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.
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
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.
Smartphones are using me more than I use them. I hate them, and love them, and hate that I love them.
Not using the device doesn’t suddenly end its impacts on society.
network effects
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 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
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
You want a Framework laptop
That shit is not going to fit in your pocket
Maybe a flatpak repo with mobile-first software?
Calling out cops on their bullshit, troublshooting your pc when you bork the ethernet, sending photos of your feces to your friends to name a few
Usable flashlight!
Proved the underpaid math teacher wrong when they said we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket.
GPS and calendar.
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.
Good for porn?
I honestly hate smartphones as well, not because of any of what OP posted. On my PC, I can install whatever I want, including swapping out the OS. Most smartphones are locked down, and the few that allow alternative ROMs have huge incompatibilities w/ FOSS OSes (i.e. getting SMS to work is a bit spotty).
My phone runs GrapheneOS. I would much rather use something else (e.g. PostmarketOS), but it’s the least bad option that supports all the features I need. I am still limited to Android-compatible apps, and developing for my phone is a lot more painful than any other ARM-based device because I’m stuck w/ the Android ecosystem.
The end result is that I don’t feel like I truly own my phone, whereas I definitely feel that way about my PC. Yeah, my phone is convenient, and I don’t use most of the nonsense Anon is complaining about (I mostly use websites on my phone instead of apps), but I still generally dislike having a thing in my pocket that I don’t actually control.
The end result is that I don’t feel like I truly own my phone
You kinda/sorta don’t. Manufacturers saw an opportunity to create a closed environment around the tech, not unlike gaming consoles, and made sure it happened that way. It may also be a side-effect of smartphones emerging from the same manufacturers that made far less capable and less open devices in generations prior (think old flip phones and 1st gen cell phones). Just like with game consoles, DRM (coupled with DMCA advantages) and the attached walled-garden retail environment are the prime motivators there. Marketing and financing help make sure it stays this way.
At the same time, providing a watered down platform for the masses did accelerate all the things OP is talking about. Phone/tablet apps make user interaction insanely^1 easy to do without any understanding of the platform its on. In contrast, PC’s do a great job of requiring some amount of tech literacy before you start. So most people that would be stymied by the complexities^2 in a Windows system or Mac can easily do all kinds of internet-enabled things, for cheaper, on their phone. It’s not a root cause by any measure, but I really do think that the commodification of software services in this way, has thrown gasoline on whatever fires were already burning.
- Note: not “insanely great”.
- I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You would be surprised.
So most people that would be stymied by the complexities^2 in a Windows system or Mac can easily do all kinds of internet-enabled things, for cheaper, on their phone
And this is what gets me. Just 40 years ago, you had to understand the whole system to use a computer, because your options were basically DOS or Unix. Apple came along w/ a GUI around then, but you still needed to understand things at a pretty deep level. And then there was Win 3 and later Win 95 and Win 98, and you still interacted w/ DOS a fair amount (I learned to launch DOS games from floppy).
And people largely seemed okay with that and adapted.
So when people get confused by our much simpler devices, I don’t think it’s because they’re complicated, but exactly the opposite. Everything is presented as “easy,” so anytime you need to do anything beyond the expected happy path of uses, it doesn’t fit and people give up. If people were used to interacting with the lower level bits periodically, they would probably just adapt.
And the net result is that power users lose and larger orgs win, because people end up getting an app to do something they could have solved another way, which gives the app store even more money and shoves ads in the user’s face. It’s incredibly frustrating. For example, if I want to debug my wifi signal, I download an app that shows the signal details. On my desktop, I’d just run a command-line app that lists available networks by signal strength and whatnot, no app needed. Or if I want to test latency, I need an app on my phone, whereas I can just use
pingon my desktop.
Can I jailbreak a Samsung Flip 6 like this? If I do will I still be able to use my job’s Microsoft 365 stuff and authenticator? I know I could Google it but I’d rather ask an expert.
I don’t know anything about Samsung’s phones, but you certainly can’t install GrapheneOS on it, since it only supports Pixeel phones, and I didn’t see a LineageOS build for it (and LineageOS is usually the best bet).
Here are a bunch of others though, just in case you wanted to shop around.
So short answer is no, but maybe there’s a longer answer. :)
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.
The smartphone didn’t ruin those things. Capitalism did.
Ruined these things for you maybe. I still enjoy them. And don’t use my phone for most. One of the things I live about the phone is being able to communicate with my friends and family I want. I also enjoy having the majority of the worlds information available to me. Ooooo and music. Soooo much music at my fingertips.
There’s no way you are having a good time with digital dating, there just isn’t.
Well, not anymore no. Living with my bae. But I dipped my toe in that scene some years back, it was kinda fun. Setting up my own blind dates, occasionally meeting someone as thirsty as me. I’m sure it’s changed. I meant more that the mobile versions of those things doent ruin the regular versions. Im sure the affect each other, but Normal dating is still a thing.
Damn good summary. Even more BS than I complain about on a weekly basis.
(written from my smartphone when I should be sleeping)
Pocket porn!
Yes, the option to just throw it in the corner and not charge it anymore.
Or to uninstall all your shitty apps.
Unironically this. I wish I had just paid in dollars instead of my data. Looking back, it was too good to be true. It’s hard to deny we never should’ve let it get this engrained in our lives.
