Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.
Ban non-free software. Ban always-on tracking devices that the user cannot disable. Don’t ban hardware form-factors.
The form factor is the problem. We carry a propaganda faucet slash ad delivery service with us 24-7-365, we check it obsessively for a quick dopamine fix throughout the day, and we have convinced ourselves this is good for us.
How many ads would be there without non-free software? How much propaganda without the non-free “social” apps? People can turn anything into an addiction, but the fact that the device fits in their pocket is not the problem. No one gets obsessed with or addicted to pocket calculators. If someone wants to respond to emails on the train without carrying their laptop with them, a smaller and low-power device running some form of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or other free OS makes sense. It doesn’t need to be a phone, and I would personally be 100% okay with all phones of every kind ceasing to exist this second, but if someone is going to have a phone anyway, then it might as well be able to send emails also. (Disclaimer: I do not have a smartphone and never will.)
Meeting people in-person is increasingly a base survival tactic these days. It’s an island of legitimacy in an ocean of advertising culture. It’s taking real effort, too.
I agree with the gist of much of the article. Although a fan of the original web, and developer of a climate web-app, I think small screens make people into consumers, while creators or investigators need a large screen, and that should be for dedicated periods of the day, not carried everywhere.
And we wish our kids had never had these things (gift from grandparents - hard to reject).However the article title is over-simple, impractical - how would you even define what is a smartphone, in the spectrum of devices ? (maybe that’s cause of downvotes ? )
Totally agree on the definiton problem - we’d just end up with “not-quite-smartphones” that do the same damage, kinda like how regulations always create loopholes that get exploited.
Ban ads and close source.
If you ban smartphones, make sur to make it in a way that would not prevent us to reinvent them in the way they should have existed in the first place.
This has to be the stupidest take I’ve ever had the privilege to read here. What a fantastical, luddite, preposterous proposal.