The problem isn’t smartphones, it’s capitalism.
All of those things would have happened anyway in a different form factor because capitalism is just a race to the bottom.
Except maybe UI design. That has been special in its enshittification.
I don’t see how we would have smartphones without capitalism. We’d still all be farmers.
Without capitalism, we’d all have the ability to swap out parts and create a phone for the purposes that we need. Some people want the best while others want the minimum, and most want something in between. Every part would be replaceable.
With capitalism, we have planned obsolescence without the ability to repair or replace parts and every conceivable thing to reap more money off us and force us to continually consume.
I’m saying without the greed of capitalism we wouldn’t have phones to swap out parts. We would have very limited technology because the incentive to innovate is much less when you do it because you want to rather than earning extra resources to raise standards of living(greed). Not as many people will volunteering their entire lives to come up with new technology while living the same standard of living as a farmer.
I get what you’re saying but, respectfully, I think you’re incorrect. The field of science is not about capitalism but the goal of understanding everything around you. Aqueducts were not the result of capitalism. Russia won the space race. Innovations happen regardless. Capitalism drives innovation in specific directions.
Also id argue that the creation of the smartphone is the result of market forces, which arent unique to and predate Capitalism by millenia. The bronze age collapse happened largely due to the collapse of the grand trade networks and markets that birthed the bronze age, most bronze age societies predate currency as we understand it outright.
Everything that happened before capitalism happened at an extremely slow pace. We might have smart phones without capitalism and therefore the industrial revolution… but how long? Centuries? Another millenia?
The reason things happened at a slow pace wasnt because capitalism sped it up by a particular amount, its because human knowledge builds on itself. Plus capitalism was borne from the enlightenment which was when a shit tonne of ideas that made the scientific revolution possible came to be.
Capitalism just happened to be the major economic ideology that was gaining favor, id actually argue that social liberalism and Republicanism was the major factor for innovation on a political level.
I’m saying without the greed of capitalism we wouldn’t have phones to swap out parts.
This might be a hot take but I’m not sure we all need a phone in our pocket or that it’s inherently a good thing.
weird that not everyone was a farmer before capitalism then
You know capitalism is really new in the scale of human history right? It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the 18th century that the means of production could be privately owned which then allowed for further speculative capital (stocks, land value, etc) to be equated to power.
The people of the past weren’t inherently stupid. Plenty of scientific and cultural progress was made prior to capitalism being our economic model.
What were most people doing before the industrial revolution? Farming.
Most were farmers because humans needed food, and food productivity was low before the age of industrialization. Not really sure what you are trying to argue other than it took a long time for enough progress was made to free humans to presue other things other than farming their land.
Capitalism incentivises rapid progress in all fields.
I’m not cheering for capitalism, just saying it takes advantage of the inherent greed of people to quickly speed innovation. There would be no industrial revolution without capitalism. At least not on the short scale of just a hundred years or two.
No, capitalism only incentivises profiting.
I’m not cheering for capitalism, just saying it takes advantage of the inherent greed of people to quickly speed innovation.
Except in the end you will get innovations of greed.
There would be no industrial revolution without capitalism.
Wrong! Sadly, article is only in Russian.
Russia’s industrial revolution did not happen in a bubble. They did not invent the technology that allowed the industrial revolution, they took advantage of others inventions to take a very inefficient rout to the revolution. They have enormous resources and a vast population… yet it was much smaller capitalist nations that advanced much faster.
“When they say ‘there is no alternative to capitalism’, they do not make a observation. They make a demand. They demand to not think about alternatives.”
You missed patch 1917 on eurasian servers.
bad UI design is also because of capitalism, because the software companies can’t stand just having a working software, they must make some changes in some way and UI is a low hanging fruit.
UI design too. Making a good UI means putting some effort into it, hiring devs native to each platform. But that costs money, so they do the minimum with the cheapest frontend devs they can find using some cross platform html ui technology like electron.
I have a smart phone with a custom ROM, and a dumb phone (Sunbeam Mobile). No, I am not a drug dealer. Sometimes I change out my SIM card and will use the smart phone (especially if traveling to another state or country), and because it can make my life easier.
Here are some rambling thoughts I have on the topic:
-If you don’t want to have a smart phone, and opt for a dumb phone, you need to be careful not to let your PC “replace” your bad smart phone habits in terms of scrolling, etc.
-For the peeps worried about privacy, I’m not sure if dumb phones would be an ideal choice. I’m not so sure how secure SMS and phone calls are. I am not an expert, so I have no idea about this, though. I usually use Matrix to have at length text conversations on a PC when I am not using a smart phone, because texting is annoying on a dumb phone and who knows if cell phone companies or other people are intercepting data to market more crap. I’m not so schizo about this, but it is annoying and creepy.
-People are isolated and need a way to build and maintain communities. These days, it is difficult to walk places and build community in the physical world. So that is why you have people getting together on Discord, Instagram, etc. I have definitely been isolated or lived in rural areas and having these outlets has been more helpful than harmful for me.
-If you want a dumb phone, I do recommend a Sunbeam Mobile phone. It supports group texting, navigation (with HERE Maps). I have an SD card full of music I put in the phone and it supports Bluetooth. I recommend the models of phones that are completely de-Googled.
-I don’t think people should feel bad if they need a smart phone, especially if they are living in circumstances beyond their control which puts them in an isolating position.
-I think that ultimately people need to want to wake up to all of this. I want to be more involved in making my life more community oriented. I do live in a city, but it is very car dependent. I think that we need to push for development and policies that support community building over the long term, because most people are not happy having smart phones a fixture of everything. For example, is creepy to me that in any moment of time, I can guess what most people are doing (and that is that they are sitting on the Internet in some capacity or a smart phone).
-I hate Google and Amazon. Any way that I do not support them and boycott them is a win for me and society.
-I find it interesting that whenever I am using my Sunbeam phone, that younger people will come up to me and start asking about it. People are desperate to escape smart phones, but there are so many macro political and macro economical problems that create the situation we are in now. We see ourselves as so atomized that there is no examples of any organization or collective rejection of this crap.
Here is a great blog post, which I highly recommend reading: https://wrongthink.link/posts/re-life-in-dysfunctional-world/
I can watch porn on the go?
Most people can handle that, not sure about you.
Like… On a bus?
> ruined masturbating to complete strangers on a bus
does a smartphone force you to only masturbate to people you know?
Yeah, of course. Is yours broken?
The smartphone didn’t ruin those things. Capitalism did.
Add in ruined music to that. Shitty speakers, super lossy codecs to preserve cellular bandwidth, even shittier Bluetooth compression, listening to music on a phone is convenient but it sounds like shit. And we’ve got generations of people who think that’s what music is supposed to sound like.
And we’ve got generations of people who think that’s what music is supposed to sound like.
There was an article on Hacker News a little ways back, about this very phenomenon in China. Basically there’s now a generation that has profound nostalgia for the absolutely awful and dirt-cheap playback tech available over a 30 years ago. To the point that “music doesn’t sound right” on newer tech, and may well be outright un-listenable without crappy hardware in play. By this, I think we can predict that “Bluetooth audio emulation” on newer and better devices, is absolutely going to be a thing eventually.
Unless you have a Sony phone or an LG V series phone. The DACs on those are incredible (for phones at least)
Apparently parents love it as it keeps the kids quiet and relieves them of the stress of parenting.
Also a tracker and a way to contact them at all times. I believe parents who let children take phones to school would feel a bit nervous if their kid would forget it at home one day.
I get why people do this but if I was being tracked when I was a kid, especially after age 16, I would be furious. I would have done something like hide it in a hole beside the movie theatre so I could go smoke some weed and have sex with my girlfriend.
I mean, if by the time you buy your condoms and weed your parent is still tracking your ass, there’s something wrong with them, not you.
As a parent, it is convenient to have a handy device to zombify my hellspawn for an hour while I need to get some actual important adult shit done, but I also strictly limit mobile device use because my kids will not be iPad kids for as long as I have any say in the matter
Take away anon’s phone for a day and see how he likes it.
I guess Flappy bird?
You don’t hate smartphones; you hate capitalism.
none of those items listed are impossible communism. Its smartphones that suck. The difference is, with capitalism you have a choice not to use them.
Ah yes in communism you have no choice and must use smartphone or else!
Smartphones are a tool. They are inherently not bad nor good.
Social media ruined it by using algorithms to keep you glued to your phone as much as possible.
For your mental health, block tankies on sight
Spotted a dipshit. Blocking…
good luck getting a job without having a smartphone
But rampant and unchecked capitalism is still what ruined all of those things, whether or not it’s possible in other systems. The constant drive for line go up drives tons of shitty behaviors that directly lead to enshitification.
a lot of the issues listed are related to the impact of technology on our lives. not on the system that controls the means of the technology’s production. unless you’re trying to say that smartphones are only possible under a capitalist society?? but im assuming you’re not saying something that ridiculous. or are you one of those freaks that thinks communism will solve all existential woes, even aging and mortality lol i hope not. because life is gonna have shit in it no matter what and being pampered to death is absolutely a thing. that’s essentially the smart phone problem. thousands of potential dating partners a swipe away, hundreds of memes and videos constantly being uploaded to the brain, yeah it’s going to impact you. this is bigger than economics.
Ruined photography?
Professionals or hobbyists can still use a proper camera but the old maxim “sometimes the best camera is the one you have with you” often applies and cellphones do fairly well in that regard
I think is more about how the smartphone and apps like instagram uses a bunch of filters and things like that.
That part I can agree with. Plus the “AI editing” bullshit.
The auto editing bullshit that you don’t even know that is active
I hate that people have taken to filming/taking pictures vertically
We were so close to everyone knowing not to do that
They changed literally to mean figuratively because the internet wouldn’t stop doing it.
This timeline is fucked in so many ways.
And some phones have some excellent cameras. I’ve taken some pretty decent shots with my phone camera, like this one of a squirrel eating pizza. Without carrying around a camera literally all the time, I never would have caught that shot.
Same with many of the abuses that we’ve seen caught on camera recently. There are some problems with videos that lack context, but authorities can’t just act with impunity in their face and expect to not have a camera in their face.
Yeah. I am a new-ish hobby photographer and at the moment I have a 50mm lens for my Canon R10 (I will buy a bigger lens soon). The camera with its current lens doesn’t zoom well but my smartphone could sometimes take a better photo zoomed in depending on how I play with the settings, angle and lighting.
Navigation
If anyone relates give this book a read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
Whats this got to do with Seveneves?
There’s (mostly) nothing wrong with the technology. It’s the enshittification and profit motive behind nearly everything that’s the real problem.
Yes, but you can’t discount the human affects that ease the transition. Smartphones made bite sized pieces of attention way more accessible. And ease of access to distraction/dreams away from the reality we all live in is what I mean, I guess, by accessibility.
Disregarding or summarizing the above: Why can’t there be an objective reality each of us can depend on to relate to eachother with?
How do you separate the two? To me smartphones seem like the sort of thing that was always headed in a bad direction. It’s inherently a tracking device. Touchscreens are easy to use and intuitive but really slow and inefficient for most things that go beyond browsing/viewing content. It pushes you to get all your software from a centralized walled garden. If it weren’t for smartphones, the people who mostly only use smartphones probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the internet, and that would be for the best.
How do you separate the two?
A major change in how our economy works. No, I don’t expect this to actually happen in my lifetime.
How do you separate the two?
you end capitalism
Makes sense, though I meant that more in the sense of like, how can it be said that there is nothing wrong with the technology when it’s been designed around the profit motive.
The rest of the fucking owl moment
But I agree lol
If it weren’t for smartphones, the people who mostly only use smartphones probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the internet, and that would be for the best.
Exactly. Eternal September was peanuts compared to smartphone connectivity.
I think that having the convenience of an easy-to-use, always-online device in your pocket at all times is inherently addicive. The profit motive just compounds this issue on purpose to extract wealth, but it is more of a symptom of a larger issue.
Humans, nor any other animal on this planet have ever existed in an era that they can be always connected to everyone in their species at all times; even having that ability at all is revolutionary and unprecidented.
It used to be that the only people you talk to would be people in your local area, but now a significant portion of the percentage of people that an average person is likely to encounter on a daily basis is via means where their real character is hidden behind a carefully curated mask.
Whales kind of have their own internet.
The interwet
Waterworld Wide Web
So do trees and fungus in symbiosis.
LANd
The gaming sectors always makes me hurt the most man.
It has taken over conventions too so there is little a way to avoid it entirely.Why is it the only good mobile games are either ports of desktop games or games that were developed with the intention of later releasing on desktop if successful enough?
because we let it happen, the average consoomer that is
the times of dead space mobile are long gone
because most people do not give a flying solitary fuck
you want quality? well tough shit, we are the overwhelming minority
I’m prepared for the downvotes knowing where I’m posting.
If you hate it that much, why are you using it? It’s a tool. It’s useful. It also allows you to overindulge, but that says more about you than the tool.
A lot of those are problems caused by phones regardless of whether one uses one themselves.
But for the personal ones, there are self aware addicts of all kinds. Smokers know cigarettes are killing them, complain about them, sometimes even hate them but can’t stop.
Edit: pair o words
That’s a fair and well measured response. It begs the question of what we can do as individuals, and when it comes to smart phones I don’t think there’s much.
Thanks, I basically agree with you.
Like most of the tragic collective action problems (phones, climate change, sweatshops etc) I’m just trying to moderate as best I can for my own soul/health and try not to be too sad about it.
knowing where I’m posting.
a place where people call each other out for saying stupid shit?
Wow
For someone sharing OP’s opinion, simply “not using it” wouldn’t solve anything. Most of the problems OP lists is stems from that people in general use them.
I’m not saying you should agree with OP, but your argument misses the point.
I don’t use it. At all. But nevertheless I still have to deal with people constantly telling me that I need to use their ‘app’, and or only giving information in the form of a QR code. I still have to navigate around zombie-people staring at their phones while they walk around. I still have to deal with the fall-out of bad online interactions that kids have had. and so on. The attention-span issue that the green-text mentions results in a dumbing-down of news and media and basically all kinds of information sharing…
This stuff negatively affects me in obvious and measurable ways, even though I don’t use any of the features of this ‘tool’.
network effects
the guy exclusively lists cultural phenomena. how would not using a phone personaly solve any of these?
“It’s just a tool” is such an ignorant statement in general. The tools we use have been shaping or culture for thousands of years. There is no choice not to take part in the current state of humanity. “It’s just a tool” is what people who want to sell you their technology tell you to make you forget about the effects it can have on a bigger scale.
I would say that it is also a fault of the device if it encourages this brain-dead overindulgence that is clearly of the interest of many big advertisement companies. You can choose a device and OS tho and install apps that lessen the effect, but an simpler phone might not have all the bells and whistles but can get you quite far without offering such a possibility to lose hours off your brain just turned off.
It’s a powerful tool, but the power isn’t yours.
I don’t have one, I’m browsing from my computer. I still go through all the inconveniences listed above and some more. Checkmate, smartphone user.
I myself feel conditioned to have it over a dumb phone. Companies and people assume that you have one, and the thing I find the most offending is obsessive QR overusage. I hate that.
If it’s on a banner or in a document, it rarely ever have plain text address. They are on all of my bills, as mobile banking is popular and you are supposed to trust it and open it in your banking app lol (although it’s payment info in a specific format, not a web link). It’s also used in 2FA\registration for apps and you can’t login into popular messengers without scanning a pattern and my workplaces used some of them for all internal communications. And whenever I scan anything or refuse, I see them everywhere, this sharp b\w noise that is not a part of a human world, but rather meant for machines. These technological shenanigans occupying the visual landscape is probably why I can jump from not wanting a smartphone myself to disliking others having them. And with how it locks you from pretty essential things I can see the next step is having government services only availiable in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. That’s when I’d call quit on that fuckyverse.
/rant
I think QR codes are cool because it’s literal computer data in ink. You can draw a QR code with a pencil if you know how to encode the data. It’s like a punch card, a physical manifestation of digital data.
However using a QR code is really freaking annoying, especially if you have a cheaper phone. I always configure my phone to only show the encoded string and not click the links because fuck normalizing blindly clicking links
I find them really fascinating, especially their error-correcting, but I do find them weird occupying every banner without any alternative and trashing our human world with too much of them, outside of the discussion of them being too much needed for functioning in our society.
I used one of those promos to get a bunch of free stickers made and I did a QR code to lemon party with my friend’s Instagram at the bottom. I travel a lot for work so I was going to post them up everywhere. Unfortunately I got them printed in yellow which made the QR code not work.
Yet, you engage with society. Curious.
I don’t create posts claiming smart phones ruined every aspect of society dude
they are implying you are the orange shirt guy
I had only ever seen the last panel, I didn’t know there’s more
Not using the device doesn’t suddenly end its impacts on society.
Smartphones are using me more than I use them. I hate them, and love them, and hate that I love them.
As someone who carries around a flip phone on purpose, it’s not impossible to live without a smartphone, but it’s getting more challenging.
Ticketmaster now requires a smartphone. You can’t print tickets. Which means I can no longer go to baseball games.
So far, that’s the only thing I’ve found that’s a hard block, but many other things are certainly not designed for the phone impaired.
Which flip phone do you use? I have a Sunbeam Mobile phone which is nice, but I have found it unsustainable in some ways.
That’s actually the model I’m using at the moment. I started out with LightPhone2, but I was frustrated not being able to get images, and I didn’t like the keyboard.
Sunbeam has been ok, but it definitely has problems. For some reason, T9 will always chose a name before any other word. So if I type “Any,” the first two suggestions are “Amy” and “Cox.” I reached out to the devs about this, and they said it’ll “learn” what your most used words are, but it hasn’t done that for me. Also, the keyboard seems to be a bit laggy and misses some keypresses.
It doesn’t help that I also spilled beer on it once which made the touch screen really wonky.
I was thinking about upgrading to a LightPhone3, but there are a few smartphone things I wouldn’t mind bringing back (like Ticketmaster for example). I preordered a Minimal phone, and I’m hoping to lock it down to just messaging, specific apps (like my car key), and no web browser.
I have a Motorola G7 Power that I installed LineageOS on. It was kind of hard to do, but I figured it out finally after some trial and error. If you ever wanted to do something similar and need help, let me know. I feel more comfortable having this versus a googled Android phone, and it is customizable enough that you could dumb it down.
GrapheneOS seems like an ideal choice, but I hate Google and didn’t want to risk buying a used phone off of eBay that was carrier locked. Most people I’ve seen recommend buying an OEM unlocked Pixel new from a store, which I would hate doing. Let Google starve. I feel like Google and Amazon are huge instigators of the social problems around this.
I just got a new phone and someone asked me “do you like it?” I hesitated to answer and they assumed “that’s a no”. Well, not really, it works well and does what I need it to. But do I like it? Not really, its a tool of necessity for operating in modern society. I like my steam deck, I like my speakers, I like my bike, but liking my phone is sort of similar to liking my work laptop. It’s just a thing I have to have or be really very inconvenienced.
