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 hard them can’t stop.

Smartphones are using me more than I use them. I hate them, and love them, and hate that I love them.

Yet, you engage with society. Curious.

I don’t have one, I’m browsing from my computer. I still go through all the inconveniences listed above and some more. Check mate, smartphone user.

Not using the device doesn’t suddenly end its impacts on society.

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.

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.

It’s a powerful tool, but the power isn’t yours.

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’.

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.

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 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 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.

network effects

knowing where I’m posting.

a place where people call each other out for saying stupid shit?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Another word for TikTok!

“Smartphones. This Christmas, take a short break from using a device to masturbate and use it to talk to your extended family.” Yea that’s not something I considered would happen with tech when I was younger.

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?

Whats this got to do with Seveneves?