© William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As photojournalist sentenced to 15 years, rights groups warn law would turn civic engagement into security crime
Iran has taken the first step towards criminalising contact with foreign media, in a move human rights groups have said attempts to “sever the entire Iranian society from the rest of the world”.
For journalists, researchers and even ordinary citizens, the proposed law being discussed by Iranian lawmakers this month could make speaking to international audiences and groups a potential criminal act and restrict coverage of events such as January’s mass anti-regime protests.
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© Photograph: Yalda Moaiery
© Photograph: Yalda Moaiery
© Photograph: Yalda Moaiery
The internet kind of sucks right now. And it’s been getting harder and harder to use over the past several years.
Imagine you’re training for a marathon, or just trying to get in better shape, and you want to buy a new pair of shoes. Well, good luck! You’re going to have to wade through sponsored links, affiliate marketing, AI summaries, and websites seemingly engineered for search engines instead of human shoppers.
Maybe you just want to connect with friends on Instagram or discover recipes on TikTok. But even there, everyone is selling something. “Get Ready With Me” videos are sponsored by CeraVe, movie reviews are actually ads for the movies being reviewed, and the guy who posts your favorite mobility routines really wants you to try his protein powder.
So people have developed a workaround: Simply add “Reddit” to the search.
Looking for a shoe with high energy return? Reddit. Want to know if an Airbnb you’ve been eyeing has a sketchy listing? Reddit. Trying to figure out the fastest way to the international terminal in Atlanta’s humongous airport? Chances are someone on Reddit has shared very specific thoughts and instructions.
It’s a strange situation. Reddit is filled with pseudonymous strangers, and yet these people can somehow feel more trustworthy recommending a skincare product than an influencer hawking cleansers to millions of followers. Why? Because the random person on Reddit doesn’t seem to have anything to sell you.
That’s why, for many people, Reddit feels like one of the last “real” places on the internet. The site has become so integral to navigating the internet that Google took notice; in recent years, it’s begun surfacing Reddit threads more prominently in search results.
Then came artificial intelligence. Chatbots need massive amounts of human language to learn how we communicate. AI-powered search also needs somewhere to turn when we ask the kinds of hyper-specific questions that newspapers, Wikipedia, and government websites haven’t answered. Reddit has plenty of both.
Unfortunately, whenever something online becomes valuable, people and companies figure out how to exploit it.
The stakes go far beyond a brand tricking someone into buying a lousy face cream. Reddit works because people trust that there’s a real person on the other side of the screen. It doesn’t have to become totally overrun by bots or marketers for that trust to disappear. We just have to start questioning who — or what — we’re talking to.
To break down how Reddit is changing, what the platform and its moderators are doing to push back, and what it could mean for the increasingly blurry line between human conversation, marketing, search, and AI, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with the Verge’s Mia Sato, who recently wrote about the new wave of AI spam beleaguering the platform.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Are you a big Reddit user?
Yeah, I think so.
What do you mainly use it for?
I think it’s become a big part of finding information on the internet. I usually use Google as the sort of doorway into Reddit, but if I search something on Google, really, it’s a high likelihood that I will end up on Reddit in the end.
That’s a trend that you write about in your piece, which I thought was very interesting because it was something that has also been happening to me and it happened without me realizing how often it was happening.
You start this piece in the Verge with an example from a post on a skincare-focused subreddit, a place you write that you visit often. Can you take us through what happened?
The skincare subreddits that I mentioned in my story are actually subreddits that I often read because I want unfiltered or true opinions about products before I buy them. And I go to Reddit for skincare recommendations quite a bit.
I suspected that if you are a skincare brand and you want people to be talking about your product, you will go to these subreddits because some of these subreddits get like one and a half million viewers a week. They’re doing crazy numbers and they have a very committed and active community. So I was like, if I were a brand and I wanted to market myself, I would probably post on Reddit.
I was curious how the moderators of these skincare subreddits were handling that, because also marketing firms had told me, “Yeah, all our clients, they really want to know how to crack Reddit. It’s really hard. They want to figure out Reddit.”
And so I talked to a subreddit moderator who does one of the skincare subreddits, and she gave me a ton of detail about the amount of spam that they were getting. She sent me one example, which was a thread of someone asking about a certain spray that people use for acne treatment.
The person who posted it asked, like: “Magic Molecule Hypochlorous Acid Spray – is it really that good? Recently I have seen a lot of good reviews about this product. Any of you tried? Do you recommend? What is your take on this?”
And, you know, it got like dozens of answers. Some people said, “Yeah, it’s great.” Others said, “They all work the same.” But one of the answers was from just a random account that said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any experience with that product, but I have tried this other one that I was skeptical of, but I really like it actually.”
If you’re reading that comment, you probably would think nothing of it. But what you don’t see unless you click over to the profile and do some digging is that this random account had actually — over the course of several days, maybe even months, and across different skincare subreddits — been recommending the same product over and over and over, and using very specific terminology, saying, “It has all these recommendations from certified dermatologists, which made me feel a bit more confident trying it on sensitive skin.”
It was very controlled messaging. Of course, the moderators were like, “What normal person is going to go across different subreddits and keep pushing this product? For no reason?”
So that is one of the ways that this new type of spam on Reddit takes shape, which is brands pretending to be normal users on Reddit.
For Reddit moderators, I’m thinking they can’t individually suss it out immediately or it wouldn’t be happening. Are they doing the search themselves to try to figure out, like, is everything on here real? How are they dealing with this?
They have a bunch of tools. Some of them are auto-moderator tools, where basically a bot will look at every submission that comes through and move some things to a filtered folder where moderators can look at [it].
One of the funniest things that several moderators actually told me was they keep shit lists of companies that they think have spammed them in the past. The skincare subreddit told me about this. A weight-loss subreddit moderator whom I interviewed also said this. They have a running list in the background where if they think you’ve spammed or astroturfed their community in the past, they keep all those brands’ names. And now if you mention that brand name, your post will automatically get filtered out.
Wow. Okay.
The moderators are trying to send a message: “If you spam us, all of the posts that are not even your spam will get filtered out and we will take a closer look at them.” They’re pretty strict with it. Some moderators that I spoke to said that they’ve really seen an increase over the last six to eight months, maybe.
I can give you a couple of the numbers that Reddit has released publicly because Reddit has said also that they know that this is a growing problem. The company said that it removes 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day. They block something like 23 million spam views. And they also tackle spam upvotes — a way on Reddit to sort of signal agreement.
But Reddit knows that it is kind of a new era of spam, and they’ve said that they’re using LLMs and other AI-powered moderation tools to try to catch this stuff better.
Let me ask you something. Maybe it comes down to what Reddit is and always has been, but I will go on Instagram, I will go on TikTok, and my sense is like half of it is just crap that’s trying to sell me something. It might not be real. It just all feels pretty garbagey to me.
I feel like when you wrote this piece, you were saying there are stakes here to Reddit being the thing that must kind of stay pure, must stay away from this. What is it about Reddit that makes it important?
One part is that the concept of influencers doesn’t really exist on Reddit in the same way that it exists elsewhere.
And if you are an influencer, there are very few places that you can post without getting in trouble. Many, many subreddits have explicit rules saying, “You may not self-promote here, and we will ban you if you do.” That is a totally different environment than Instagram, where sort of the expectation is that someone is selling you something.
The other part that makes Reddit unique, I think, is that for better or for worse, and deserve it or not, Reddit, in the minds of people using the internet, has come to sort of be associated with real opinions or real people. Which is funny because the platform is anonymous, you know? Most people are using just a random username, not their full name. So it’s kind of stumbled into this reputation of being filled with real, helpful opinions and perspectives.
Reddit has deals with certain AI companies where they allow LLMs to be trained on troves of Reddit data, of real people having conversations. And so I think over the last few years as Google search feels like it’s gotten worse and people have gone to places like Reddit to answer their questions, Reddit’s stock literally has skyrocketed as a place where you can find information where people aren’t trying to sell you something all the time. Or are they? That’s kind of the part that I wanted to untangle.
Does Reddit actually have to become overrun with marketing, fake posts, people saying, “Oh, you should definitely buy this skincare,” because they’re getting paid to say that for this to be a big problem? Or does it just have to get to the point where I am suspicious that I’m not talking to an actual person on Reddit and I start doubting a platform itself?
For me personally, in the course of reporting this story, I was like, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t buy things based on a recommendation from Reddit.”
It’s a new type of problem and a new way of looking at a platform. As it relates to AI search, if these chatbots love to cite Reddit so much for their answers, can the AI systems detect when something is spam? Can they detect when a comment is coming from a brand or when the person who left that comment, if you go to their account, they’re always promoting that product?
I am not convinced that Google’s Gemini or ChatGPT can suss out when something is promotional and when it isn’t. Because I’ve written about this before and I know that they can’t.
Hmm!
It’s a strange thing where I think the deception on one platform ends up trickling through other places as well, as the Reddit thread gets cited by search features and LLMs.
Have you changed your buying habits based on what you’re seeing now on Reddit?
I feel like I’m just way slower to buy things. I’m just like, let me keep this in my head. Let me put it on my wishlist and do some research to see what other people, what real people think, and also make sure that they have a good return policy.
Cute, egoless canines offer a break from a world that feels dominated by ‘nepo babies’ and ‘Maga lady aesthetic’
What do Nicole Kidman, a pair of “nepo babies” and a beagle called Sansa Martínez Berlingeri have in common? They all appear on the covers of the all-important September issues of Vogue and Dogue. But the winner of the unofficial battle of the covers? The one with the keenest sense of smell and a penchant for playing with socks.
The September covers of British Vogue and Vogue US have come under intense scrutiny after their recent release, while their canine counterpoint, Dogue, has been almost unanimously celebrated.
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© Photograph: Paul Hempstead/Dogue
© Photograph: Paul Hempstead/Dogue
© Photograph: Paul Hempstead/Dogue
Ever find yourself hunched over your laptop, eyes glazed, slack jawed, and stunned by the quantity of information modern life is throwing at you? You might take a break to stare at your phone. Or you could try switching from one browser tab to the next while checking your email and inching closer to the day’s deadline.
Some people call this TikTok brain. Others call it brain rot. Either way, it feels like a distinctly 21st-century affliction, caused by scrolling through too many short-form videos and social media feeds that trains your brain to seek out little hits of dopamine and ruins your ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. People with the condition may not be able to read books or even watch feature-length films. They can’t do anything except watch little videos, leaving them prone, catatonic, faces blank and bright in the glow of their smartphone screens.
I don’t even use TikTok, but I feel this way all the time. Give me one hour to complete a task that requires even a medium amount of mental fortitude, and I’ll find 55 minutes’ worth of other things to do. It’s not that I’m avoiding the task. But once I get started, my mind wanders relentlessly, no matter how hard I try to keep it on track.
You can blame technology for doing this to you — and I do — but the real issue is with how we treat our brains. Generally speaking, the human brain works like an analog computer, processing one thing at a time, and when you switch tasks (which is what we’re actually doing when we say we are multitasking), it comes at a cost: It drains your cognitive resources, which makes it even harder to pay attention in the future. The more you do this, the more ingrained the behavior becomes.
“It’s a myth to think that we should push ourselves to focus as long as possible and we’ll be more productive,” said Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity and the Substack The Future of Attention.
The human attention span is not one thing. There are different types of attention, including sustained attention (your ability to stay engaged with a task over a period of time) and selective attention (your capacity to take in certain information while tuning out irrelevant details). Alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to switch tasks rapidly) and dividing attention (process multiple things at once) are especially demanding on your cognitive resources. And all of this is managed by the brain’s command center, your prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function. When you’re experiencing cognitive fatigue, there’s a physical reason why: There’s actually less blood flowing to this portion of the brain.
“We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor
The good news is that the damage is not permanent. The human brain’s capacity to focus is just as intact as it was in the 19th century when everyone spent their evenings reading novels and knitting fisherman sweaters. Lots of things have changed since then, of course. As smartphones have driven us to consume endless amounts of information, psychologists have been working on strategies to put the pieces of our attention spans back together. I called a few of these attention experts hoping that they might tell me the secret to regaining my ability to focus. They all agreed that two things are necessary to solve the problem: Be intentional with your attention and let your brain rest.
“What we need most is the capacity to know where attention is, moment by moment, and greater agency over our attention so we can direct it intentionally,” Amishi Jha, a neuroscience professor at the University of Miami and author of Peak Mind, told me. “We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Put another way, in order to reclaim your attention span, you first need to be mindful. That means spending less brain power dissociating on social media feeds and more on whatever you’re actually interested in. You also need to give your brain a chance to rest and recover. Staring at your phone will not help you recharge and reclaim your attention span. Staring at a tree, however, will.
One way to think about your own attention span is to consider what is voluntary and what is not. When something like a bright light or a loud noise grabs your attention, it engages your involuntary attention, which is effectively limitless. When you’re deciding to pay attention to something, however, you’re using your voluntary, or directed attention. This is a limited resource. As you’re making an effort to focus on something, like a book, your supply of directed attention runs down, but it can be replenished in specific ways.
This simpler way to understand how our attention works dates back to the 19th-century psychologists, like Williams James, but it’s making a comeback thanks to attention restoration theory (ART). This school of thought, first developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, suggests that spending time in nature restores your directed attention. The theory claims that the natural world does this by captivating our indirect, or involuntary, attention and allowing our cognitive resources to recover.
Imagine you’ve gone for a hike and happen upon a waterfall that’s so fascinating you can’t look away from it. Marc Berman, one of Stephen Kaplan’s former students and now a professor at the University of Chicago, refers to such a spectacle as a “soft fascination,” something that can grab your attention without consuming it, thus giving your mind space to wander. You might get the same effect from staring at a campfire or looking up at tree branches swaying in the breeze. Hard fascinations, by contrast, capture so much of your attention that you can’t look away and you can’t quickly recover. Times Square is a canonical example, but being on social media counts, too.
“Doomscrolling, streaming, surfing the internet — they’re activities that maybe seem restful, but we actually think that they’re fatiguing and depleting,” said Berman, who is also the author of the book Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being.
In one study Berman conducted, he and his team (which included Kaplan) gave research subjects difficult attention and memory tasks, sent them on a walk in nature or an urban environment, and then repeated the tests. The participants who went on nature walks improved their performance in these tests by about 20 percent, Berman said, and the improvements held regardless of whether participants said they liked the walk or not.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention.”
Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor
Berman said they aren’t entirely sure why nature seems to have this effect on us, but he theorizes that it relates to fractals, or repeating, self-similar patterns whose individual parts resemble their larger whole — tree branches or fern leaves, for instance. Fractals are common in nature, and Berman thinks their orderly arrangement helps our brains to process the information. “It’s easy to get the gist and you don’t need to encode all the details,” he said. “Whereas in the built environment, it’s not very fractal and you might have to encode everything, which might be more taxing.”
Of course, it’s not always possible to zip over a forest in the middle of the work day. If you can’t take a walk in the park, Berman said that even looking at a picture of nature scenes can help. (Try not to do that on Instagram, though, because you might end up just doomscrolling.)
Reclaiming your attention is one thing, but holding onto it in the first place is its own distinct challenge. When you find yourself feeling distractable, it might be that you need a break. If that’s the case, you can’t will your way into concentrating.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention,” said Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “It’s not enough to just want to pay attention.”
Instead, you have to put yourself in an environment that makes paying attention not only possible but achievable. That means making a concerted effort to avoid multitasking, which will drain your cognitive resources. Try the alternative: monotasking.
Monotasking likely requires clearing away clutter, whether that’s literal clutter on your desk, or digital clutter on your screen in the form of extra apps or browser tabs. Turning off all notifications is essential. You should also hide your phone — put it in a drawer or in another room. (A widely cited study published in 2017 found that even having a phone in sight can reduce your cognitive capacity and affect your ability to concentrate.) When you need to take a break, don’t go find your phone: Take a walk outside, or stare at a tree, or look out the window and listen to a song you like.
Monotasking also means being intentional about how you do that one thing, avoiding distractions along the way. At work, this might mean carving up projects into digestible chunks. You might even try the Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes, focus hard on the task until it goes off, take a five-minute break, and repeat. At home, it could mean making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks so that the toughest ones get done first, while you still have some gas in the tank.
If you aren’t ready to turn off all notifications at this point, at the very least turn off all the ones that aren’t coming from humans. You do not need to be alerted of an Amazon flash sale while you’re trying to plan your family’s meals for the week.
There’s no such thing as being 100 percent locked in to any given task. When there are no external distractions, your brain actually turns inward and finds something else to pay attention to, which can lead to daydreaming and mind wandering. Daydreaming — creating a structured narrative of imaginary scenarios — is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It can be productive in helping you plan and think creatively. But if you’re just mentally wandering from random topic to topic, you’re getting into the danger zone.
Some people find that adding constraints can improve their attention. One approach you’ll see in self-help books is the use of a so-called commitment device that restricts future behavior in service of a larger goal. If you’ve read (or seen) The Odyssey, you might remember the scene in which Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast and ignore his orders so that he won’t steer the boat into the rocks when he hears the Sirens’ call. Odysseus was using a commitment device to avoid killing his whole crew. You might use a commitment device, like a dedicated writing space or the Pomodoro technique, to avoid distractions, both external and internal.
So how do you focus just the right amount? Removing those external distractions is a great start. Much like paying attention, ignoring these distractions consumes your cognitive resources, impacting your performance, and causing you to make mistakes. It also takes more effort to stay on task as time goes on. From there, do your best to avoid overtaxing your brain to the point that the internal distractions take over and your mind is wandering. That’s how you know it’s time to take a break.
“For several minutes, give yourself no new input,” Jha said. “Do not reach for the phone while waiting in line. Take a short walk without listening to anything. Look out a window. Let the mind wander without trying to solve a problem.”
Take a walk in the park. Sit quietly and look at a bird. Paying attention has never sounded so relaxing.
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I’m swimming in information. I have tracking apps to keep tally of my daily steps, minutes online, my calories, my sleep. Throughout the day, I am awash with data — some “actionable” and some useless. I find it a struggle to prioritize. I find myself looking up the latest betting odds for a Senate race in a state where I don’t live. (I didn’t bet on the race.) What I want to know is: What should I know less about? I’ve heard that ignorance is bliss, though I don’t often find that to be the case. But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know?
Dear Un-blissfully Aware,
As a fellow know-it-all, I relate to your impulse to gather as much information as possible. I used to obstinately reject the idea that ignorance was bliss. Even if I learned something that was unpleasant, wouldn’t it be much worse not to know it?
But, as you may suspect from sharing my temperament in this arena, this approach to life can lead to hoarding knowledge like a frantic animal preparing for winter. You’re acquiring information as if it’s a scarce resource (which it’s not) and as if choosing to know something is neutral (it isn’t). What helped me understand the implications of this sort of approach was learning about the cases when people decided not to know, or the study of “deliberate ignorance.”
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Several years ago, a psychologist, Ralph Hertwig, and lawyer, Christoph Engel, who both work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, examined what happened in the early 1990s, when the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, opened to the public. Any person who had been living in the German Democratic Republic could check if they had been spied on. There was a pretty substantial catch, though: The spies were often “unofficial collaborators” — friends, family, teachers, or lovers who had been tasked with covertly collecting information. When the files were opened, many elected not to look. Hertwig and Engel estimated that potentially more people chose not to know what their files contained than those who did.
This goes against what we think we know about humans and how you have described yourself. Even Aristotle seemed quite certain that “all men naturally desire knowledge.” In the 1980s, the psychologist George Miller followed along in this line of thinking. He described humans as informavores: creatures with minds that constantly seek out and consume information. So, it can feel surprising to hear about occasions when people didn’t start grabbing for every available datapoint like squirrels dashing for acorns as the first winds of fall arrive.
But, as Hertwig and Engel — who collaborated on an entire book called Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know — point out, we’re surrounded by people choosing ignorance all the time. They avoid looking at their bank statements, they skip doctor’s appointments, and they cover their ears and say “no spoilers” if someone is talking about a movie they haven’t yet seen.
Even Nobel Laureates do this. When James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double helix, had his own genome sequenced, he requested that a specific gene be left out: ApoE4, which can reveal an increased Alzheimer’s risk. Watson’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and her experience clearly made an impression on him. (Then, many in the scientific world tried to remain ignorant to Watson’s increasingly misogynistic and racist comments, until it was unignorable.)
Why do people choose not to know? The most common reason: Ignorance can be an extremely effective way to regulate any emotions that might crop up in response to knowledge. You can minimize negative feelings by, for example, not knowing that your otherwise friendly neighbor had been reporting on your comings and goings.
In a study about romantic relationships, a majority of people said they didn’t want to know if their partner had ever thought about cheating on them (but never acted on it). Other research showed that most people wouldn’t want to know the exact time of their death. Alternatively, someone could cultivate the feelings of joy and surprise by waiting to find out the sex of a baby until it’s born.
Deliberate ignorance can also be used to protect us from our biases. Scientists do blinded studies, because the knowledge of what drugs are being used can unwittingly change the outcomes or research. When orchestras implemented blind auditions, more women musicians were accepted.
Of course, deliberate ignorance can be problematic when it causes harm to yourself or others, like failing to gather basic information about your financial or physical health. In some cases, for instance, about 10 percent of people who got tested for HIV didn’t come back for their results — which could lead to further spread of the disease.
But when skipping out on knowledge doesn’t endanger you or those around you, it’s worth asking: How would this information make me feel?
This sounds like a question that’s missing from your information-ingestion habits. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — ignore everything that comes across your desk. But your deliberate ignorance filter is turned entirely off; seemingly anything passes through it. To take just one of your examples, you mentioned fitness wearables. It can be useful to be aware of your general activity levels and your sleep, but honestly, don’t you already know enough from your memories of a workout class and how rested you feel in the morning? A quest for more detailed knowledge like this can backfire, making people more anxious, and disconnected from their actual physical experience.
It’s not just about how much knowledge to take in, it’s also about what kind. The breadth of information that you’re seeking out makes me wonder if you’re not already using knowledge to regulate your emotions by favoring superficial knowledge over the meaningful. When we face difficult tasks (even if they’re important, and we want to get them done), that’s usually when, suddenly, a Senate race in a far-off state starts to become interesting, or you find yourself scrolling a high school acquaintance’s wife’s Instagram.
In the 1990s, two technology researchers proposed the concept of “information foraging,” which was inspired by early user behavior on the web. A few years later, Webster’s dictionary announced that their word of the year was “infosnacking,” or mindless grazing for useless knowledge online in order to pass the time.
Snacking sometimes is fine, but you’ll start to suffer if you only eat chips for every meal rather than something more nutritious. I suspect you might be avoiding the slightly more challenging task of taking in other, more nutrient-dense knowledge. If you cut out the step tallies, screen minute totals, and news headlines scrolling, what could you choose to know instead?
What I’ve learned about myself is that I will always lean towards being an informavore. I can’t help it. I am hungry to know, and there is no need to totally overhaul this valuable part of who you are (as I also tell myself!). This means you don’t need to replace your infosnacking with zenfully staring at the ceiling or emptying your mind through meditation. You can still put new things into it! But you could worry less about your daily information calorie intake and spend more time thinking about the nutrition content of your knowledge diet.
Take a lesson from our many deliberately ignorant friends, and try disregarding some of the little stuff — the body tracking, the random factoids — for a period of time. But, at the same time, increase your knowledge about other subjects: a neglected hobby or a nonfiction book collecting dust on your shelf. Have a long conversation with your best friend and ask each other questions you’ve never asked before or interview an older relative about their childhood.
And remember that all of this knowledge relates back to your emotional life. Rather than asking yourself what you should or shouldn’t know, examine how you might be using knowledge to alter how you feel. Knowledge changes us. It can make us happy, anxious, excited, or sad; it impacts our decisions and how we see ourselves and other people.
In some of your newfound spaces of intentional ignorance, you may find just some surprising moments of bliss.
When I first heard about the new Apple Upgrade program, which lets you lease devices like iPhones and MacBooks for a monthly fee, I was offended. It amounts to paying a tithe to one of the world’s richest companies just to borrow devices for a couple years, rather than buying them outright. You could then choose to purchase the device, which is outdated at that point, or upgrade and keep paying that monthly fee. You may never own an iPhone again.
Then, as my mind wandered to the stack of old phones in my closet, it occurred to me: What’s so great about owning these things to begin with?
Apple, of course, would love to sell you a new iPhone for keeps. Its most advanced model, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, will set you back $1,200, a price that’s expected to rise soon due to the global shortage of storage and memory chips. You can sign up for an installment plan — most carriers offer these, as does Apple through its credit card — and pay it off in two to three years. Or you could lease the thing for $35 a month under the new Apple Upgrade program. You can pick a 12-, 24-, or 36-month lease, depending on the device, and you don’t get to keep the phone at the end of the term unless you decide to buy it by paying off the remainder of the retail price in one lump sum. (This is similar to the controversial rent-to-own model you find at places like Rent-a-Center.)
For the financial side of the new program, Apple has partnered with none other than Klarna, the “buy now, pay later” giant. When you go to lease a new device, Klarna runs a soft credit check and decides if you’ll be able to cover the monthly payments. When I asked Klarna, the company did not tell me where it draws the line here, but it’s worth noting that critics have accused Klarna of a lack of underwriting and of lending to people with subprime credit scores. If you miss three consecutive payments, Klarna will terminate the lease agreement and possibly send a collection agency after you.
“How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”
Aaron Perzanowski, University of Michigan law professor
While there was some speculation last week that Apple might lock people out of leased devices if they failed to pay their bill, Apple confirmed to me that it will not put limitations on device functionality due to missed payments or default. If you want to cancel the lease, you face an early termination fee. If you choose to keep paying the monthly fee, you can keep upgrading with new lease agreements for new devices every few years, existing in this cycle indefinitely.
“I don’t think people are getting a good deal here,” said Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”
If you’re someone who likes to get a new iPhone or MacBook on a regular basis, Apple’s new leasing option might make a lot of sense. The monthly fee to lease these devices is cheaper than the payment plan to buy them, and electronics are depreciating assets. If you own one, you can sell it or trade it in for credit toward a new device, but they’re all worth less and less as time goes on. Furthermore, Apple eventually stops supporting old devices through software updates, so they might just stop working at a certain point. Put another way: You may own the phone, but you’re still just licensing the software that makes it work.
Renting an iPhone does sound bleak, though. The United States is suffering through an affordability crisis as prices across the board rise in the face of new tariffs and new wars. Meanwhile, AI is promising to transform the way we work if it doesn’t simply steal our jobs first, adding further insecurity, and the data center boom is making electronics more expensive. This era of economic anxiety is pushing people to use “buy now, pay later” services like Klarna and Affirm to pay for groceries or a tank of gas. (These companies faced scrutiny by state attorneys general a few years ago for operating like predatory lenders.) And now Apple, surely suspecting that many people can’t afford to pay full price for new phones, is inviting us to rent our devices at a monthly fee that undercuts the path to ownership.
Apple could have just called this the Apple Rental program, by the way. Lease sounds nicer, though, like something you do with a car.
“It is funny that they frame it as not a loan but as a lease,” Louis Hyman, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink. He added that “leasing” has class implications, suggesting that you’re either someone who needs to have the newest things but can’t afford them, or that you’re so wealthy, you’re indifferent to money.
Suffice it to say, the bulk of people who will soon be leasing their iPhones are probably not the ones who are indifferent to money.
The new Apple Upgrade program is the company’s latest customer acquisition strategy. As the rising price of hardware has made cheaper Android devices or the refurbished market more attractive, Apple is offering upgrade enthusiasts and budget-minded users, including people who simply couldn’t afford to buy Apple products in the past, a deal to join the company’s ecosystem. After all, keeping people supplied with new iPhones and MacBooks also helps keep them subscribed to Apple services, like iCloud, which now makes the company more money than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and other accessories combined.
If Apple’s financial future hinges on getting more and more people to subscribe to these services, it’s only natural that the company would want to lower the barrier to entry. So Apple is betting that by letting people use but not own its products, it will extract more profit in the long run through lease payments and subscription fees. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that it seemed like nobody was interested in upgrading their iPhone, since the new phones looked so much like the old ones. Now, Apple is just trying to get everyone on autopay, effectively subscribing so that they get the latest devices when they come out.
There’s not necessarily any harm in giving people a cheaper way to access expensive but useful products. For more than a century, installment plans have enabled people to buy modern conveniences like sewing machines, radios, and eventually, televisions. Leasing is a popular way to keep yourself in a new car, sometimes with free maintenance. Meanwhile, cellular carriers have a long history of helping their customers buy phones. Nearly two decades ago, you could get an iPhone 3G for $199, thanks to subsidies from AT&T, which the company recouped in service fees over the course of your contract. Sprint and T-Mobile have even offered unlimited upgrades through leasing programs of their own in years past.
Apple previously worked with Citizen One Bank to offer loans to customers who wanted the option to upgrade their iPhones every year. The payments were higher and they included a fee for AppleCare, but every year, you could trade in your current phone for a new one. If you didn’t want to upgrade, you could simply keep paying the installments, and you’d eventually own the phone. Most carriers now give you the option to set up a payment plan to purchase a new device that simply amounts to the retail price of the gadget divided by the number of months you’ll need to pay it off, usually 24 or 36, with zero interest. That makes it easier to get your hands on an iPhone Pro Max, and if you pay it off in full, it’s yours for life — or until Apple convinces you to buy another new iPhone.
The difference between paying those monthly installments and paying a monthly lease agreement, of course, is that the former puts you on the path to ownership. The latter simply puts you on a path to make a decision: Do you want to buy the thing and recoup some of the money you’ve already spent, or do you want to keep making payments?
“What ownership ideally gets us is independence,” Perzanowski said. “It gives us autonomy. It gives us the ability to function in the world without relying on third parties.” He went on to explain how moving from owning a product to leasing it means you’re stuck with that third party. “I’m tied to that manufacturer in a way where they get to exert a fair amount of control over my behavior,” Perzanowski said. “Historically, we’ve been primed, especially in the United States, to resist and reject that kind of control.”
One great thing about owning an iPhone or a MacBook outright is that if you lose your job to AI, you don’t have to come up with a monthly payment in order to keep using those devices to apply for new jobs. Another great thing about ownership is that should you need a couple hundred bucks, you can sell that old phone or laptop and pocket the cash. Maybe the best thing about owning these devices is that you can repair them and keep using them for many years — or at least until Apple stops supporting them.
That doesn’t mean leasing never makes sense. If your digital life revolves around always having the newest devices and you upgrade every year or two no matter what, you might actually save money by doing so through Apple’s leasing program. If you need an iPhone or MacBook right away but can’t afford to pay full price or even cover the monthly payments on an installment plan, a one-year lease could be a good solution.
Invariably, when you lease anything, you’re entering into a contract, one that comes with consequences if you break it. Leasing an iPhone means you’re tied not only to Apple but also to Klarna for the next 12 to 36 months. If something goes wrong — you lose your job, you lose or break your phone, or you simply don’t want the device any more — you’re subject to the terms and conditions of these big tech companies. If you keep renewing your lease, you may very well end up spending more on a phone than you would have if you’d bought it outright. That would be fine with Apple, of course. It has shareholders to please.
Correction, July 30, 1 pm: This story originally misstated how the previous Apple upgrade loan program worked; it allowed phone trade-ins every year, not every two years.
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