop, and soon a half-dozen states launched similar plans. One element of No Child Left Behind, “Enhancing Education through Technology,” gave schools nationwide funding to integrate tech into the curriculum and make kids “technologically literate” by eighth grade. Billions of dollars backed these grand designs. In 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District alone agreed to pay $1.3 billion for 700,000 iPads for teachers and students to use for schoolwork only. As a result, every student was soon attached to a screen whose software tailored the exercise to each user’s needs and talents. 

It sounded so good, but didn’t pan out. The momentum has flipped, and not only because test scores have dropped. Jonathan Haidt’s documentation of the emotional damage done to adolescents by cell phone use has inspired bans in schools far and wide. The disappearance of book reading in high schools and colleges—caused in good part by the habits of the screen—is now an accepted and regretted fact. Every week brings fresh research on the cognitive damage wrought by daily hours of gaming, scrolling, viewing, and texting (Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024 was “brain rot,” that is, the mental decline caused by internet overuse). Apologists used to say, “The tools are neutral—we just need to teach the young how to use them wisely.” Nobody believes that anymore. The relationship is too intimate; the screen isn’t a passive object; lives are steered by it.

It’s a remarkable collapse from the optimism of the 2000s. We heard glowing promises of digitized classrooms that would customize learning and raise test scores, of online communities that would cure youth isolation and loneliness, and the crowning of Millennials as savvy pioneers leading America into the 21^st century. There were texting contests that awarded scholarships to winners, teachers who praised Wikipedia as a breakthrough in collaborative learning, and foundations that issued happy reports on the new digital youth.

What were they thinking? I don’t mean the creators of the tools who cashed in big-time, whose motives were obvious. I mean educators, academics, journalists, intellectuals, politicians, and researchers who got no immediate reward, but boarded the digital bandwagon in the intoxicating belief that History was underway. They insisted that schools had to go digital if the U.S. were to remain competitive with China, fretted over a “digital divide,” and pressed to get more low-income kids online. They touted the advantage of Google and social media over browsing in the library, cast a youth without a device as poorly equipped for the 21^st-century workplace, and derided skeptics and critics as Luddites and Chicken Littles. Speaking before the student body at the Virginia Military Institute, I berated the cadets for not logging enough homework when a professor on the panel indignantly objected, “With Google, they can do the same work much faster!” 

As I said, those predictions of better learning fell flat. There was never any evidence supporting it, but digiphiles didn’t care. For them, this was a Culture War, a battle of the new against the old; innovation versus reactionaries. The screen signified Progress, the empowerment of the individual, as in the famous “1984” commercial by Apple, which cast the personal computer as the end of authoritarianism. That was the allure: to be part of a revolution, to be cutting edge. Only fogies and spoilsports would say, “No.” That it was simple common sense that kids and screens were a volatile pairing, that the screen might inspire fresh forms of conformity, intimidation, and anti-intellectualism … such outcomes were denied. Soon after the first rollout of the Los Angeles laptop program, the Los Angeles Times reported, “It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web.” 

So here we are in 2026, facing the worst academic outcomes in decades despite billions spent on digital tools. The experts pushing eyes-on-screens are the architects and cheerleaders of this disaster, and now they’ve moved on to pushing AI. The destructive enthusiasm of the past is a lesson for the present, and we should view the mania for AI with skepticism, caution, and wariness. When you hear digiphiles talking about AI with the same utopian words they used 20 years ago, remind them of just how poor their judgment was and is.

Two months ago, Senator Angus King of Maine reflected on the laptop program he spearheaded while governor. “For a while there, I was Apple’s biggest customer!” he said. “We bought 34,000 laptops in a single day.” The program has made “learning more engaging and equitable.” He didn’t add that when NAEP scores were released a year ago, a local paper had this headline, “Maine students score lowest in three decades on nation’s report card.”