We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.
[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.
Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)
Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?
I think the main difference is that the Hi-Fi set isn’t trying to make money from your attention.
I think a distraction free device starts with the network in is connecting to. Maybe a phone that can only do the Gemini/Gopher thing for web access.
Leave it face down on the table with mute on, then it doesn’t affect what you’re doing unless you keep picking it up to look.
Put it next to the large red button with the label ‘DO NOT PRESS’, I’m sure it’s going to alright and nobody will touch either.
Did anyone really want to get rid of the headphone jack? No, and yet it has vanished and we were told it was because of “courage”. Usability without a data plan, usability without an online account, sensible battery life, replaceable batteries, headphone jack, an OS that doesn’t spy on you, and a usable internet that isn’t all vying for all your time are all things that are long gone. This raises the question as to why these options are gone.
There are core problems: smartphones created to be indispensable and the psychology of modern era is effectively to follow the path of least resistance. As such, the entire concept of personal responsibility has been lost in it’s entirety and deemed too inconvenient to deal with. Why do you think people keep using Windows/Facebook/Google/smartphones despite the ever-expanding enshittification? At total lack of personal responsibility because making any sacrifice is one sacrifice too far.
There are two realistic options: abide uncompromising greed of corporations or reclaim personal responsibly and choose a less convenient life. People who try to have it both ways either have unusual resolve or fall victim again to their own foolishness. It’s usually the later.
See, Elliot, THAT’S how you do a rant.
You know, in the past i thought that “total lack of personal responsibility” is the problem as well. After working some time in gambling industry i don’t think that anymore. The whole thing is about addiction. Gambling is about making you addicted to it, intentionally, and because that causes harm to society, it is regulated in many places (or outright banned). There are things you can’t do as a licensed gambling operator as that is deemed “too addictive” and therefore too harmful. Now i see the exactly same patterns in variety of social networks and online games. The difference is, they are not regulated at all. Their goal is the same, to make you addicted, and it is also harmful – any addiction is. But there are no limits to what they can do. So it is not about “one sacrifice”. It is deliberately designed to “hack your brain” and make you addicted.
One example – i like youtube, i go to that site and watch content i like. Sometimes in the past youtube started to offer me “shorts”. First i was not interested. Then i decided “let’s take a peek what this short content everybody is talking about is”. At first i was not very interested, than one day i lost 4 hours scrolling through the shorts. I was not happy at all, completely wasted time, yet it happened. Why? It is designed to be addictive. Was it my fault? Yes. Should this be like it is? There is a reason society regulates addictive substances and behaviors (gambling is not a substance) for a reason.
TLDR; it’s not about “convenience with a price tag” any more.
Yes exactly my thoughts. Obviously a certain amount of personal responsibilty is always necessary, but the conversation is a little more complex now than just “put your phone down.”
Especially when nearly EVERYTHING seems to require a phone.
+100
Mobile OSes also seem substantially stacked against the user; despite clear historical examples.
Email, say, is something that you can’t really pretend to be serious in offering without spam filtering. Some services offer more control than others; or more detailed configuration than others; but it’s treated both as a baseline requirement that it be present and a fairly serious deficiency if it gives the user no recourse to deal with false positives.
“Notifications”? Haha, you’ll get limited or no control over whatever the vendor decides are ‘system’ notifications; and per-app binary on/off for everything else; which will end up being mandatory-on in a lot of cases because an app can tell if it has been denied notification privileges and refuse to work until it is given them. They’ll obliquely acknowledge the deluge by pretending that ‘AI’ summarization of notifications is what you clearly want; but notification filtration at even the level of a mid-90s email account? Not a thing; and not something the OS security model will allow you insert without fairly radical surgery.
That’s the sort of case where it is undeniable that the vendor knows there is a problem and knows that there could be at least a less worse solution; but nope; AI summaries or nothing; sucker. No filtering rules, no ability to lie to apps about whether notifications are being delivered or not. No ability to tell iOS that you don’t care that an icloud backup hasn’t been made and dismiss the little red warning icon you see every time you go into settings.
I filter out shorts with u-Block Origin on my phone and laptop.
Certainly a bit of both – as if you know what is going on you do have personal responsibility on if you engage with it at all, and how you use it if you do – folks go to Vegas with their mates for a bit of fun once or twice in their lifetimes or perhaps a decade vs the real gambling addicts that are glued to whatever their gambling suppler of choice is on the internet.
The big problem there is rather more IMO how much ownership and use of a smartphone is rather forced by so many things like Banks, so anybody that knows they have a problem with it can’t really stay away entirely, and the complete lack of decent education – just ban under 16’s under 18’s or whatever it is being pushed in you area (as seemingly everywhere is pushing for something akin to the UK’s online
safetysurveillance act) from basically everything on the internet isn’t a solution.Especially with the knock on effects that will drive all these kids and the adults to actively avoid the more known web that is stuck dealing with the nanny state and stumble around blind in much more dangerous corners of the internet. The solution has to be education, and perhaps like gambling more regulation on what the operators are allowed to do.
Most phones that arent apple or google still have the headphone jack and radio… I would never buy a phone without. Vote with your wallet and suppliers will follow.
“Most phones that arent apple or google still have the headphone jack”
Citation needed
Incidentally, what is also annoying is the massive removal of SD card slots on phones, all of them including Android brands are trying to kill SD cards.
Meanwhile they charge you extra because they ‘added AI’, which a great many people despise.
There’s profit to be made though, I see a future where they’ll offer a subscription for them to remove AI, if you don’t pay it will be reactivated.
I don’t know about most phones – I just don’t look at most phones that don’t have a headphone jack or SD slot, or a replaceable battery. So far I’ve always found at least one that has all three.
Maybe a bit extreme but interesting take.
Just one addition: Past smartphones were able to receive FM radio with any plugged in headphone cable (as the antenna).
This would still be useful during (large scale) catastrophes (what a wired plural) when the Internet/WWW or just mobile telephone infrastructure is down.
Mesh networking would be more useful that one-way broadcast, especially if the views of the entity controlling the broadcast are colliding with yours.
The controlling entities are still announcing what they are doing in such broadcasts, so it’s still relevant even if you don’t agree, you have to know WHAT you don’t agree with specifically, and know what they are up to.
“roadblocks on route X” is helpful to be aware of surely, or “we allowed a mega tank of hydrazine through town and it crashed and is leaking on the corner of x and y”
I thought about FM radio too, but then I realized you can buy gum-stick sized FM receivers that work for days on a pair of AAA batteries.
If I’m in cellular coverage, I’m close enough to home to not care about battery life, and internet radio works just the same because all the FM radio stations have online streams. If I’m outside of cellular coverage, or the cellphone network has gone down for some reason, then I’m probably going to want a battery radio anyways.
Aside from the behavioral psychology of ‘personal responsibility’ it seems worth noting that we are getting to the point where the pervasiveness of smartphones is starting to pull up the ladder on what ‘less convenient’ means.
The number of cases where there is literally no alternative is still modest; but it’s increasingly common to see instances where non-phone users are a grudgingly supported afterthought and dropping as fast as they can get away with; and you have a real problem if the parking meters have been replaced with some QR code and app nonsense and the kiosk someone was forced to add every block or two as an alternative is in shaky repair and you would prefer not to get ticketed or towed. Locations whose march toward ‘cashless’ is reasonably far along can provide many similar examples; especially for transactions where credit cards didn’t become well entrenched before mobile took over.
The payment cases are especially troublesome because those are the ‘apps’ most likely to demand one of the vendor blessed, cryptographically enforced, ‘integrity’ states; so your ability to work around them, even at your own risk, is quite limited unless you really want workarounds to be a full time hobby.
“She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor”
I’m waiting for the rant to start addressing this singing, dancing box we sit in front of all day, almost every day. Maybe tuned only to the HaD channel.
I hate everything about smartphones and mostly just use mine for two factor authentication or as a way to play the New York Times Spelling Bee (check our my open source version that plays the exact same game per day!) — I hate the lack of a keyboard, the ads I cannot block, and the proprietary incompatible nonsense and black-box data encryption of apps. A laptop is much prefereable, even though it is arguable more distracting. But I only use one when I decide to instead of carrying it around in a pocket, pulling it out every time it make a sound.
Use the web sites instead of the apps, and use Firefox with uBlocks Origin to block the ads.
No ads on YouTube, no ads on Reddit, no ads on most any site.
When a site wants to set cookies, open it in a private tab and let it knock itself out – all that shit disappears when you close the tab.
The internet doesn’t have to suck as bad as everyone says. You just need to make a little effort to block the shit from the enshittification.
True, but also false for many as the website generally won’t work on a mobile device properly as it goes ‘oh you are mobile, have the mobile version’ or these days ‘oh you are mobile, don’t you know our app gives you a far better experience’ pop ups…
On a real computer you still have enough freedom to do as you suggest and have things work, for now at least. But still a game of cat and mouse.
Nah, just fake the browser User-Agent…
I have pretty much all my notifications turned off. I get phone calls beeping at me but I get those so rarely they usually do require my attention. Social media notifications are completely off except for DMs which show in my car but are silenced. The only other audio notifications are things like people detected at my front door.
I use ringtones to distinguish calls and texts from those I know from the vast wave of unwanted texts and calls. Special ones for friends and relatives . Specific group ones for Dr/dentist, car mechanic, rescue groups I work with, etc .
Not perfect but keeps the crap down to a dull roar
I have to check if my wts t-shirt finnaly arrived or not.
RE: “… the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver…”.
Boomboxes didn’t have the ability to have the equivalent of a Cray computer behind them. They had very few functions and were not upgradeable to much more beyond that. Their original function was mostly audio entertainment, perhaps some news/weather feed (am/fm radio) and that’s about all they were good for. Some rare boomboxes had built-in TV receivers in addition to the standard AM/FM, and also received the analog over-the-air TV sound, and some (mostly international kind) had shortwave band, which at the time was about the equivalent of connecting to the world outside, albeit, one-way only.
Also, the boomboxes that were capable of recording from a builtin microphone could potentially double as a dictaphone, and the ones with two mics could record in stereo in tinny unimpressive sound. Some boomboxes had clocks and alarms (and some had clocks that could read time aloud), and I own one that has a phone jack for connecting to a landline and record the conversations; unsure if it could double as the answering machine, probably not (though it would be hilarious to use one playing some kind of random tape as the outgoing message :] ).
Then there are “emergency radios” with the flashlight built-in, weatherband included, some have cheap thermometer and/or compass and/or clock, and some still include shortwave radio band (though, I am not exactly clear for what purpose, since most shortwave stations of interest by now had been shutdown). These are still sold in many different variants, few can serve as a power bank for charging a cell phone ( : – ] ) and some have bluetooth.
Luckily, one still can receive things like time signals and weather reports (US/Canada), but that’s about the only usable things left over the air, maybe spotty news from the few remaining places (Boston, NY, Toronto, etc) that kept some of their stations working, or local driving conditions and road closures. All of these are quite inefficient when compared with anything delivered through the ordinary phone, one cannot skip forward has to patiently wait for his/her part of the usable information/data to slowly rewind. The bandwidth of this is very limited and HAS to be scaled down to its absolute bare minimum.
Point being, the two, boomboxes and cell phones, are vastly different kinds of apples and oranges. I have yet to see a boombox concept that could serve as, say, general ledger, or measure one’s blood pressure, or show driving directions, or do Tarot reading : – ]
Cell phone is a relatively new invention, since phones as invented 100+ years ago were connected to a landline (and were mostly electric units – electronics were added fairly recently). It is one of the first times in the history of the humans that they could carry an equivalent of a Cray computer in their pocket, which is another experiment (in addition to unlimited and free access to any kind of information on the internet) that has never been done before, so there, your guess is as good as mine, ie, nobody knows for sure.
Sort of, there were graybeards with mini CRT strapped to their glasses sending emails from a ‘twiddler’ keyboard (still want the glasses and twiddler, without the ads/AI and crap that current phones have become) from the 70s/80s. Saw a documentary about it with Alan Alda on PBS.
By and large people are not using it to compute, but to consume crap non-stop.
just wondering … was the word “popups” derived from german language by omitting the dash after the second letter?
maybe the joke is going over my head, but I’m pretty sure modern usage of “popups” is derived from being to lazy to press a shift key and reach the upper top row with the right pinky finger.o
ah, sorry … yes, the referred german words may not be common among not-native-speakers: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po?useskin=vector and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pups?useskin=vector first list entry
I simply do not allow my phone to notify me unless a human is trying to contact me, and during work hours only a select few humans. Which is annoying enough.
I do not install apps, not even FB Messenger since they depreciated Messenger Lite.
No “news” apps, no “weather” apps, no social media apps. I can reach all of those from the web browser, and I should probably switch to Firefox because it has “reader mode” so I can read without pop up videos, which are getting really really bad. I can speed read, but if I can’t get 2 sentences in before 3 pop ups “pop-over” each other your website is poorly designed. Tip: be less ‘in my face’, and more what I came for and I might come back.
As for Windows and Steam, I do NOT log into Windows, and I debloat the tracking. AI everything is become the new crap shoveled on us and I hope to avoid it. Every new phone I try to disable Gemini and Siri/Bixby ASAP. Oddly enough they were this >< close to being actually useful before they were dropped for the current crop of Large Language models. Aggregation of the lowest common denominator’s opinions is less than ideal. Garbage in garbage out. People also using AI for the dumbest things, like sorting 20 fuel injectors into 8 matched sets, very poorly. It paired low and high flow injectors, which on the surface made sense, but you could get a lot closer by throwing the outliers away to start with and grouping them all closer, which also gets you spares that are closer to the matched pairs.
The OS is important but the hardware is moreso. I see this effort as one of modularity. Physical switches for audio in, out, video, wifi, blue tooth, calls, gps, motion sensors/haptics, and sms.
At the OS level a full on firewall for applications would be a dream. Think like portmaster or even a pi hole. Make it user friendly so even simple people can control what their apps do or don’t do on the network level.
A lot of distraction comes from the trillion dollar effort to surveill you and recommend attention grabbing things to you. If you can combat that with an app ecosystem that doesn’t do that you win. News app, weather app, etc without tracking or data harvesting.
Physical buttons could be great but in practice would be terrible. In order to look sleek and modern, the buttons will be tiny unlabeled black-on-black, which means they will be almost useless for intentional control, but will still trigger unintended events at random times.
Some of the privacy phones have switches on them. They put them on the side of the phone I think.
My phone has a lot of spare real estate on the sides of it. I think it could work but it’s one of those things where you would have to actually have it in your hands to see. I think most people wouldn’t be flipping them too regularly though
For over 30 years my cassette deck would at end of tape switch to the recording input. Tape ends and radio comes on, that feature sold me on it!
A number of current android phones have a headphone jack, both Samsung and Motorola. Searching about FM radio I found nothing about my phone. I couldn’t find it in the phone till I found a search window in the onboard apps, it was that hidden away! Now I have FM radio on my phone, which takes having the cord plugged in for an antenna. It’s OK but not like my 80’s car radio crammed into chunky pocket sized case.
my everything device is still my computer, i dont use smart phones. when im out of the house, i like to engage with the world. the computer has its notification completely disabled. i keep my agency in the loop, and i maintain enough discipline to handle the important stuff at regular intervals. people complain about their nagging parents and then let their phone take over that role. it makes zero sense to me.
Are those a whole lot of things, or are they all fundamentally the same thing, “play audio, usually music”?
+1 for disabling notifications. When an app asks for permission, the answer is generally oh-hell-no, very rarely “yes but silently” and never “yes with noise.”
If something is not important enough for a phone call, then it’s not important enough for any other level of method of distraction.
I’m disappointed with the article, because “distraction” is a problem of convenience, and it’s a criticism that’s aimed at the faults of the consumer’s brain, whether or not there’s a number of products to block the distractions(which discussions often lead to). Surely one should be able to discipline oneself away from “distractions”, right? Right? Whereas TRACKING is a serious violation of privacy, and I care less about the pop-ups which every browser has extensions to block, and more about the tracking used to decide what pop-ups to bombard me with, and which companies are using it. Lately I’ve been collecting and fiddling with Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and family, Sharp and other “handheld” and pocket computers. They can be fairly easily restored and enhanced with hardware hacks, including adding WIFI (and presumably 5G and such with arduinos or whatev) I think this is a cheap and easy way to deal with “too many distractions” and cuts down on tracking my activities as well.
Also, I’m not sure if there are any formal laws governing the software engineering, but in the past, with most PS/2 devices relying on bit-banging to generate signals, we’re dealing with this quirky bi-directional protocol where the device acts as the clock master. Typically, that’s not a big deal since the PC side handles the clock. UART is inherently asynchronous, usually managing about a 2-3% clock rate deviation, but that can lead to keyboards that either don’t work well or have errors. You’d definitely need a scope or logic analyzer to check the timing. In the past (like early 1980s) a setup where an Amiga 1200 is controlling the house taking care of not just the X10, but also more indecent stuff like flushing the lavatory (could use Game Boy Camera to detect user presence…) These smart homes of the past could integrate sensors that use UART, X10 or plain old TTL. Anyway If the system follows open architecture principles, there’s a good chance the human-appliance interaction is a fascinating intersection of technology. Most people think just of retro gaming with the Amiga 1200, but it can be used to build smart home solutions that make living a bit more efficient and free of advertising.
Why would you go to those lengths for a home automation system these days for anything other than just for fun? You could just use a basic microcontroller or even an SBC and still have full control and privacy and be able to connect whatever type of sensor you want.
Privacy is a right, not a choice.
The problem is that control has been taken away from us. When I start my PC in the morning, I don’t fire up KiCAD, LibrePCB, Qucs-s, Octave, Blender, Inkscape, FreeCAD, openscad, LibreOffice, firefox, surf, chrome, etc all at once…I start them as I need them. On a smartphone, if it is installed, it runs after startup…if you force a stop, it will be restarted again at some point, either by the OS, or some other app.
You will always have people that actually “prefer” what a smartphone does to them, but for the rest of us, give us back control, and make a smartphone act like a standard desktop PC, then all will be well with the world again. I want to decide what runs, and when. I am not against smartphones…I am against how they are being used against us.
Of course if you are a Windows user, you’re all out of luck…double-whammy… :)
Indeed, though I don’t care if they are all restarted where I left off on a PC if it has the swap space and RAM to handle running smoothly and parking the inactive – as the desktop applications don’t as a rule scream for attention or have any other impact on the things I actually want to do right now. Where Smartphones its all notifications all the time if you have installed basically anything…