Phones only as smart as their users

David Sherman

Smart phones get a bad rap. Cell phones don’t chew your brain, people invite phones to chew their brains. It’s just a phone. With extras. You can use it to make phone calls. Read the news. Use Google maps when you’re on the road, though you might get “Googled,” which means ending up in a farmer’s field 100 kms away from where you were aiming. You can still find paper maps.

We’ve seen the “Are you kidding me?” prices of new cars, so we drive old cars. The cell phone a passenger in case we’re on the side of the road, longing for CAA.

You can sit in a café or restaurant and watch the world go by or you can ignore everyone and read and write email, read the news or “doom scroll.” It’s your choice.

Last time I was in Manhattan, I went down to the hotel bar and ordered whatever and took the last seat. I had phone in hand. A woman beside me was looking at her phone. I said, “You know, 10 years ago, instead of staring at our phones, we would probably have chatted.” She said, “You’re right,” smiled and put her phone down. We exchanged pleasantries until we went our separate ways. Manhattan was human for a time.

Whether you download all the “Look at me,” “Hear me,” “Buy me,” “Screw with my head” apps is your choice. Not so different than TV these days. The medium is not exactly the message anymore. You can use the wide screen to screen films, watch sports. Or tune into 22-minute sitcoms and attendant commercials designed for the brain dead. Or indulge the spectacle of cage fighting where men and women try to punch, kick and choke each other into submission or death. Or watch the late-night porn on the pay channels. It’s not the TV’s fault what turns your crank. It’s between you and your crank or your shrink. A TV is a TV.

A phone’s a phone. Doom scrolling to elevate blood pressure is a choice.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he seemed proudest the gadget in his hand could give you the New York Times. He probably didn’t envision that the web site an unlikeable Mark Zuckerberg created to humiliate a woman that dumped him at university would become Facebook. Nothing is forcing you to sign onto the premier look-at-me app with hundreds of millions of “friends” sharing pictures of their dinner plates, hair dos, sexual proclivities, thoughts of the day and other minutiae that stitches iPhones into hands.

He probably didn’t imagine Twitter would acquire Tweetie, an iPhone app, and turn it into a megaphone for the ravings of a lunatic president and an insane electric-car manufacturer who dream of a fascist world where they can be kings.

He probably didn’t see that birth rates would continue to fall as would salaries, job losses and climbing housing costs. He probably didn’t envision that millions would lose good jobs to free trade and be angry and frustrated and resentful that the good life was gone. Or more and more kids would grow up without brothers and sisters or even parents at home. Fewer brothers and sisters to pester and play with inevitably led to screen time. It glowed, it went where you told it to and mothers and fathers weren’t even around to supervise.

The phone became an escape hatch for the desperate. A way to plug into something that staved off isolation and ennui. Share anger and confusion. Find fellow travellers walking the old road of “hate the other.”

Jobs didn’t foresee a time when families would go out to dinner and all stare at screens, children included. Or, maybe he did, since families had been watching TV over dinner for decades but now everyone could watch their own personal screen. Families didn’t have to talk to each other. Children could be pacified, aka ignored.

Did he see that along with the rise of Instagram, SnapChat, WeChat, WhatsApp, TikTok, texting and sexting, CDs and theatres, newspapers, live music and teenage sex would deflate under the onslaught of YouTube and streaming everything. Yes, the phone put everything in your hand, if you wanted it, and took down entire industries with it. Onanism is thriving.

Its camera destroyed photography as most knew it but, at the same time, put cameras in everyone’s hands. The daily violence and murder visited by police upon people of colour was now easy to capture. It even led to token prosecutions and maybe made some cops think twice. “You’re on Candid Camera.”

Jobs was a temperamental genius but not a fortune teller. Everything, it would seem, is fertile grounds for abuse and manipulation. The new science of microchips found a home among the less scrupulous who used it to bend and manipulate minds, take advantage of the lonely and alienated and cash in.

Communication between corporation and consumer became its raison d’être. Jobs did see a time when Apple would become avaricious and suck every penny it could from each and every convenience it added to the phone in the pocket.

A Korean car company’s ads open with the come on that you can start your car with your phone. Why a thousand-dollar phone is better than a five dollar key I have no idea but it’s a selling point. They suspect the phone is always in your hand.

Maybe Jobs did see a time the phone would primarily be a data mine and, if you let it, it follow you and your habits, could bend your will, waste your time and light up your dopamine receptors to addict you. Sometimes even if you didn’t let it. Those cookies do not have a cream filling.

News was not only news anymore, it was click bait, the more sensational the better. Death and destruction never felt so good. Moment by moment, day after day, year after year, the outrage of the moment was with you, no printing presses or delivery trucks needed.

No one who could pay the monthly bill ever had to be alone again. Not crossing a street, not out for a moonlit stroll, not in your bed at 3 a.m.

But, it’s still a phone. A camera if you want. A half-assed library. Guns kill people if someone pulls the trigger but they’re designed to kill people. Smart phones were not designed to eat your brain. You have to sign up for brain eating. You can turn it off, you can use it as a coaster, you can read headlines. Or you can climb into it and spend your life in the apps as they suck up your time and your data – what do you read, watch, where do you go, what do you buy, like, do, etc.

Revolution is in the air. People are switching to stupid flip phones, minimizing their screen time. Some have refused to plug in and turn on. A man I know says he’d rather kill himself than own a cell phone but there are less extreme methods to prevent brain damage.

You can fight back. Buy refurbished phones for a fifth of the price of the latest and greatest and sidestep the incursion of AI that wants to learn how you talk, think, look. Fight the incessant demands to upgrade, update, install, sign in, etc., which brings you closer to planned obsolescence, bigger monthly bills, a newer model and newer operating system to screw with your head.

It’s just a phone. You can order a pizza with it. Or turn it off and read a book. You can read texts and email later. Call back whoever leaves a message later. Talk to your family at the table or in the living room. Call a friend instead of text, email or WhatsApp them.

Save your dopamine.

It’s just a phone.