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.
Open source
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?
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.
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.
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.
You don’t hate smartphones; you hate capitalism.
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.
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
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
Don’t worry! RAM is not upgradable on a lot of laptops now as well"!
Or storage if you’re a Mac owner.
Both if you’re a mac owner actually! I’m pretty sure the only user replaceable components are the screen and battery.
You can still replace the battery? They’re slacking.
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.
Maybe a flatpak repo with mobile-first software?
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
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.
Proved the underpaid math teacher wrong when they said we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket.
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.
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.
I can watch porn on the go?
Like… On a bus?
> ruined masturbating to complete strangers on a bus
does a smartphone force you to only masturbate to people you know?
Yeah, of course. Is yours broken?
Most people can handle that, not sure about you.
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.
Ruined pointless but enjoyable arguments with mates in the pub. In the old days you could get a good 15 minutes of entertainment out of ‘Was it Matt Damon or Mark Wahlberg in that Three Kings movie?’
Now some asshat with a phone will kill that argument in 5 seconds.
There’s plenty of pub topics Google can’t kill. For example Would you rather have hands made of chocolate cake or an armpit that squirts cream?
That’s a complete no-starter though. Cream squirting armpits every day of the week. After all, I’d have usable hands to be able to harvest the free cream, therefore profit. Whereas hands made of chocolate cake wouldn’t be very usable and once they’d been eaten (and with my wife and daughter around they soon would be) I’m just left with the stumps. You’ve not thought this through. So. Armpits that squirt cream. Definitively.
Yeah we need more info? Do the cake hands regenerate because if so you’re basically deadpool at that point
You see how we have a discussion the hands grow back the cream is unlimited
The Guinness Book of World Records was created to do just that, settle pub arguments.
Yeah, but up to the point where you could have it on your phone, no-one took a copy of the Guinness book of records to the pub with them.
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.
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
People either have forgotten or didn’t live in the time before smart phones, but the world was fucking boring as, you HAD to talk to someone because you were so fucking bored, that’s why we discovered shit, we were bored and had to do something, then turtle neck man gave us smartphones.
I just played a game on my pc.
What game?
Not OP. I remember when I was little, playing computer games that were completely on the keyboard (we didn’t even have a mouse.) They were stored on floppy disks and would start up by just inserting them into the computer. I’m not sure if you’re asking as a fellow old-school gamer seeking nostalgic connections, or as someone who’s never played old games and is simply curious, but I did find this list of early games pretty interesting.
There are a number of adaptations of classic arcade games, pop culture tie-ins, and even flight simulators. It amazes me how much floppy disks used to be able to accomplish.
deleted by creator
While music was playing on the stereo… flipped the cassette every half hour…
It’s really sad to me that people think that smartphones are the source of all entertainment now. Even today I use my phone very little on a daily basis. You’re limiting your perspective to that little screen in your hand instead of exploring the real world.
Smartphones are what is fucking boring to me. I don’t want to sit around and look at that shit.
They’re good for those of us with physical disabilities or certain mental issues. I’m mostly off today. I wish I could just go downtown and have fun or go get some groceries but my brain is not letting me.
what? thats how i feel when i use my smartphone
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. :)
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.
Even if your goal is to hit it and quit it like dating apps encourage, it’s still not a good time.
I’m not very confident in person in the sense I would never randomly start talking to a cute girl. Online dating is great for me as a way to start conversations.
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.
