Airbnb relaunched itself as an “everything app” this week, announcing an expanded array of Services and Experiences in a move that Steven Levy describes as a midlife crisis for the company. “I’ve never had a dream with a device in it,” CEO Brian Chesky tells Levy, emphasizing Airbnb’s ability to get us off of our phones and out into the Real World of our dreams, where Experiences await. This is what we aspire to, right? You don’t see phones on Instagram either. The reason they don’t appear in our dreams because they’re the frame. A more realistic view of our aspirations, perhaps, is this article about how students are cheating their way through college using ChatGPT—one of the reasons being that they’re too busy to do the work as content consumption demands more and more of their time. “What students have replaced the reading and writing and seminars with is the tell,” Sean Monahan observes: “Screens. TikTok. Instagram. Netflix. Xbox.” In other words, reducing the hours you spend on Bad Screen simply frees up more time for Good Screen, to invoke a pandemic meme about remote work. A darker version of the same idea is this tweet from a couple months ago, positing that every corporate or government layoff “creates incremental screen time for the consumption of conspiracy theories among people who feel bitter or desperate.” Each observation makes the same point: When everything happens on your phone, time saved in one category of screen activity (work, school) is simply reinvested in another. When you don’t see the computer it means you’re inside the computer.That we are addicted to our phones is nothing new, but as screen time approaches the limit of our available waking hours, it becomes possible to view the foundational activities of life, such as work and education, as the few remaining obstacles to unfettered content consumption (along with sleep, which Netflix once declared its biggest competitor). It’s ironic, then, that the same technology that demands so much o