Smartphone saturation is here. Here are the highlights:
- On average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones each day.
- Individuals check their phones an average of 58 times each day.
- 3 in 4 Gen Zers claim to spend too much time on their smartphones.
Here’s the breakdown by age group:
| Generation | Average Daily Screen Time | Proportion Who Feel Addicted |
| Gen Z | 6 hours and 5 minutes | 56% |
| Millennial | 4 hours and 36 minutes | 48% |
| Gen X | 4 hours and 9 minutes | 44% |
| Baby Boomer | 3 hours and 31 minutes | 29% |
It’s extremely clear that all age groups spend a great deal of time on their phones. Among Gen X and younger, a lot of this time is going to be spent on social media. That means that social norm transmission via online is a major competitor to social norm transmission in real life.
New Right Poast on Substack just published “The Four Commandments of Reddit,” an interesting and in-depth look at the Reddit subculture. For many age groups, especially Millennials, who are rising to positions of prominence in many organizations this decade, the Reddit subculture is extremely influential. Even if they don’t visit Reddit daily, many social groups in prosperous suburbs or major cities reflect Reddit sensibilities regardless. It’s a sort of consensus among the majority of “with it” American leftists, and is the de facto ruling ideology among the professional managerial class, who control most of our economy.
The essay on Reddit says:
“Oh, what’s the big deal? Isn’t this just harmless geeky fun?”
No. I refuse. It’s not harmless; it’s the most insidious and pervasive cultural force of our time. It’s corroding the bonds that hold society together. It destroyed a generation and shows no signs of stopping. You can’t escape it: everything is ugly and fat and dorky and trite and corny and satanic and fake and gay and soy and cringe. All mainstream culture is created by and for resentful geek losers. Everything sucks now and it’s because of Reddit.
What are the “four commandments of Reddit”?
Commandment #1: Thou shalt believe in nothing
Commandment #2. Thou shalt read the room
Commandment #3. Thou shalt be a decent human
Commandment #4. Thou shalt let people enjoy things
These points are all expanded on in the essay.
Why does Reddit matter? The ideology of Reddit is the ideology of the professional managerial class. It creates a common language that managers everywhere can use to run organizations, from a Starbucks to the New York Times newsroom. Outside the workplace, it’s the ideology that’s expected in any urban or suburban area that is predominantly liberal, which is many of them, perhaps 90 percent of urban neighborhoods and maybe 60 percent of suburban. Biden’s victory came from the suburbs. Reddit is the ninth-most visited website in the world, and about 198 million Americans are Reddit users, which is 59 percent of all adult Americans. Between 2012 and 2014, Reddit’s userbase grew from 35 million to 174 million.
The ideology of Reddit is one of aloof detachment from topics that icky people like to discuss such as immigration and crime. “How does this impact you?” is the all-purpose dismissal ready for use.
Since public education can only do so much, once people graduate High School they move onto getting their intellectual and cultural content online (college doesn’t count). In this critical period, between the age of 18 and 25 or so, people form their moral and cultural identity which formats who they will be for the rest of their lives. Today, in America and many Anglosphere countries, for that age group, the venues that shape people fall into two primary categories: Reddit and its proximate nodes, and 4chan and its intellectual descendants. There isn’t really an in-between. Since people in the critical age group will be intellectually acculturated via one of these two means, they will continue to have an impact until those people are dead—60 years from now and beyond. These are the “intellectual minting mills” that shape our world.
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