You don’t hate smartphones; you hate capitalism.
Anon hates smartphones
Submitted 4 months ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/ab35d2d1-f157-4d72-9e86-1e8d6e06eff3.jpeg
Comments
angelmountain@feddit.nl 4 months ago
C126@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
none of those items listed are impossible communism. Its smartphones that suck
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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.
imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Ah yes in communism you have no choice and must use smartphone or else!
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 4 months ago
For your mental health, block tankies on site
yetiftw@lemmy.world 4 months ago
good luck getting a job without having a smartphone
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 4 months ago
a lot of the issues listed are related to the impact of technology on our lives. not on the system that controls the means of the technology’s production. unless you’re trying to say that smartphones are only possible under a capitalist society?? but im assuming you’re not saying something that ridiculous. or are you one of those freaks that thinks communism will solve all existential woes, even aging and mortality lol i hope not. because life is gonna have shit in it no matter what and being pampered to death is absolutely a thing.
angelmountain@feddit.nl 4 months ago
I don’t think capitalism/communism is a binary thing. I think (hope at least) there are more options.
I also think that the problem with smartphones is that they are designed to get you “hooked”. The companies doing that are hoping to influence your behaviour so you will buy more of your stuff. And because we live in a society where capitalism is seen as holy and just, we let them.
I think we don’t really have a free choice anymore. Companies know how to always win, they are too good at influencing through advertisement and design choices. And without actual free choice capitalism does not work. Anyone telling you that we have a free choice to not buy a product or to not use a smartphone, lies. A choice is not free if companies can and do spend millions of dollars to influence my choice.
Also, capitalism requires a free market to function. But a true free market will always end in a monopoly, because the biggest company can always buy the other smaller companies, again breaking the free market. So there is a catch-22 problem in the system.
TL;DR - Capitalism is slavery, except if you are the CEO.
clarinet_estimator@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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.
nexguy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I don’t see how we would have smartphones without capitalism. We’d still all be farmers.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 4 months ago
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.
uis@lemm.ee 4 months ago
“When they say ‘there is no alternative to capitalism’, they do not make a statement. They make a demand. They demand to not think about alternatives.”
You missed patch 1917 on eurasian servers.
clarinet_estimator@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 4 months ago
weird that not everyone was a farmer before capitalism then
tibi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
phx@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
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
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I think is more about how the smartphone and apps like instagram uses a bunch of filters and things like that.
phx@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
That part I can agree with. Plus the “AI editing” bullshit.
pingveno@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
elidoz@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You want a laptop
timestatic@feddit.org 4 months ago
I’d argue Fairphones are pretty close although I’d probably go with a custom FOSS rom
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Don’t worry! RAM is not upgradable on a lot of laptops now as well"!
timestatic@feddit.org 4 months ago
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!
PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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?
Mikina@programming.dev 4 months ago
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Maybe a flatpak repo with mobile-first software?
theneverfox@pawb.social 4 months ago
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
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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
Hule@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Usable flashlight!
scytale@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
x0chi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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…
uis@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Proved the underpaid math teacher wrong when they said we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket.
inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
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.
underwire212@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Yeah definitely the smartphone is why I still don’t have a girlfriend yup yup
dumbass@leminal.space 4 months ago
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.
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 4 months ago
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.
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Apparently parents love it as it keeps the kids quiet and relieves them of the stress of parenting.
psycho_driver@lemmy.world 4 months ago
GPS and calendar.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I like having maps and gps with me
peteypete420@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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.
Freefall@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah, none of that is the phone’s fault. That is like blaming fast food for being a fat ass.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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.
Frostbeard@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Good for porn?
ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The smartphone didn’t ruin those things. Capitalism did.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Take away anon’s phone for a day and see how he likes it.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
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.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 months ago
Ruined cell phone keyboards
Ruined cell phone batteries
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 4 months ago
Add in ruined music to that. Shitty speakers, super lossy codecs to preserve cellular bandwidth, even shittier Bluetooth compression, listening to music on a phone is convenient but it sounds like shit. And we’ve got generations of people who think that’s what music is supposed to sound like.
chocosoldier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
ITT awful fucking reasons for “smartphone good”. Fuck smartphones.
latenightnoir@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Pocket porn!
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
What do you mean “is there anything good about smartphones at all”? It made a ton of money for Apple and its shareholders, that’s the only thing that matters. Who cares that it caused anxiety in a whole generation and ruined social life?
chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
privacy
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 4 months ago
“There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so that you can have more of it”
sifr@retrolemmy.com 4 months ago
I have a smart phone with a custom ROM, and a dumb phone (Sunbeam Mobile). No, I am not a drug dealer. Sometimes I change out my SIM card and will use the smart phone (especially if traveling to another state or country), and because it can make my life easier.
Here are some rambling thoughts I have on the topic:
-If you don’t want to have a smart phone, and opt for a dumb phone, you need to be careful not to let your PC “replace” your bad smart phone habits in terms of scrolling, etc.
-People are isolated and need a way to build and maintain communities. These days, it is difficult to walk places and build community in the physical world. So that is why you have people getting together on Discord, Instagram, etc. I have definitely been isolated or lived in rural areas and having these outlets has been more helpful than harmful for me.
-If you want a dumb phone, I do recommend a Sunbeam Mobile phone. It supports group texting, navigation (with HERE Maps). I have an SD card full of music I put in the phone and it supports Bluetooth. I recommend the models of phones that are completely de-Googled.
-I don’t think people should feel bad if they need a smart phone, especially if they are living in circumstances beyond their control which puts them in an isolating position.
-I think that ultimately people need to want to wake up to all of this. I want to be more involved in making my life more community oriented. I do live in a city, but it is very car dependent. I think that we need to push for development and policies that support community building over the long term, because most people are not happy having smart phones a fixture of everything. For example, is creepy to me that in any moment of time, I can guess what most people are doing (and that is that they are sitting on the Internet in some capacity or a smart phone).
-I hate Google and Amazon. Any way that I do not support them and boycott them is a win for me and society.
-I find it interesting that whenever I am using my Sunbeam phone, that younger people will come up to me and start asking about it. People are desperate to escape smart phones, but there are so many macro political and macro economical problems that create the situation we are in now. We see ourselves as so atomized that there is no examples of any organization or collective rejection of this crap.
Here is a great blog post, which I highly recommend reading: wrongthink.link/…/re-life-in-dysfunctional-world/
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Lauchs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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 hard them can’t stop.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
rtxn@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yet, you engage with society. Curious.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I don’t create posts claiming smart phones ruined every aspect of society dude
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 4 months ago
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.
zloubida@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Smartphones are using me more than I use them. I hate them, and love them, and hate that I love them.
ch00f@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
sifr@retrolemmy.com 4 months ago
Which flip phone do you use? I have a Sunbeam Mobile phone which is nice, but I have found it unsustainable in some ways.
deikoepfiges_dreirad@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
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.
Bonsoir@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I don’t have one, I’m browsing from my computer. I still go through all the inconveniences listed above and some more. Check mate, smartphone user.
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Not using the device doesn’t suddenly end its impacts on society.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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’.
KomfortablesKissen@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
It’s a powerful tool, but the power isn’t yours.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 4 months ago
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
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 4 months ago
a place where people call each other out for saying stupid shit?
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wow
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
network effects
Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
timestatic@feddit.org 4 months ago
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.