Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can't reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google's camera bar and apple's lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn't want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn't think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

And I'm one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It's ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because "it costs too much money." It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. "But that doesn't scale to all of our employees and contractors." We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what's more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don't even think there's any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don't even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.