It won’t have escaped your attention that a kind of backlash against the smartphone is going on, in certain elite circles. That picture of schoolkids rivetted to their phones in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch went viral; in the Guardian rarely a week goes by without some columnist giving up her phone for Lent; and no lesser celeb than Simon Cowell just confirmed that he did it and it made him happier.
However, don’t expect me to come down on either side of this weighty debate. I’m not exactly indifferent to smartphones, but I’m far from being a dedicated or power user. I work at home and so still use a landline for most calls, and when out on the town or walking the green hills I use my mobile mostly for consulting Citymapper and listening to music on Spotify. This is not a case of Luddism: I was running the web on a Palm Pilot before the word smartphone was even coined, and used a Treo for several years before Steve Jobs’ bombshell burst onto the scene.
What it does mean is that I don’t fret about 'the notch', or curvy edges, or squeezy edges, or how easily fingerprints will wipe off my little jewel. I use an old HTC Desire from my provider-before-last which does me just fine: all black plastic I can stick it in my pocket without a case, it weighs nothing, it goes two days between charges, and if dropped it bounces. I rarely feel envy when I see someone flaunt the latest sliver of gleaming Peacock Blue sapphire glass, and was beginning to think this meant a lack of libido on my part. And then I read John Herrman…
I was browsing Medium when I came across a three-year-old article called ‘Shitphone: A Love Story’ and with that title, how could I not read it? Herrman - who turns out to be a prize-winning media reporter for the New York Times rather than some punkoid hacker - describes not giving up his smartphone, but giving up his smart phone, in favour of the cheapest no-name Chinese knock-off he could find. His article is amusing and deadly serious at the same time. In it he explains in clinical detail the phenomenology of living with a disgusting communication device, one that shames him in front of friends, colleagues, even waitresses. He unravels the psychic wounds that propel smartphone addiction: “The easy tactile pleasure of a nice phone makes you feel like you’re at the center of the internet, which is designed to respond to your desires.”
But that’s only the intro and he goes on to draw serious conclusions about the nature and life-cycle of the consumer electronics industry. Shitphone is just Poshphone of two years ago, (which is precisely what my HTC is). Shitphone is made from the same parts that Poshphone used to be. That’s inevitable because wafer fabs cost moon-landing bucks and no little Chinese bucket shop will ever be able afford to make its own chips. As Herrman put it: “Premium branded phones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design. Shitphones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design — minus a year or two.”
Branded phones are kept going (for now) by those ever-smaller improvements in usability that And here’s where things have the potential to turn nasty. Stunning advances in genetic engineering enabled by CRISP technology (see Idealog 284) mean that it will soon be easier and cheaper to consider modifying an animal to do some difficult job than build an android robot to do it, and once created these would be self-replicating. I don’t normally go in for pitching sci-fi movie treatments, but I’m very tempted by an update of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ in which the evil scientist, instead of chopping up animals and sewing their bits back together in different combinations, instead employs CRISPR to create a race of not undead but living zombies, which have sufficient intelligence to follow instructions but few emotions and no ability to disobey.
You may believe, as I’d like to, that we would recoil from such an immoral and disgusting invention and ban it immediately, but how sure are you of that? People are now seriously discussing the problems of unemployment caused by automation by robots, but the concensus nevertheless remains that it will happen and we’ll have to find ways to cope with it, for example a univeral basic income or similar. If the imperative to profitability leads people to aquiesce in that, why wouldn’t they eventually aquiesce to genetically-modified zombie slaves?
If you still object that it would never be allowed, may I recommend a book for your summer beach reading: it’s called ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. It explores the stuff humans have been doing ever since the 1400s, and are doing still, to maximise profits by rendering labour, money, food, energy, care, lives, and nature itself, as cheap as possible. Admit it, you’d like a zombie butler.
[Dick Pountain would still rather open the pod bay door himself]
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