• Gammelfisch@lemmy.world
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    32 minutes ago

    Anonymous does have valid points. The devices and internet all released with the governments blessing, for tracking and spying.

  • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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    8 hours ago

    “There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so that you can have more of it”

    • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      Dating sites with the usual business model of pay-to-play have an incentive to sabotage long term relationships by not showing the most compatible people to each other.

      Corrupt states can use it to undermine assumed enemy states.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    Proved the underpaid math teacher wrong when they said we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket.

  • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 hours ago

    GPS, music, and I disagree about the camera. I’d love a dumb phone that could do GPS music and a camera and nothing else besides text and calls.

  • Freefall@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Yeah, none of that is the phone’s fault. That is like blaming fast food for being a fat ass.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      There is a legitimate comparison there. There’s shared culpability. Sure, you’re responsible for what you eat. But those fast food companies hire teams of nutritionists, psychologists, and sociologists, people with PhDs in their fields, and task them with developing the most addictive foods they can. It’s no different than cigarettes. Sure we’re ultimately responsible for our actions. But it does end up feeling a bit like victim blaming.

    • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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      17 hours ago

      Yeah it is totally the phone’s fault that this person is unable to date other people, that is their biggest problem with smartphones, not the Internet.

  • phx@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Ruined photography?

    Professionals or hobbyists can still use a proper camera but the old maxim “sometimes the best camera is the one you have with you” often applies and cellphones do fairly well in that regard

    • pingveno@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      And some phones have some excellent cameras. I’ve taken some pretty decent shots with my phone camera, like this one of a squirrel eating pizza. Without carrying around a camera literally all the time, I never would have caught that shot.

      Same with many of the abuses that we’ve seen caught on camera recently. There are some problems with videos that lack context, but authorities can’t just act with impunity in their face and expect to not have a camera in their face.

    • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      I think is more about how the smartphone and apps like instagram uses a bunch of filters and things like that.

      • phx@lemmy.ca
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        22 hours ago

        That part I can agree with. Plus the “AI editing” bullshit.

          • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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            20 hours ago

            I hate that people have taken to filming/taking pictures vertically

            We were so close to everyone knowing not to do that

            • nomous@lemmy.world
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              15 hours ago

              They changed literally to mean figuratively because the internet wouldn’t stop doing it.

              This timeline is fucked in so many ways.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Yeah. I am a new-ish hobby photographer and at the moment I have a 50mm lens for my Canon R10 (I will buy a bigger lens soon). The camera with its current lens doesn’t zoom well but my smartphone could sometimes take a better photo zoomed in depending on how I play with the settings, angle and lighting.

  • clarinet_estimator@lemm.ee
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    23 hours ago

    The problem isn’t smartphones, it’s capitalism.

    All of those things would have happened anyway in a different form factor because capitalism is just a race to the bottom.

    Except maybe UI design. That has been special in its enshittification.

    • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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      14 hours ago

      bad UI design is also because of capitalism, because the software companies can’t stand just having a working software, they must make some changes in some way and UI is a low hanging fruit.

    • nexguy@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I don’t see how we would have smartphones without capitalism. We’d still all be farmers.

      • redwattlebird@lemmings.world
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        17 hours ago

        Without capitalism, we’d all have the ability to swap out parts and create a phone for the purposes that we need. Some people want the best while others want the minimum, and most want something in between. Every part would be replaceable.

        With capitalism, we have planned obsolescence without the ability to repair or replace parts and every conceivable thing to reap more money off us and force us to continually consume.

        • nexguy@lemmy.world
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          17 hours ago

          I’m saying without the greed of capitalism we wouldn’t have phones to swap out parts. We would have very limited technology because the incentive to innovate is much less when you do it because you want to rather than earning extra resources to raise standards of living(greed). Not as many people will volunteering their entire lives to come up with new technology while living the same standard of living as a farmer.

          • redwattlebird@lemmings.world
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            13 hours ago

            I get what you’re saying but, respectfully, I think you’re incorrect. The field of science is not about capitalism but the goal of understanding everything around you. Aqueducts were not the result of capitalism. Russia won the space race. Innovations happen regardless. Capitalism drives innovation in specific directions.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              9 hours ago

              Also id argue that the creation of the smartphone is the result of market forces, which arent unique to and predate Capitalism by millenia. The bronze age collapse happened largely due to the collapse of the grand trade networks and markets that birthed the bronze age, most bronze age societies predate currency as we understand it outright.

              • nexguy@lemmy.world
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                1 hour ago

                Everything that happened before capitalism happened at an extremely slow pace. We might have smart phones without capitalism and therefore the industrial revolution… but how long? Centuries? Another millenia?

                • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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                  47 minutes ago

                  The reason things happened at a slow pace wasnt because capitalism sped it up by a particular amount, its because human knowledge builds on itself. Plus capitalism was borne from the enlightenment which was when a shit tonne of ideas that made the scientific revolution possible came to be.

                  Capitalism just happened to be the major economic ideology that was gaining favor, id actually argue that social liberalism and Republicanism was the major factor for innovation on a political level.

          • nomous@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            I’m saying without the greed of capitalism we wouldn’t have phones to swap out parts.

            This might be a hot take but I’m not sure we all need a phone in our pocket or that it’s inherently a good thing.

      • uis@lemm.ee
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        16 hours ago

        “When they say ‘there is no alternative to capitalism’, they do not make a observation. They make a demand. They demand to not think about alternatives.”

        You missed patch 1917 on eurasian servers.

      • clarinet_estimator@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        You know capitalism is really new in the scale of human history right? It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the 18th century that the means of production could be privately owned which then allowed for further speculative capital (stocks, land value, etc) to be equated to power.

        The people of the past weren’t inherently stupid. Plenty of scientific and cultural progress was made prior to capitalism being our economic model.

          • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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            16 hours ago

            Most were farmers because humans needed food, and food productivity was low before the age of industrialization. Not really sure what you are trying to argue other than it took a long time for enough progress was made to free humans to presue other things other than farming their land.

            • nexguy@lemmy.world
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              11 hours ago

              Capitalism incentivises rapid progress in all fields.

              I’m not cheering for capitalism, just saying it takes advantage of the inherent greed of people to quickly speed innovation. There would be no industrial revolution without capitalism. At least not on the short scale of just a hundred years or two.

              • uis@lemm.ee
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                5 hours ago

                No, capitalism only incentivises profiting.

                I’m not cheering for capitalism, just saying it takes advantage of the inherent greed of people to quickly speed innovation.

                Except in the end you will get innovations of greed.

                There would be no industrial revolution without capitalism.

                Wrong! Sadly, article is only in Russian.

                • nexguy@lemmy.world
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                  4 hours ago

                  Russia’s industrial revolution did not happen in a bubble. They did not invent the technology that allowed the industrial revolution, they took advantage of others inventions to take a very inefficient rout to the revolution. They have enormous resources and a vast population… yet it was much smaller capitalist nations that advanced much faster.

  • Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk
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    22 hours ago

    Ruined pointless but enjoyable arguments with mates in the pub. In the old days you could get a good 15 minutes of entertainment out of ‘Was it Matt Damon or Mark Wahlberg in that Three Kings movie?’

    Now some asshat with a phone will kill that argument in 5 seconds.

      • Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk
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        7 hours ago

        Yeah, but up to the point where you could have it on your phone, no-one took a copy of the Guinness book of records to the pub with them.

    • Destide@feddit.uk
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      18 hours ago

      There’s plenty of pub topics Google can’t kill. For example Would you rather have hands made of chocolate cake or an armpit that squirts cream?

      • Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk
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        7 hours ago

        That’s a complete no-starter though. Cream squirting armpits every day of the week. After all, I’d have usable hands to be able to harvest the free cream, therefore profit. Whereas hands made of chocolate cake wouldn’t be very usable and once they’d been eaten (and with my wife and daughter around they soon would be) I’m just left with the stumps. You’ve not thought this through. So. Armpits that squirt cream. Definitively.

        • Quadhammer@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Yeah we need more info? Do the cake hands regenerate because if so you’re basically deadpool at that point

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
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      18 hours ago

      They ruined clubs, too. The flip phone cameras were shitty enough to make it a non-issue.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Maps/gps navigation and being able to talk to someone across the world for free (provided you have an internet connection). Genz and younger millennials don’t know how expensive long-distance calls were back then.

    • x0chi@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      How calls were expensive…

      How music hobby was expensive and nowadays you got the world music collection for less than 10 euro per month…

      How we had to pay a few euros per movie when going to the video club to get a movie. And that would imply moving there to get it, moving there to return it. Nowadays I pay less than 10 euro per HBO max…

      How we had to get into a public library to get some info on something and always would come very short, specially on some themes…

      How electronic equipment was way more expensive and did way way less.

      And this… And that… And this… And that…

      • uis@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        How music hobby was expensive and nowadays you got the world music collection for less than 10 euro per month…

        Well, 0 is indeed less than 10.

        How we had to get into a public library to get some info on something and always would come very short, specially on some themes…

        We still have public libraries. For example scihub, anna’s archive, the pirate bay.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    I honestly hate smartphones as well, not because of any of what OP posted. On my PC, I can install whatever I want, including swapping out the OS. Most smartphones are locked down, and the few that allow alternative ROMs have huge incompatibilities w/ FOSS OSes (i.e. getting SMS to work is a bit spotty).

    My phone runs GrapheneOS. I would much rather use something else (e.g. PostmarketOS), but it’s the least bad option that supports all the features I need. I am still limited to Android-compatible apps, and developing for my phone is a lot more painful than any other ARM-based device because I’m stuck w/ the Android ecosystem.

    The end result is that I don’t feel like I truly own my phone, whereas I definitely feel that way about my PC. Yeah, my phone is convenient, and I don’t use most of the nonsense Anon is complaining about (I mostly use websites on my phone instead of apps), but I still generally dislike having a thing in my pocket that I don’t actually control.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      The end result is that I don’t feel like I truly own my phone

      You kinda/sorta don’t. Manufacturers saw an opportunity to create a closed environment around the tech, not unlike gaming consoles, and made sure it happened that way. It may also be a side-effect of smartphones emerging from the same manufacturers that made far less capable and less open devices in generations prior (think old flip phones and 1st gen cell phones). Just like with game consoles, DRM (coupled with DMCA advantages) and the attached walled-garden retail environment are the prime motivators there. Marketing and financing help make sure it stays this way.

      At the same time, providing a watered down platform for the masses did accelerate all the things OP is talking about. Phone/tablet apps make user interaction insanely^1 easy to do without any understanding of the platform its on. In contrast, PC’s do a great job of requiring some amount of tech literacy before you start. So most people that would be stymied by the complexities^2 in a Windows system or Mac can easily do all kinds of internet-enabled things, for cheaper, on their phone. It’s not a root cause by any measure, but I really do think that the commodification of software services in this way, has thrown gasoline on whatever fires were already burning.


      1. Note: not “insanely great”.
      2. I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You would be surprised.
      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        So most people that would be stymied by the complexities^2 in a Windows system or Mac can easily do all kinds of internet-enabled things, for cheaper, on their phone

        And this is what gets me. Just 40 years ago, you had to understand the whole system to use a computer, because your options were basically DOS or Unix. Apple came along w/ a GUI around then, but you still needed to understand things at a pretty deep level. And then there was Win 3 and later Win 95 and Win 98, and you still interacted w/ DOS a fair amount (I learned to launch DOS games from floppy).

        And people largely seemed okay with that and adapted.

        So when people get confused by our much simpler devices, I don’t think it’s because they’re complicated, but exactly the opposite. Everything is presented as “easy,” so anytime you need to do anything beyond the expected happy path of uses, it doesn’t fit and people give up. If people were used to interacting with the lower level bits periodically, they would probably just adapt.

        And the net result is that power users lose and larger orgs win, because people end up getting an app to do something they could have solved another way, which gives the app store even more money and shoves ads in the user’s face. It’s incredibly frustrating. For example, if I want to debug my wifi signal, I download an app that shows the signal details. On my desktop, I’d just run a command-line app that lists available networks by signal strength and whatnot, no app needed. Or if I want to test latency, I need an app on my phone, whereas I can just use ping on my desktop.

    • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Can I jailbreak a Samsung Flip 6 like this? If I do will I still be able to use my job’s Microsoft 365 stuff and authenticator? I know I could Google it but I’d rather ask an expert.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        23 hours ago

        I don’t know anything about Samsung’s phones, but you certainly can’t install GrapheneOS on it, since it only supports Pixeel phones, and I didn’t see a LineageOS build for it (and LineageOS is usually the best bet).

        Here are a bunch of others though, just in case you wanted to shop around.

        So short answer is no, but maybe there’s a longer answer. :)

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    There’s (mostly) nothing wrong with the technology. It’s the enshittification and profit motive behind nearly everything that’s the real problem.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      How do you separate the two? To me smartphones seem like the sort of thing that was always headed in a bad direction. It’s inherently a tracking device. Touchscreens are easy to use and intuitive but really slow and inefficient for most things that go beyond browsing/viewing content. It pushes you to get all your software from a centralized walled garden. If it weren’t for smartphones, the people who mostly only use smartphones probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the internet, and that would be for the best.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          19 hours ago

          Makes sense, though I meant that more in the sense of like, how can it be said that there is nothing wrong with the technology when it’s been designed around the profit motive.

      • If it weren’t for smartphones, the people who mostly only use smartphones probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the internet, and that would be for the best.

        Exactly. Eternal September was peanuts compared to smartphone connectivity.

      • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        How do you separate the two?

        A major change in how our economy works. No, I don’t expect this to actually happen in my lifetime.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      I think that having the convenience of an easy-to-use, always-online device in your pocket at all times is inherently addicive. The profit motive just compounds this issue on purpose to extract wealth, but it is more of a symptom of a larger issue.

      Humans, nor any other animal on this planet have ever existed in an era that they can be always connected to everyone in their species at all times; even having that ability at all is revolutionary and unprecidented.

      It used to be that the only people you talk to would be people in your local area, but now a significant portion of the percentage of people that an average person is likely to encounter on a daily basis is via means where their real character is hidden behind a carefully curated mask.

    • sloppysol@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yes, but you can’t discount the human affects that ease the transition. Smartphones made bite sized pieces of attention way more accessible. And ease of access to distraction/dreams away from the reality we all live in is what I mean, I guess, by accessibility.

      Disregarding or summarizing the above: Why can’t there be an objective reality each of us can depend on to relate to eachother with?

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    23 hours ago

    What do you mean “is there anything good about smartphones at all”? It made a ton of money for Apple and its shareholders, that’s the only thing that matters. Who cares that it caused anxiety in a whole generation and ruined social life?