The smartphone didn’t ruin those things. Capitalism did.
The person who wrote this wasn’t alive before smartphones and are doing the whole “I was born in the wrong decade” thing.
I like having maps and gps with me
Dumb phones had that too (and cameras, and internet). I was using GPS on my Motorola Razr back in 2004.
Dumbphones have had a lot of the functionality we now use with smartphones. It’s a vague distinction anyway
True
I had an actual Garmin GPS map handheld device with me. It was a pretty hefty brick I’m sure you could double as a weapon and literally all it did was show maps and your location. Fucking things were pretty advanced, I think they used those for civil engineering and shit
And then young me bought an Android device…
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/
Yeah definitely the smartphone is why I still don’t have a girlfriend yup yup
Dating sites with the usual business model of pay-to-play have an incentive to sabotage long term relationships by not showing the most compatible people to each other.
Corrupt states can use it to undermine assumed enemy states.
Proved the underpaid math teacher wrong when they said we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket.
Amateur photography has gotten pretty darned good.
This is actually the best point for a "smart"phone. Having a camera with you all the times in case you’d have/want to capture a moment or even a video. And they’ve gotten pretty darn decent at it. Would’ve killed for such a device in the 80s+
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
weird that not everyone was a farmer before capitalism then
There’s (mostly) nothing wrong with the technology. It’s the enshittification and profit motive behind nearly everything that’s the real problem.
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?
you end capitalism
The rest of the fucking owl moment
But I agree lol
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
GPS, music, and I disagree about the camera. I’d love a dumb phone that could do GPS music and a camera and nothing else besides text and calls.
The flashlight to.
The flashlight to where?
.
And authenticators, password managers.
Ehh… I hate anal-locked phones. They are turing machines. They are mathematically proven to be as capable as any other turing machines.
anal-locked
new kind of biometrics?
Insert authentication dildo to continue.
Or anal-guarded. Yes. Translation of анально-огороженные.
Is this how Russians call the iPhone gay?
Ruines photogrpahy ?
Rhien II sold for $4.5 Million in 2011
I’d suggest that ruined photography.
Wow…what a boring picture. Must’ve been money laundering. For that price you could fly here and do one yourself. I live here and made nicer ones out the window of the Rhine. Tsk…
But I’m more baffled at the pedo shit. What the actual f…
That really is an unimpressive photo. Most of the photos on that list are terrible.
“There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so that you can have more of it”
Yeah, none of that is the phone’s fault. That is like blaming fast food for being a fat ass.
There is a legitimate comparison there. There’s shared culpability. Sure, you’re responsible for what you eat. But those fast food companies hire teams of nutritionists, psychologists, and sociologists, people with PhDs in their fields, and task them with developing the most addictive foods they can. It’s no different than cigarettes. Sure we’re ultimately responsible for our actions. But it does end up feeling a bit like victim blaming.
I understand the position and the line of thought that leads to the victim blaming idea, but ultimately there is not a “victim”. It is not being forced upon the “victim”. While it is entirely true the playing field is violently unfair, it is still a choice to participate.
This is why regulation is a good thing. Level the playing field and make it safer for those that choose to partake…but it is ultimately personal accountability, unfortunately.
Yeah it is totally the phone’s fault that this person is unable to date other people, that is their biggest problem with smartphones, not the Internet.
Maps/gps navigation and being able to talk to someone across the world for free (provided you have an internet connection). Genz and younger millennials don’t know how expensive long-distance calls were back then.
How calls were expensive…
How music hobby was expensive and nowadays you got the world music collection for less than 10 euro per month…
How we had to pay a few euros per movie when going to the video club to get a movie. And that would imply moving there to get it, moving there to return it. Nowadays I pay less than 10 euro per HBO max…
How we had to get into a public library to get some info on something and always would come very short, specially on some themes…
How electronic equipment was way more expensive and did way way less.
And this… And that… And this… And that…
How music hobby was expensive and nowadays you got the world music collection for less than 10 euro per month…
Well, 0 is indeed less than 10.
How we had to get into a public library to get some info on something and always would come very short, specially on some themes…
We still have public libraries. For example scihub, anna’s archive, the pirate bay.
