As a person who is gainfully employed on the web platform, it's pretty stupid of me to say "I prefer life before smart phones," because a tremendous amount of my income has come from developing applications and systems that you can't really separate from the introduction of phones and the proliferation of the internet to more people around the world.
Not that I make phone apps or phone websites or anything, but if the evolution of new computing technology ended in 2006, pre-smartphone, and the proliferation of the internet stopped at whoever had access in 2006 via a traditional piece of pre-2006 hardware (desktop/bulky laptop computer + landline internet), I don't really think my industry or job would exist in the same way that it does. It's a massive difference of demand and expectation. I suspect that's the case for a huge number of people at this site, as well, even people who don't work immediately in technology fields.
I think there are things that are bad about smart phones, but that there are things that are much more insidious that get tagged along with smart phones, but it's not really the fault of the smart phone..... just poor incentives. I think personalization/recommendation algorithms at large scale are insidiously bad for people. Those are largely made possible or profitable
because you have this little biomod device attached to your body 24 hours a day. It's the first thing you do in the morning, the last thing you do at night, you wake up at 2am and you turn to your little biomod device that may as well be attached to you, it's rarely less than 2 feet from your body at any time of the day. But there are things that are so, so so much better because of smart phones, the magic has just worn off because these things are part of every day life.
The most obviously "Good" thing is something we don't even notice. Most peoples's ability to work and earn a living was not thoroughly disrupted by the global pandemic. Unemployment peaked early on, and then quickly went back down within about a year. A huge, huge percentage of gainful employment was preserved and not-starving-to-death-destitute-poverty was avoided because of technology that's been introduced, honed, and perfect over the smart phone era of the last 15 years. You can try to say "well, http was invented 30 years ago" or "TCP/IP was invented 50 years ago," but the rate at which
everything shifted online for a huge plurality of the industrialized work force was only made possible because of continued technological development from 2006 to 2020. Everything is affected by it, at the most obvious level (like, almost no PCs came equipped with camera technology from the introduction of the PC in 1980 to the mid 2000s, and within 2 years of the smart phone being introduced,
almost every personal computing device [the phone] would be bundled with a camera -- that changes
everything), down to things that are hard for the everyday technology user to really appreciate, like logistics, optimization, latency, and like 1000 tiny things that are now part of
everything that you can't even really imagine otherwise
. I think our pandemic and post pandemic world, for industrialized places, is very different without the mesh of technology that accellerated with the introduction of the smart phone; this could have been a 1929-like two-decade collapse followed by an immediate rise of authoritarianism... And I don't think you can separate that cleanly, nor that most people (even myself) really appreciate it.
And this isn't even taking account of the things that are
obviously better today than they were 18 years ago. The things that are in front of your face. One of the most obvious changes is the rapid descent in drunk driving, which is pretty much entirely attributed to the ubiquity of ride share apps. Stricter laws against drunk driving were introduced 30, 40, 50 years ago, and you didn't see that much of a decline across most places in the US. You saw more drunk driving arrests, but fatality and crash rates were pretty stubborn, they'd go down, but not meaningfully or consistently. This changed among young people in the 1990s, it made a small impact as driving education and classrooms were more active in anti-DUI education, but the biggest, most dramatic drop city to city town to town is introduced when Uber, Lyft, and rideshare become ubiquitous. In major cities, NYC, LA, Miami, and elsewhere, the affects aren't as stark: Public transportation exists there, taxis exist. But in the smaller urban areas (~150,000 - 1mil) where there is no public transportation and little to no reliable taxis, and also where the majority of Americans live, injuries/deaths from OUI began their precipitous decline when mobile-based ride sharing became nearly ubiquitous --
in my city this was a 52% reduction starting in 2014, after being relatively unchanged from 1980-2014. It also introduced the first changes to the taxi industry in like 60 years. In my city, the taxi landscape in 2010 was the same as it was in 1970, but worse: cash only, racist, dangerous, unreliable. By 2020, 10 years later, everything changed. Electronic payments, app-based hailing, significant drop in bias serving passengers, instead of being a mob-run monopoly with no competition and no reason to change, they had to adapt.
This is an obvious-right-in-front-of-everybody's-face improvement, like something that nobody was able to meaningfully change for 60 years, to something that has changed dramatically in 10 years, and if you think hard about smart phones, theres hundreds of these case studies. That said, there's then the opposite thing: mental health declines, social isolation, sharp rise in adolescent/teenage/young-adult anxiety, etc. I don't think that smart phones are
all good, though my hostility is typically reserved most for personalization algorithms, but I think it's very easy and very lazy to say "smart phones are terrible and wish they didn't exist," just like "the internet was a mistake," and then you think about how that affects things tangentially to you -- like if we were still in the midst of a 1929-like great depression lasting 20 years and dramatic rise of authoritarianism -- or if you think about the things all around you but less obviously -- logistics of delivery, smart municipal systems -- or if you think about the super obvious things right in front of you -- the dramatic drop in OUI deaths/incidents... And I think it's a more balanced picture.
At the most basic level, this community most likely does not exist in the same way without the proliferation of connected computing, and so we're not even having this conversation. Maybe that's a good thing that it wouldn't exist, but we're all here discussing it anyway.
-- edit
Side note, I've been banging this thought in my head about the name "personal computer," and I wonder if in 100 years whether we'll really think of "The personal computer" in the same way as we do today. The Apple Macintosh was popularized in the year I was born, 1984, by the time I was old enough to have independent thoughts, I was in the midst of the PC era. Windows 95 was an
event that I -- a computer dork -- was aware and personally excited for. I came of age in the early 2000s at the height of the personal computer, for a person like me (white, middle class, American). But for most people in the US, and especially for most people in the world, the personal computer was not a personal computer, even in my white, middle class, American house in 1996, our personal computer was shared between the 5 people living there, and it was barely more personal than the household telephone or the TV set. For most people in the world it wasn't personal at all, you'd get online at a school, library, internet cafe. The personal computer was as
personal as an ATM machine. I think when we have time to distance ourselves from the terminology, we'll rethink the ubiquity of the
personal computer to the smart phone, and then, who knows, maybe even something scarier... your personal AI, or what ever chasm we're about to bridge.
