Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
The most ridiculous part are services insisting you install an app when everything their app does could be in a progressive web app. PWAs are less work to develop as they can run on any device with a browser. For fast food and clothing brands especially, I think PWAs are a no brainer. (Unless you want to track your customers coughTimHortonscough)
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
Relevant meme…
It’s a media art piece by Mark Vomit.
Yeah. Restaurant I was in about a month ago. You need a phone to order, to pay, and to see the menu.
You can almost imagine the conversation
Boss: so we will move everything to app based
Underling: but what about people without cellphones?
Boss: people without cellphones have no money.
As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you’d need still exist. You’d just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions… But you could do it.
What’s interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
I’m having to work on a safety plan for a trade school. There is no good way of establishing communication across campus in the event of a disaster outside of A) Walkie Talkies or B) Cellphones. And honestly I can’t entrust faculty and staff to grab a walkie talkie in such an event. What I can trust is that they’ll have their cellphone on them.
Yeah but maybe a bit of our problem is people don’t get bored anymore. The feeling of boredom is an important one and we stuff it down with dopamine doping and doom scrolling. When I was a child, if I got bored I went outside, or I saw if my friend could play, or I got a toy out. Once smart phones came along suddenly being bored was just an invitation for Reddit— Lemmy— to fill in the void.
I’m glad that Lemmy is not as addictive as Reddit was. I want to be bored a bit sometimes. Boredom makes me do chores instead of ignore them. Or play with my kid more. Or go hiking.
I don’t imagine 80s kids would have said they had boring childhoods, just because they weren’t completely soaked up with phones demanding their attention 24/7.
My childhood wasn’t boring, but I was bored an awful lot. And I agree, boredom can be a great motivator. But I can’t say that I miss being bored.
The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.
We didn’t get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc…
But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It’s a camera, it’s camcorder, it’s a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald’s ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can’t do.
You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.
This kind of “single device that replaced an entire backpack of stuff” is why there are no computers in the Dune universe.
They would make the plots too easy to resolve.
The whole no computers thing in Dune never made any sense. The only difference between a computer and an industrial controller is scale, not kind. We had wood computers in the 19th century. Some of them are still operating.
Ok lets talk about sewage. To turn human feces into dirt we use stages, to move from stage to stage we use screw conveyors. Without computers how are you going to regulate the speed of it? When to run them? Deal with clogs? Report motor problems?
Nothing would work beyond about the 1840s. And yet they act like it does. Which brings me to my fantheory about Dune: Just assume everything is told by inbred religious royality morons cosplaying and it all makes sense. Why do they fight with swords? Why cant they fold space without spice and yet clearly could in the past? Why do they think the Bene witches have powers? Because they are religious royality morons cosplaying.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Deathstar plans
We did get flying cars. They are called helicopters. Impractical except for niche applications.
Look at the mofos you see only dealing with driving in straight lines on the ground and tell me you want them flying. Like a week ago I made the foolish mistake of honking (one honk) someone who cut me off and they got behind me just so they could rage honk and tailgate me for a solid minute. You want that guy with access to the ability to drop stuff from above?
touch grass lad
I agree, in fact let’s get rid of all technological advances humans have made in the past few hundreds of thousands of years. Man wasn’t intended to use “tools” like weapons or agriculture or housing or machine manufacturing. Our ORIGINS say we’re monkeys, we shouldn’t be walking on 2 legs or speaking like this! After all, social sedentary culture and technological advancement is COMPLETELY UNNATURAL and NOT AT ALL a core part of an ““intelligent”” species’ evolution! Ooo ooo aaa aaa
So, return to monke?
Turn Monke my friend Ooo oo aaaa!
A friend of mine has no smartphone (still an old Nokia mobile) and thus has no access to a train ticket in his state in Germany. There is no way of a non-digital ticket. That’s so f’ed up
I’ll tell ya, it’s getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.
I mean we quit reddit, right?
Does anyone disagree with this? My city gives out smartphones to people who can’t afford them because it’s cheapest way they can get access to city services. Much more efficient then having staff in an office to enter data and make calls on their behalf.
Which country is this in?
Do they also have access to public internet and public charging stations? What happens if the phone is lost or damaged??
I’m not 100% but they will replace the phone if damaged. I’m not sure about if it is lost. There is probably a cut off where giving out phones is considered worse than having social workers enter data for certain people. There is housing assistance which would include electricity. I suppose you could charge at city service points? The cell phone plan includes Internet access.
Modern life is difficult without internet access, but yet you can live without internet, the question is, how long?
One of my favourite books is Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers.
“The essential idea is simple: to lead happy, productive lives in a connected world, we need to master the art of disconnecting.”
Is that one of those things that only sounds profound because it presents a contradiction?
In order to X we must first not-X.
I have two personas. One with a google phone with FB (to talk to my mom to Greece), and a macbook. And another with a de-googled Murena eOS phone and Linux laptop. One of these two personas will die once I move to Greece next year. I don’t mind not being able to talk to friends on FB or IG. If they want to find me, there’s email, or they can join federated social media. I won’t miss them.
Thanks, I had never heard of Murena before. I’ve been worrying about what would happen when my Oneplus 7 Pro dies. I’ll get one of their eOS phones.
You could actually put Lineage OS with Micro G on your current phone and be living the dream, it is supported.
Up until long-covid and being over-worked kicked me out of a job and onto my ass for a few months, I was a caseworker for adults with severe mental illness for years.
Helping people get a government phone was a necessity if we were working on transitioning them out of their residential care facility into more independent living.
It was such a frustrating struggle for the Clients without phones… Reminders, telephonic appointments, me being able to reach them was so much more difficult if they didn’t have a phone. Even being in RCFs, the resident line was always busy or misplaced, and staff at those facilities are not always the most stellar employees…
When covid hit and everything went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible for my team and myself to reach our Clients without cellphones…
Cellphones have become so ingrained in society and are essential for access to not only normal community resources, but also essential for adequate coordination and access to one’s treatment team and resources.
It’s getting harder and harder to function in society without a cellphone. That trend will only continue. I don’t think it’s necessarily/inherently a bad thing; it’s the evolution of our society. But it certainly is a terrible thing if you do not have one…
As a society we place huge importance on reading and writing literacy yet forget that digital literacy is just as important. Having a cell phone is, like it or not, a pretty big part of being literate in this digital world. We don’t see people acting proud of themselves for not being able to read (at least I hope not), and cell phones should be no different.
“I don’t even have a smart phone” is the new “I don’t even own a TV.”
Right? It’s a basic expectation that you have a phone number for everything. Work, doctor, etc. But we still treat it like having a phone is a luxury, for entertainment and convenience. Buy it yourself and figure it out yourself!
Hell, even restaurants are more and more replacing menus with QR codes
Yeah… I commented to my friend “and a smartphone is a basic human right, right?” When talking about this. Well, internet is not, either so yeah, your existence is extra gimped or based on touching ground base if you’re homeless, phoneless and internet planless.
It’s about who gets to participate in society.
