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Comment by stretchwithme | Hacker News Reader

You have no more need to use a mobile phone today than the Romans did. What you have is the opportunity to use a powerful tool that can save you a lot of time and provides unprecedented access to people and information.

The needs these devices satisfy have always existed.

If having a mobile device is worth more to you than it costs, you GAIN by having one. It's not a net loss to you.

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You're likely to have a tough time getting a job or going out with friends if you don't have a mobile phone these days, which would not be the case for a Roman. People don't exist in isolation, and if society is structured around the assumption that everyone has a phone, you could be worse off without one than in another society that isn't structured that way.

You can communicate using s cheap feature phone and a small plan. You don’t need a new iPhone to get a job.

Have you heard of Google Voice?

Requiring any kind of computer is no different.

Have you heard of public libraries? Or friends with phones?

In olden times, we had one phone number for our family. And before phones we had mail. There's are all kinds of ways to communicate, albeit slower than carrying a cellphone.

In olden times, other people expected you to use these other ways to communicate. Now they don't.

The fact that you can still mail a letter doesn't help at all when the other party expects something else.

Nobody has to use mail any more for many kinds of communications. That was just an example of how we addressed such needs before we had access to phones.

I can't recall my mobile phone ever entering into the process of obtaining employment. I guess if it were my only means of internet access that might not be the case.

No. Because it's assumed. Try being that weird person who can't receive an email or a $COMMUNICATION unless you're with your laptop on WiFi. You're generally assumed to have the normal communications channels at a job.

A cheap feature phone will do.

> What you have is the opportunity to use a powerful tool that can save you a lot of time

Big emphasis on "can", because usually they don't. Instead we get social media and smartphone addiction.

> You have no more need to use a mobile phone today than the Romans did.

Don't tell that to the 'digital divide' people

This is Not Even Wrong. I've addressed the question as Maslow's Smartphone:

There's nothing innate to the iPhone itself which provides for basic needs: water, food, shelter, clothing. It can play a role in the procurement or execution of task, but does not of itself provide them. Which is rather much the role of much of technology: it may allow us to reach theoretical limits imposed outside of technology in accomplishing a task, but it doesn't move those limits. Electronic engine controls approach but do not change Carnot's rule.

https://redd.it/2vwfb6

Moreover, by setting a new baseline of expectations for what people have and how they interact in society, a smartphone (or email address, or social media account) creates an effective barrier and set of essential fundamentals.

Karl Marx discussed this in the 1800s:

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning by this appellation to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life, and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.

Oh, silly me. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...

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