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Smartphones, the New Opiate of the People

People on smartphones

Karl Marx has been famously quoted as referring to religion as the opiate of the masses. His point being that religion, offering a future, better life in the by and by, narcotized people to endure the difficulty of their lives and work, rather than rising to demand change in the here and now. Religion now lacks the force or mass participation of the past, but it’s also pretty clear to me that it has been replaced as the critical agent for peoples’ pacification by the ubiquity of smartphones.

It’s impossible to ignore, so don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed this phenomenon as well. Some might argue that this is a teen issue. There’s heavy breathing around the United States about blocking cellphones from schools and classrooms and the reported benefits of these restrictions in attention and participation. Others might claim this is a relief from boredom. Waiting for airplanes or in lobbies almost anywhere these days, I sometimes find myself counting the number of people, old and young, who are buried deep in their phones. It’s always a majority, and frequently it’s nearly unanimous, as I find myself an outlier.

I told Ohio lawmakers that a new law would put gas plants in residential areas. Now it’s happening in Hilliard.

Amazon plant

This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal

Last March during the hearings on Ohio House Bill 15, I was the only representative of an environmental organization in Ohio to testify against it.

The reason? It gave the Ohio Power Siting Board just 45 days to consider a major utility facility – defined as 50 MW or more – to serve a large energy user – often a data center – on property owned by the applicant. Usually this process takes one to three years.

Data centers use prodigious amounts of energy – often as much as an entire city. If they are to be directly served by an energy generation facility, it needs to be well over 50 MW.

It was clear from the language of H.B. 15 that any such major utility facility would be run by gas.

Wind turbines have too large of a setback requirement to go on most land next to a large energy user, and the footprint of utility scale solar projects is too large.

Blow the Whistle on ICE!

Woman blowing a whistle

Wednesday, Dec 31 at 7 PM 
MAS Columbus (4615 Northtowne Blvd, 43229)

ICE attacks in Columbus are rampant, and our community needs to show up for one another! Join us on Wednesday, Dec 31 at 7 PM at MAS Columbus to take action by building whistle kits and learning how to use them. Whistle kits are a simple, low-tech tool neighbors use to alert one another when ICE or federal agents are nearby. Can’t make it? You can still help by donating to help buy more supplies

Washington Post Goes All Bezos Against Food Stamps

Washington Post building

Before the election in 2024, the normally moderate to liberal Washington Post, had its editorial independence eviscerated when its owner, Amazon-billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked their endorsement of Harris and mandated the editorial policy move towards business and the right. Regular readers might still find hope in the general willingness of the editorial page to make efforts to hold some of the more egregious Trump policies and extremes to account around immigration, foreign policy, and other issues. But, with today’s end of the year editorial mouthing far right anti-poor rhetoric, bashing food stamp programs, and beating the drums for the worst of Trump’s big, bad, budget bill, it’s clear that Bezos hand is getting heavier and any continuing hope for the Post editorial policies to be different than the Wall Street Journal will only find them by degree, not distinction.

            Let’s look at their bias and compare the facts. The Post editorial says:

Columbus 2025: Big Announcements, Bigger Bills, Same Old Questions

Details about Columbus projects

Columbus did not simply “have a year” in 2025. It ran an experiment.

The experiment was straightforward: Can a region stack national-scale industrial development on top of local-scale fragility and call it progress? It can — if the definition of progress is press conferences, ribbon cuttings and renderings that stop before the line item titled “who pays.”

A year-end recap that reads like a scrapbook misses the point. Columbus is a paperwork town pretending to be a destiny town. The only way to understand 2025 is as a ledger — what happened, what changed, and who absorbed the cost.

What follows is not a countdown. It is a map of the stories that defined Columbus in 2025.

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