Addiction to cigarettes governed my father’s life and death. He smoked heavily and eventually became sick with emphysema. My father could have avoided his painful final years hooked to an oxygen tank by quitting smoking when he was diagnosed. But he chose otherwise. We desperately tried to resist his decision by taking his cigarettes away. He reacted with uncharacteristic anger, exercising every means at his disposal to get his cigarette pack back. We eventually gave up.

I always had a complicated relationship with technology. I would like it, then realize I like it too much, and then try to disentangle from it. I went through several cycles of this. As a young girl in the 1970s, I spent far too much time playing video games. Then in the 1990s, I spent every spare minute during one college semester playing a dungeon treasure hunt computer game. I stopped only after I convinced a friend to place a password on the game to prevent my access. Then came email. I simply could not stop checking it. In my first apartment in New York City as a graduate student, I endlessly connected and disconnected my modem to check my emails. But for me and for many others, 2009 was the year when things started changing. This was the year that smartphones and Facebook became popular.1 Suddenly, we could text, email, access the Internet, and engage in social interactions practically anywhere and anytime.

Technology overuse is a novel problem. For the first time in history, electronic communications have replaced a significant part of real-life face-to-face interactions. The harms are also unique. But battles between corporations and activists seeking to protect the public from harmful products have happened before. And when they did, the stakes were often high, and the fight prolonged. This past gives us a window into the future. We can extract from the battles of the past, the choices and obstacles likely to confront a movement to curtail technology overuse.

I met Seth, a 23-year-old man, at a meditation retreat in Connecticut. Seth called himself “a recovering tech-addict.” It started in high school, he told me, when he spent a lot of time playing online games. But it was in college when things got out of control. For nearly three years, he said he was “a slave to information from the Internet.” He spent eight hours a day on Reddit. Reddit users can submit news items and vote them up or down. When enough users give a submission up-votes, the item will make it to the site’s front page. Sam told me it was a vicious cycle. He felt isolated in college and used Reddit to fill his time. But then the more he used Reddit, the more isolated he became. He could not stay off Reddit and barely studied. Eventually, the college placed him on academic probation, and he knew then that he had to quit. In our conversation, he used AA lingo. “I have been two years clean,” he said. Seth explained that he now religiously limits the time and type of his online activities, but he is always worried about relapsing.

As the science wars raged on, a grassroots movement emerged. Parents and regulators took action to protect children against technology overuse. It is not surprising that children came first. They bear the brunt of the harm. They are also where corporate vulnerability lies. Action began against online gaming and spread to social networks. Children are the Achilles heel of the technology industry’s hold on manipulative designs to sustain an abusive business model. But, protecting children also opens the door for more. Any gain made for kids is a step toward change for all.

Melissa came to speak to me after a lecture I gave to parents at her son’s school. Her son Neil was a fifth grader. She told me that Neil was a good student and had friends in school, but he plays Fortnite for many hours a day. At first, Melissa told him to stop playing, but he kept begging for more time. When she insisted, he yelled and got extremely upset. Melissa then installed an app to limit Neil’s computer time. After a while Melissa noticed that he was playing Fortnite well into the evening. It turned out that Neil had discovered the password and changed the settings. This happened multiple times. Sometimes Neil asked for extra computer time for homework, but Melissa found him playing Fortnite instead. Melissa told me she thought she was not so good with technology, and that she should have found a better app. She felt that maybe she could have prevented what happened next.

Our connectivity is here to stay. Our phones, computers, and tablets will remain until replaced by the communication tools of the future. We are unlikely to return to an era of limited connectivity. And neither should we. When considering the good, the bad, and the ugly of connectivity, the good stands out. Learning about the misfortunes of others, whether across the globe or even in our own city. Connecting to help ourselves, friends, and strangers. We will never know, but would definitely hope, that an Internet in 1939 would have prevented the horrors of the Holocaust that followed.

I was finalizing this book, while juggling the usual frenzy of the end of the academic year. On a Saturday morning, I ordered bagels for my kids for breakfast through a phone delivery app, hoping to gain a few hours to write. After I placed the order, I received a confirmation text with an estimated delivery time. Twenty minutes later, as I settled down to work, I received another text letting me know my order was on the way. Then the doorbell rang, and the bagels arrived. I placed the bagels in the kitchen and sat down at my desk again, attempting to write. At that point I received a third text notifying me that my order had arrived. Every time a text arrived, I picked up my phone automatically and, without noticing, clicked on a few more apps. Despite my best efforts, I started work an hour later than intended that morning.

In 2017, I began giving lectures to parents about technology overuse through my school outreach program. I explained that this is not just about kids playing video games all night, but that it is about all of us. We are all over-users. We all love our technologies too much. We all use them much more than we intend. I talked about the costs to ourselves, our families, and our relationships. I discussed self-help measures because I knew parents wanted a solution. But I was honest about the difficulty of limiting kids’ use of smartphones, social networks, and games. I then opened the floor for discussion, hoping parents could give one another ideas that had worked in their community. During the first year, what followed astounded me. As one parent after another spoke, revealing their struggles, the other parents turned around to one another. “You too?” was the resounding reaction. Followed by reactions such as, “My daughter said I was the only parent prohibiting her from using Snapchat!” There was a sense of surprise, but also a sense of relief that they were all together in this.