“There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so that you can have more of it”
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.
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.
Is this how Russians call the iPhone gay?
Yeah, none of that is the phone’s fault. That is like blaming fast food for being a fat ass.
Yeah it is totally the phone’s fault that this person is unable to date other people, that is their biggest problem with smartphones, not the Internet.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
weird that not everyone was a farmer before capitalism then
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.
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.
The Guinness Book of World Records was created to do just that, settle pub arguments.
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?
They ruined clubs, too. The flip phone cameras were shitty enough to make it a non-issue.
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.
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?
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. :)
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.
Ruined cell phone keyboards
Ruined cell phone batteries
If you teach yourself to use swype typing on Gboard it can be almost as fast as a keyboard to type. Of course that’s a Google product though blah blah blah.
It’s good and better than typing on a dumb screen, but it still sucks compared to a real keyboard, especially when I want or need to type non-words. PTBR also has many words that use “ss” or “rr”, with similar words with only a single s or r, so I often have to manually type anyway.
Anything I have to text with any regularity that isn’t a real word I just save in Gboard. Acronyms, abbreviations, people’s names. Even things that need to be capitalized, I save them capitalized. All you have to do in Gboard is peck out the “word”, then click on what you typed in the suggestion area. After that you can swype it.
There will always be problem words. There are several short words that it fucks up all the time. The only one I can think of at the moment is replacing I’m with in.
You don’t hate smartphones; you hate capitalism.
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. that’s essentially the smart phone problem. thousands of potential dating partners a swipe away, hundreds of memes and videos constantly being uploaded to the brain, yeah it’s going to impact you. this is bigger than economics.
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!
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.
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.
good luck getting a job without having a smartphone
For your mental health, block tankies on sight
Spotted a dipshit. Blocking…
Good for porn?
Like sure, but it’s no VR masturbatorium.
Shitty for porn. Tiny screen.
Do you want to take a 32inch screen to the bathroom?
Challenge accepted.
No but if I’m going to watch porn in the bathroom I’m going to use a laptop or tablet not a little postage stamp phone screen
More importantly why would you even need a screen in the bathroom? Literally ruins the most basic act of our existence.
