Wisconsin Considers Phone-Free(r) Schools & National PTA Breaks Up with Meta

On celebrating wins when things feel especially bleak

Burnout is real in this struggle to claw back our humanity in the age of the machine. I have felt it a lot in recent months. Pushing back against the resignation so many people in our society seem to feel about digital technology’s oppressive hold over our lives is exhausting and often maddening. Whether it’s schools doubling down on the failed EdTech experiment because of the sunk-cost fallacy, parents allowing their tweens and teens on social media despite the harms because “that’s just how kids communicate now,” parents’ inability/unwillingness to confront their own phone addictions, and a thousand other examples I could list if I had the strength. (Don’t even get me started on AI.) Almost everyone seems to realize the kids are not okay, but the inertia of “oh well, this is just how it is now” is hard to overcome.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t even want to try to convince the unconvinced anymore. I just want to name the problem in plain English and if people are ready to hear it, great. If not, oh well, maybe I’ve at least planted a seed. Frequently though, I feel like I’m just screaming into the void, which makes me want to pick up and move my family to rural Kentucky and join the type of “membership” that Wendell Berry writes about in Hannah Coulter, if such a thing even exists anymore.

So yeah, I’ve been in a bit of a slump (February in Wisconsin will do that to you).

BUT.

Two things happened recently that gave me a reviving dash of optimism. The first is that Republican senators in my state, Wisconsin, recently introduced a bell-to-bell phone-free school bill that received minimal push-back at the initial public hearing that was held about it last week. This bill would replace the current law, which bans phones during instructional time only (so students can still use their phones at lunch, between classes, etc.) A Democratic senator has since signed on as a cosponsor of the bill. This is a big win—and one that seemed extremely unrealistic a year ago. When I (along with other phone-free school advocates in the state) pushed for bell-to-bell legislation during a hearing last February, we got the impression there was no political appetite for it. Fast forward one year and we now have a bipartisan bill for exactly that.

The second thing that cheered me up is that the National PTA has finally broken up with Meta, its longtime sponsor—a move that is LONG overdue. The timing of this breakup coincides with a landmark trial that began this week in which Meta is accused of designing apps to addict kids.

When I first found out about the National PTA/Meta partnership about a year ago, I was infuriated. The National PTA’s alignment with a trillion+ dollar corporation whose business model is centered on the exploitation of children at scale is nothing short of a betrayal. I channeled my anger into an open letter that I drafted on behalf of Smartphone Free Childhood US last March asking the National PTA to cut ties with Meta. They said no.

Many other advocates and organizations have called out this shameful partnership too, including ParentsSOS and the Tech Transparency Project. But as the months passed and more whistleblowers came forward with appalling revelations about Meta’s complete disregard for the health and safety of kids online, nothing changed, and I was starting to feel like it never would.

But this week, it did!

I like to imagine that every single person who’s called this awful partnership out over the months and years may have planted a seed with someone, somewhere. And eventually, those seeds added up and…my uncaffeinated brain is losing the metaphor, but anyway, National PTA has done the right thing here and that’s worth celebrating.

To be clear, the National PTA still retains plenty of appalling “proud national sponsors,” like TikTok, Google, and Discord. It also promotes ConnectSafely, a “digital safety” org that is itself funded by the very tech companies that purposely made the internet so unsafe in the first place, including Meta. But the National PTA’s removal of Meta from their sponsor list is a big step in the right direction, and hopefully more steps will follow.

So the pep talk I’m giving myself this morning is that the day-to-day advocacy we’re doing is draining and even feels pointless sometimes, but it pays dividends. Change is happening, not nearly as fast as I’d like, but it is happening. One year ago, it didn’t seem likely that Wisconsin would introduce a strong phone-free school bill or that the National PTA would ever distance itself from Meta, but both of those things have now happened. I believe these wins are due in no small part to tiny seeds being planted by ordinary people all over the world who refuse to shut up about these issues.

We still have a really long way to go. Today, almost every teenager in the U.S. is on social media, even though many of their parents are increasingly uncomfortable with it. Parents of teens look at me like I’m hopelessly naïve when I suggest that teen social media use should not be a foregone conclusion. But maybe in another year, that idea won’t sound so crazy anymore. Maybe in another year, more parents will have deleted their own accounts.

So let’s keep at it. Because the work is far from done, as I’m reminded every time I get another email from Girl Scouts nagging me to hawk my first grader’s cookies for her on Instagram. That’s right, Girl Scouts is also partners with Meta. For now.

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I’d like to signal my enthusiastic support of Paul Kingsnorth’s Writer’s Against AI campaign, and I pledge that:

• I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

• I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

• I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.