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.
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?
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.
I don’t create posts claiming smart phones ruined every aspect of society dude
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
knowing where I’m posting.
a place where people call each other out for saying stupid shit?
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.
“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.
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.
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.
smartphone manufacturers have almost no common standards, they are made to be bought and then disposed of instead of upgrading the specs
it’s impossible to do stuff like upgrading ram which would be very easy on a computer, and every smartphone has a different cpu
companies are doing their best to keep the open source guys out of the game, which in my opinion would solve a lot of the issues if this weren’t the case
I want a smartphone without ios or android but just plain linux, which should be upgradable and durable, possibly with open source firmware and that kind of stuff
I’d argue Fairphones are pretty close although I’d probably go with a custom FOSS rom
the thing I don’t like about fairphone, just like any other phone, is that upgradability is still impossible. I wasn’t able to find any information about it when I checked, which is an indication that it’s not possible, otherwise they would probably use it as a marketing point
I think the focus on fairphone is more on sustainability and repairability than upgradability
maybe it’ll become possible with a future fairphone, or the mikrophone project, or another group
Both if you’re a mac owner actually! I’m pretty sure the only user replaceable components are the screen and battery.
I mean I use a fairphone with /e/OS from Murena. This solves the issue of open source and upgradability/replacability mostly for me. I like the idea of bare linux phones but the hardware and software is just not there yet. I used an iPhone before that and while I miss some aspects of apple hardware I am really happy to be able to just replace parts without this tremendous glue they put in their phone and like 20 different screws and steps to replace one part. Besides some minor inconveniences the switch was definitely the right move!
I hate how /e/OS’s ‘BlissLauncher’ doesn’t let you leave an empty space between icons on the homescreen. I don’t know whether switching to a different launcher will break /e/OS’s widgets etc, and it bugs me just little enough to ignore it. The worst thing is that because you can’t leave gaps (unless you leave the bottom row partially blank, which is dumb because that’s the most important row), moving any app requires swapping it with another, which requires a minimum of three app-drags. In practice four, because draggin one app onto another will turn the icon into a folder with the two apps in them, so you’ll have to open the folder and drag em both out.
I hate it so much. Why can’t they just make a normal homescreen?
I switched to a different launcher a while ago. The one I use is Kvaesitso. It also has a widget integration and relies more on search although I can still pin Apps I want. I believe most alternate Launchers have their own Widget integration in a way so I’d recommend you try that
From my experience, all the linux for mobile distros I’ve tried on my Pinephone were a really bad experience, with a lot of issues. But the option is there, and while it wasnt reliable enough to use as a daily phone, I still carry it in the bag with a dock and Kali, which sometimes can get useful during pentesting.
The problem is the chipsets, which include the radio. They have their own proprietary code, including some built in firmware. Along with things like roaming, negotiating frequencies, requesting MMS downloads and other niggly details, you have stuff like handling sim cards, emergency services modes, and public alerts. All of which I’ve heard are lightly documented and a pain to work with… It’s a lot of compatibility layers built up over the years
You can get a Linux phone today, the consensus just seems to be it’s not ready as a primary phone