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.
NO! You are not allowed to enjoy things, you must be sad, capitalism bad, communism is solution to all our problems. enshitification. enshitification. enshitification. 😡
ITT awful fucking reasons for “smartphone good”. Fuck smartphones.
You don’t hate smartphones; you hate capitalism.
none of those items listed are impossible communism. Its smartphones that suck. The difference is, with capitalism you have a choice not to use them.
Ah yes in communism you have no choice and must use smartphone or else!
But rampant and unchecked capitalism is still what ruined all of those things, whether or not it’s possible in other systems. The constant drive for line go up drives tons of shitty behaviors that directly lead to enshitification.
Smartphones are a tool. They are inherently not bad nor good.
Social media ruined it by using algorithms to keep you glued to your phone as much as possible.
good luck getting a job without having a smartphone
For your mental health, block tankies on sight
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!
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.
you HAD to talk to someone because you were so fucking bored
Yeah, nah, I just read one or two novels each day.
While music was playing on the stereo… flipped the cassette every half hour…
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.
what? thats how i feel when i use my smartphone
Take away anon’s phone for a day and see how he likes it.
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
Don’t worry! RAM is not upgradable on a lot of laptops now as well"!
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?
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
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
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.
Navigation
Before modern smartphones existed, I dreamed that they would one day exist and we could use computers and the Internet whereever we are, not just from home/work/school.
There are bad things about them too, but overall I would not want to do without them.
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?
Damn good summary. Even more BS than I complain about on a weekly basis.
(written from my smartphone when I should be sleeping)
There’s (mostly) nothing wrong with the technology. It’s the enshittification and profit motive behind nearly everything that’s the real problem.
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 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
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.
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?
you end capitalism
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.
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.
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
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.
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’.
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
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.
It’s a powerful tool, but the power isn’t yours.
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.
I don’t have one, I’m browsing from my computer. I still go through all the inconveniences listed above and some more. Checkmate, smartphone user.
Not using the device doesn’t suddenly end its impacts on society.
GPS and calendar.
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.
