It’s Time To Revolt Against Smartphones

Before I begin, let me admit, I fought the smartphone fad for half a decade before being forced to give in. When my six year old Motorola SLVR finally gave up the ghost, the hot phone on the market was the iPhone 3gs. I'm fairly confident it was the same "first" smarphone everybody had in that era of technology. At first, it was neat. I had the world of information in my pocket and video calls were the promised technological leap we had expected since Back to the Future II. But the smartphone changed everything, and we didn't even see it happening.

Humans are inherently lazy when they have time to be. In 2009, if I wanted to get online and check whatever social media there was at the time, I had to get out of my chair, walk to the designated computer room and hop on my desktop to see what was what. The social media presence in those early days had less exposure since you didn't want to spend all night hunched over a PC, so you checked what you wanted to check, then went back to the TV room like a normal human being... The moment I got that iPhone, I realized I could check social media during the same commercial breaks without having to even get up out of my chair. Skip forward ten years, and I don't even have a computer in my house anymore.

I can only assume that you're in the same boat when I say, my smartphone has become my PC, and I control my entire life on it. Everything from social media, entertainment, banking, shopping, groceries, etc... I just fear the day you can order a fuel truck to deliver gas to your driveway. We'll never have to leave home again. Sounds like heaven, but it's becoming meh-ven.

Show of hands, have you ever been inundated with work stuffs over a weekend? It's not that big of a deal, but it's a first world problem that only the smartphone makes possible to such an extent. There's no reason you shouldn't have seen that email or text. If you miss a call these days, it's obvious you didn't want to talk with whoever called. Besides, we live in a time where people shame other people for calling. Life is crazy.

Beyond those stretchy talking points, there's the obvious elephant in your pocket... It's a tiny little spy that picks up on every minute detail of yourself. It literally knows you better than you know you. Between the Patriot Act and endless user agreements, each individual person has become mine from which governments and companies pull data. Hard data. They don't care to know you, they care to sell that information to other companies looking for an "in" to sell you something. You know what doesn't do that? Flip phones.

While there's nothing you can do about the government and the phone carrier listening in on every phone call you make, there is something you can do about the other side of that spy game, take the red pill and trade in your smartphone for a boring old dumb phone that only makes calls and sends texts. I'm game for it. It was be a huge change, but a simpler life is what most are looking for, especially in 2020 where virtual stuff jumped so far ahead of its time.