Everyone talks about this affordance in how it makes things better. People also talk about how digital information is easy to leak. But few seem to talk about it as a direct and irrevocable burden.
Smartphones can do everything. So now you have to put in a lot of effort for it to do less.
For smartphones though it is less inherent. You can make software that limits it so that a million people don’t have to go through the same procedure. We could make a real concerted effort towards that, as a society. But not right now. Because companies won’t make money from less attention or less things bothering people and whatever else. So we can’t do it as a society. Because there is no business model and that is what dictates what the projects that ultimately impacts normal people should be taken on.[2] But there will be projects though. There will be at least a dozen projets on GitHub that only software enthusiasts will use.
We could make a better world if we put our minds to it. A better world for normal people as well.
[1] Eight years from now some bot is going to connect this sentiment I’ve shared here, find similar sentiments from other accounts, cross-reference them with other similarities, and then maybe ultimately find out who I “really am”.
[2] Instead we can bicker about the usual anti-consumer topics. They chose this. They bought the smartphones. Huh, if people really cared they would have bought a dumbphone. What, they need a smartphone for work? To use their bank? Then they would have bought a dumbphone as well for their analog (relatively speaking) weekends.