{"text":[[{"start":6.35,"text":"It wasn’t so long ago that acts like Coldplay were actively encouraging audiences to use smartphones during live performances. The band’s frontman Chris Martin would ask crowds to create a sea of phone flashlights during the song Yellow, or to create a “cell phone lights wave”. “Forget cigarette lighters, mobile phones are the new glowsticks!” one of the band’s roadies enthused on their official tour blog back in 2008. "}],[{"start":31.9,"text":"Perhaps, if we’re being generous, it sounded cool back then. Today, it feels rather depressing — démodé, even. Indeed, these days the band gives out LED wristbands so the crowd can create the sea-of-lights effect without their phones, and Martin routinely asks audiences to put their phones away entirely for a single song. "}],[{"start":52.099999999999994,"text":"Others are taking further the wacky idea that going to see a gig should be about a shared human experience rather than content-gathering. Phoebe Bridgers, a 32-year-old indie-folk singer with a fan base that stretches from young teenager to ageing Boomer, has brought in an all-out smartphone ban for her current tour, requiring audience members to lock their devices in pouches that are magnetically sealed for the duration of the event (also banned are smartwatches, AirPods and Meta glasses). She’s not the only one: Harry Styles and Bob Dylan have recently brought in similar bans, and tech-free events are proving increasingly popular. "}],[{"start":89.3,"text":"You might think it is stodgy old technophobes or techno-incompetents who are driving this trend, but no. A study from gig-booking website Eventbrite earlier this year, which reported a 567 per cent increase in the number of explicitly phone-free events listed between 2024 and 2025, found that 49 per cent of Gen Z and millennial respondents agreed they wanted live experiences “to feel less curated and more real”. "}],[{"start":118.25,"text":"Yet if you look at imagery or footage from live events at which smartphones have not been banned, that 49 per cent is hard to detect. Where there were once mosh pits and dance floors, there are now jumbles of upstretched young arms topped by phones that seem like extensions of their limbs. It appears that even those who would like experiences to feel “more real” still feel the need to capture the moment they are ostensibly living, so that after the event they can show others what a great time they were filming — sorry, having. "}],[{"start":147.35,"text":"A curious paradox seems to be emerging: young people might be the heaviest users of emerging technology, but they also seem to be the ones least positive about it. A recent Pew survey of more than 5,000 Americans found that while 18-29-year-olds were the most likely to use chatbots, they were also the most pessimistic about AI. Some 48 per cent said its impact over the next two decades would be negative for society, while just 14 per cent said it would be positive (compared with 40 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively, for all adults). A YouGov survey in 2023 found that Britons aged 18-24, the heaviest users of smartphones, were the most likely to say they use their phones “too much” and were trying to do something about that."}],[{"start":188.39999999999998,"text":"‘Twas not ever thus. The rate at which young people are falling out of love with technology is striking. An Ipsos survey found there had been a huge increase in people of all ages who agree with the idea that “technological progress is destroying our lives” over the past decade or so, but in the UK the jump was the biggest among 15-24-year-olds. In 2013, only 26 per cent of them agreed with that statement; by 2026, that figure had swelled to 62 per cent. "}],[{"start":219.99999999999997,"text":"So pervasive is the youth’s tech fatigue that many of them wish they had been born in an altogether different era: a large-scale NBC poll released in April found that 47 per cent of 18-29-year-old Americans would, if they had the option, choose to live in the past. (Just 38 per cent said they would rather live in the present, while 15 per cent would like to live in the future.)"}],[{"start":244.24999999999997,"text":"Has any previous generation of young people felt this way? Sadly, we don’t have comparable data for earlier cohorts, but the prevalence of this modernity malaise strikes me as unprecedented. Yes, kids in the 1960s and 1970s might have wished the nuclear bomb didn’t exist, but that didn’t mean they wished to be born in the past. "}],[{"start":266,"text":"I used to consider it a given that now was the best time to be alive, and that would continue to be the case while we remained at (relative) peace. That this is no longer so is, of course, rather troubling — as is the fact that so many of us seem to be enslaved by technology we resent. But I am reassured, somewhat, by the growing appetite for restriction. As I have written before, if freedom is something we want to be freed from, it’s not really freedom at all. "}],[{"start":300.15000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1791115263_5965.mp3"}