Always On

The Looming Disaster of Mandatory Smartphones

I believe in giving the people what they want, and the response to my Jeremiad against QR Code Menus made clear what you want. So, although I planned to follow my least controversial post with my most controversial one, that will wait until next week. Instead, I want to expand on this quote:

I often like to leave my phone in the car or fully at home when I go out to eat. I continue to chafe at the idea that everything in the world should be built around the assumption that we are all carrying a phone at all times.

That came from one of my favorite Substack authors, the mononymous Sarah, author of Weird Emails,¹ which I cannot recommend highly enough. In fact, you should stop reading this piece and go and subscribe to her. May I recommend this mind-blowing (to me as a dude) piece about witchcraft? Or this magnum opus primer on reading news about state laws? Go handle that, I’ll wait.

Welcome back! That quote resonated because it’s a truth about the modern world that even those of us who love technology can feel weighing us down. Our phones have become increasingly mandatory, appendages. Whether we like it or not. How did we get here?

My first cellphone was in 1999. It was a more convenient way to call home when I was at college than using a calling card or calling collect. For those of you too young to understand those words, allow these commercials from the Collect Calling Wars to explain:

Cellphones obliterated the collect calling industry because they were simply a better option. By the time I got my first cellphone of my own, I could access the internet on it. Expensively and slowly.² But, like the phone itself, it was merely a convenience for when I was away from a computer. Similarly – due to minutes restrictions and lousy service –my cellphone was an option, to make life easier when I was out and about, but landlines were my primary means of communication. Even as a young, college educated person it was normal to have cellphoneless friends. The ease of losing them, breaking them, and constantly changing numbers meant you had to have other ways to contact people. It was a different time. The cell phone was a luxury that made life more convenient.

But during the 2000s this changed. Text messaging – something you couldn’t do on a landline³ - started taking off in 2000 and for my generation became second nature. In 2003 the camera phone exploded in popularity. Although nowhere near what would soon be possible, phones were also starting to become usable for music. Cellphones, merely as replacements for landlines, were beginning to change our lives. If I can quote, at length, a passage from Chuck Klosterman’s wonderful The 90s:

It’s easy to argue that a world without cell phones was charming, and easier still to argue that it was inferior. But it was mostly just immutable. Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found. You had to trust people, and they had to trust you. If you made plans over the phone and left the house, those plans could not be changed—everyone had to be where they said they’d be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they’d arrive. Life was more scripted and less fluid, dictated by a machine that would not (and could not) compromise its location. Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less. It was an appliance, not that different from the dishwasher.

Once you’re done subscribing to Sarah’s newsletter, you should also go buy this book, my favorite of 2022. How we lived in a landline dominated world was different from how we live in a cellphone dominated world. This was even more true for those in the corporate set, for whom the “always on” world was being created. Being always on wasn’t exactly a new condition,⁴ the Blackberry just popularized it.

There’s no finer time capsule than the one we create ourselves through popular art. Compare the version of Wall Street presented in, well, Wall Street, to the one in The Big Short and Margin Call. A world of Blackberrys, late nights, and always being on.

But even for us plebs, we were entering a world of omniconnection. Compare the way that Seinfeld plots fall apart in a world with cellphones to the way that less than a decade later, the plot of The Departed is entirely dependent on cell phones.

I could have picked any scene, but it depicts a world completely alien to the world of the previous decade. But even that world seems alien to us today. First, humans were still a filmable species. Secondly, while cellphones were busy changing us, they were busy changing themselves, evolving from portable landlines to something more. A mere 95 days after The Departed entered theaters, the world got its first look at the iPhone.

The revolutionary nature of the iPhone is oft overstated. Smartphones existed for years. What made the iPhone different is that it was only coincidentally a phone, it was primarily a way to access the internet. Combined with improvements in networks, the phone itself (particularly the creation of the App Store), and the introduction of the competing Android operating system, the modern smartphone revolutionized how we viewed the very concept of the phone. Observe the difference is in the explosion of data traffic compared to voice traffic.

The amount of change this unleashed cannot be overstated and can barely be understood. I wrote about the cognitive effects this had in my first piece. It powered social media. It led to us experiencing the world through a camera lens. It created influencer culture and the idea of a fake self on social media. Now, everyone was always on.

How the Internet Breaks Our Brains

Critically, this also meant always being plugged in. Me and my law school classmates sitting at 12 Steps Down, drinking and waiting for our phones to go off with the text from Obama about who is running mate would be was an amuse bouche to the future of people consuming news anywhere, anytime, instantly. And we’re surprised that the heat of politics – specifically the culture war – has been turned up?

Of course, not all of this is new. Presenting a fake version of your life for public consumption predates Instagram.⁵ The insatiable thirst for instant news is old as well, and one of the things that drove the growth of New York City. In 1869, the Golden Spike was linked to a telegram wire so the finishing of the transcontinental railroad would instantly be transmitted everywhere. Perhaps humanity’s first live tweeting? It’s just now, we’re all plugged into a network of everyone else at all times. And considering issues with privacy, effect on our cognitive abilities, anxiety, stress, disturbing sleep, contributing to addictions to pornography and gambling, and worst of all, the unacceptable amount of death on our roads, perhaps this is not wholly good. From convenient luxury to detrimental necessity.

Despite that, I love my iPhone. I normally do take it everywhere. If I’m taking my dog for a walk, I like that I can listen to an audiobook or music, take pictures, even buy things, if need be, all while carrying only my phone and some poopbags. But I also love having that choice. And because my apartment building is one of the many that makes you use your smartphone as your key, it’s no longer a choice. And it’s a trend that is growing.

Everything from restaurants to apartment buildings to even accessing some New Jersey beaches are now becoming dependent on having a smartphone. Once Uber and Lyft fully dominate the taxi market, imagine trying to get a ride.⁶ Countless parts of our society are becoming app based, with the leading-edge becoming app only.

These are early days of the app only world. It may not affect you at all. But part of this space’s mission is to stay ahead of the cresting wave. And this wave feels inevitable. Look at something as simple as parking. Not that long ago, I had to carry quarters in my car to “feed the meter,” despite having a credit card on me. In the 00s, as mobile card reading technology became cheap enough, parking meters accepted credit cards. These were combined with multi-space pay stations – which already existed but exploded as both small mobile printing and data transmission became cheaper.

Eventually, me using my credit card was as silly as the quarters. I had a mobile payment device in my pocket! Pay by phone quickly became prevalent. However, why expend the cost on meters or even pay stations if you can just have people pay through their smartphones? Recently, an entire parking lot near me became pay to park. Not through installing meters, but by putting up a sign with a QR code. If you don’t have your smartphone on you? Sorry, but who wouldn’t have their smartphone on them?

We learned that answer last week. About 85% of Americans have a smartphone, a number brought down by two groups: low income and senior citizens. If history is a guide, the former is easy to ignore, and the latter will – through the operation of nature – change composition. Eventually, smartphone penetration will be near universal. What happens then?

Look backwards. When few had smartphones, few of these replacement techs existed. As smartphones became more popular, these replacement technologies grew as well, although typically in cutting edge places like Whole Foods or the country of Finland. Now that smartphones are ubiquitous, so are these complementary technologies. When we do reach near universality, why would a business or government waste money on a system that will hardly ever be used?⁷

I’m a firm believer in People Should Like What They Like, so if you disagree with me, that’s fine. But I love smartphones and think they’re a massive leap forward. Yet, I also love wearing suits, and yet, I hated working at a firm that required us to wear them daily. Because I like having options in life.

This is, in fact, one of the great contradictions at the core of technology. Technologies – including smartphones – are wonderful because they provide us new options. They’re liberating. But at a certain point, when they become mandatory, they become a straitjacket. An imposition on our lives. And it’s done by us, it’s done culturally. We’ve made this mistake over and over. Let’s not make it again. Because I love smartphones, I’m asking you all: Please don’t make them mandatory.

1. I’ll reiterate that I reject the belief that for me to like someone’s writing I must adopt every view they have or endorse all their positions. Especially Sarah, who has some horrible opinions, like being against the 5 Star scale.

2. I vividly recall spending half an hour at the 2001 trade deadline for who the Phillies got for Wayne Gomes to download. A half hour to learn about Felipe Crespo.

3. But let’s be clear, merely an upgrade to telegrams.

4. This is one of the pivotal plot points in The Godfather! Because this is already a video heavy piece, I did not include a video for which I apologize. Here’s a link to the entire assassination scene.

5. Also, the basis for Hitchcock’s best film.

6. You actually can order an Uber without a phone. You just need a computer. Did anyone know this?

7. For analogy, cash – which has its own benefits – hasn’t disappeared, but so many places are no longer cash friendly that leaving the house without a credit card is difficult.