I enjoyed the new Sam Kriss on smartphones & dumbphones:
To live is to live in the world. What we do on the screens is something else.
After a while without my phone, I started to really notice how much everyone else was staring at theirs. On public transport in particular. Every adult is sitting there, pushing around coloured squares and popping coloured bubbles. They are playing with toys for babies. Now look at their faces. These people are not being entertained. They’re not having fun. They are turning their brains off while they wait.
Kriss is very good at writing about stupid people; this essay is good for demonstrating how at the smartphone substrate, we’re all dumb and dumbing rapidly, pathetically; Kriss becomes the stupid person of his own smart person style of critique.
Ivan Illich called this phenomenon ‘disabling’; technology does tasks for us and we stop using precious energy to do other things; the muscles and synapses that were required to do the pre-modern tasks necessarily wither. I think this is a master-concept—the central idea or absolute of the technologist—what tasks should we keep performing because they’re inherently good for the soul and help create it? What should be automated? Freedom from backbreaking labor seems good; freedom from being able to cook a meal or walk a mile without getting lost is… not? The freedom to not be able to talk to someone at a bar is not freedom? And so on. Some machines are liberating; some machines are disabling; all machines are some combination of disabling and liberating.
I’ve only owned a smartphone for about 6 months of my life in 2017—and I immediately became a Tinder addict, if I’m remembering truthfully. Suddenly I couldn’t sit on the toilet without my phone. That trial period was disturbing. Even now, if I check my email on my fiancé’s phone, I feel like I’ve taken a hit of a crackpipe (I don’t actually know what that feels like).