Is the future a bit less digital?

If you’re roughly my age, that is: born sometime just before or around the turn of the century, you may just barely remember what life was like before the age of smartphones. I can’t even remember what I used my pockets for as a kid, aside from a velcro wallet with some coins. I’ve never been a gum or Chapstick person, I didn’t get a cell phone until my early teens, and I carried a housekey on a string around my neck.

When I was at home, I had access to a computer, and a game console with a couple of video games, and by “couple” I literally mean two or three games. The internet was a thing that meant that to connect to it your computer had to yell signals at other computers, and when it was connected, the home phone was not. Time on the internet normally had to have a specific purpose and it had a practical limit. When you were off the internet, you were off the internet. No notifications, no impulse googling, no doomscrolling.

Phones aren’t fun anymore

If we just let the cultural current carry us, we will end up with a smartphone that has countless different ways of contacting the same people, each app with some kind of gimmick and different etiquette when it comes to interacting with the people in your life. There are some people who prefer to use one app while others prefer something else, and an app that is popular in one country may barely get any use in another. We are constantly connected unless we make the conscious choice not to be.

I still remember when I got my first cell phone. I was around 13 years old, and it was a Sony Ericson W200. You could make phone calls, write texts, it had an mp3 player and FM radio, 27 megabytes of storage plus whatever Sony Ericsson’s overpriced proprietary cards allowed, some simple games, calculator and some other basic tools, slightly smarter than a Nokia 3310 but still rudimentary. The black slab phone currently in my pocket has the same or even fewer features than the one I had before it, which I only replaced because it had become unusably slow, the battery was degraded and stopped receiving updates years ago. It does all the smartphone stuff. That’s it. It’s a smartphone, you know them.

Smartphones have only changed incrementally for several years now, that change primarily being spec bumps, more cameras, and AI features. After years of interesting innovations that made you excited to buy a new model, buying a phone today feels more like a grudge purchase, something you just need to buy because your old one broke or became impractical to keep using.

At the risk of this becoming a “kids these days with their phones” kind of rant, I want to examine how our relationship with technology has evolved and why, and maybe give my predictions on where it may go in the future if I’m feeling brave.

The internet isn’t fun anymore

I was ecstatic when I got my first smartphone, which was small, bulky, and had a dedicated camera button, but it was something new that I felt opened up new possibilities. Suddenly I could easily google things wherever I was, watch YouTube videos, share images with my friends through social media and even play that one game where you flick crumpled paper into a basket.

Looking back, I don’t feel like I used it as much as a modern smartphone, at least not in the same ways. I played some games on it, but I wasn’t doomscrolling… yet. That was probably how I used my phone until around 2014, when I got my first flagship phone. It’s hard to get an accurate assessment of one’s behaviour that far back, but I think that’s when I first started actually using my phone for social media in a concerted way, scrolling until I felt like I’d caught up with everything.

I have never been a regular user of social media, but I still felt a sense of duty to those around me to pay attention to it. If some cousin that I hardly ever meet was suddenly getting married I was expected to learn about it through social media, mainly Facebook or Instagram. This I feel has cheapened human interaction in ways that many may not even realise. Do you really not want to see the look on someone’s face when you tell them these kinds of news? Not even second-hand? Catching up is barely necessary. You miss these kinds of meaningful interactions with people when you learn about their milestones when you’re sitting alone on the can.

J. Robert Sloppenheimer

In 2006, designer and writer Aza Raskin created the infinite scroll. The concept of never running out of content because the website or app you are using will constantly supply you with more of it. Raskin references a study in which participants ate from a bowl of soup. The control group just had a regular bowl of soup whereas the test group had a bowl that automatically refilled the bowl with more soup from a tube in the bottom of the bowl. Members of the test group ate 73% more soup than the control group without even realising it. Raskin has since apologized.

Late 2000s and early 2010s, social media sites started rolling out infinite scrolling as a feature to keep people on the platform for longer at a time. Before that, people would go through their chronological feed until they had caught up, and leave. But now you never catch up. You may see posts from your friends, but they are mixed in with posts from pages you don’t even follow, ads, follow recommendations, and posts the app’s algorithm thinks you may like.

In 2021 we got a peek behind the curtains at Facebook. A leak, now commonly referred to as the Facebook papers, showed us that they were trying to make products targeted at children to grow their userbase in the long run, had unsatisfactory content moderation in languages that were not English, and what I personally find very interesting: they made posts with the “angry” emoji reactions weigh far more in their algorithm. Considering that Mark Zuckerberg himself endorsed the use of it as a placeholder for a dislike, a lot of anger-inducing content was boosted by people who were voicing their disapproval towards a post. Facebook has since fixed this and made the reaction worthless in their algorithm.

The tech industry is not what it was

Smartphones were a massive boon for the tech industry, which has notoriously been reliant on products that have a huge, revolutionary impact, like the internet and iPhones, and almost ran itself into the ground multiple times as a result. If you create an industry that relies on the invention of something as impactful as the printing press every few years, then you’re going to have a bad time when progress plateaus.

Since smartphones became ubiquitous the tech industry seems to be scrambling to find a new vehicle for the same kind of massive growth that smartphones gave them. The next thing they jumped on was blockchain technology, which today is mostly used for grifts and money laundering. Meta, neé Facebook, poured billions of dollars into the Metaverse, something that not a single soul seems to care about today. The industry then moved on to artificial intelligence, which has in many cases been an expensive and power-hungry disappointment.

People’s device needs have remained stagnant for a couple of decades at this point. Most people have a phone, and they have a computer or a tablet. Maybe some people like smart wearables, but aside from watches those still remain a niche. A mobile phone became commonplace around the turn of the century, and while they have gotten more advanced, the base concept is still the same. You have a mobile device that makes you reachable wherever you are, and a bigger device that you actually do work on.

There are some fantastic journalists covering the bloated monster that is the tech industry, some that come to mind being Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At) and Molly White (Web3 Is Going Just Great).

Maybe the future is a bit more analogue

Lately we have been seeing a rise in young people who have an affinity for old gadgets and equipment. Kodak is expanding its film production because demand has gone up, vinyl saw a massive resurgence a while back causing some musicians to start releasing their albums in that format, and some millennials and zoomers are yeeting their smartphone in favour of an old school cell phone, now called a dumbphone.

I predict that some portion of people will eventually start to tire of the extreme connectedness that smartphones bring, because even though it makes communication easier, it still often feels empty and vapid. They will seek out more physical, tactile forms of media and communication. They will put more effort into things that technology has rendered near-instant, and they will love every second of it. While I deem this lifestyle unlikely to become completely mainstream, considering the hassle, it does seem to be a growing movement, and I suspect it will be a durable one.

From what I’ve said so far, it’s very understandable if you see me as a bit of a doomer. I’ve certainly been there, and it’s easy to get jaded.

We live in times of transition. Smartphones and the internet are immature technologies, and we are still trying to work out how our relationship with them is going to be. I criticize these things because I know they can be better. I’ve seen the good in technology, I’ve seen it bring people together, but I’ve also seen it abused by craven tech-bros who are willing to shatter the fabric of society to make a line go up. At the end of the day, “technology” is just a catch-all for the tools we use in our daily lives. How we use them will always be up to us.