This is an interesting perspective considering how many people are taking "wellness breaks" away from these devices, and mental health issues have come up due to the obsession with using these devices.

What's next, saying I'm antisocial for maintaining personal relationships outside of "social media" and calling it harmful to myself because I'm not a doomscroller?

Relying on an easy and available substitute cripples your mind and makes you dumber.

This creates a situation where you could use radio interference or DDOS 30 points of IQ out of the population instantly.

1% drop in a 19 year age range and you write an entire opinion article about it with an obvious slant towards smart phones?

Why do people care what type of phone others have? Tracking? Missing out on that ad revenue or information gathering?

Slashdot needs a "stupid news" section or "pointless news" section.

Shit post.

"Interference with my phone is like giving me some brain damage," Clark told Wired. He expressed concern about the dumbphone movement, calling it "generally a retrograde step" and warning that as smartphone enmeshment becomes the societal norm, those who opt out risk becoming "effectively disabled within that society." Clark described this as "the creation of a disempowered class."

Well, if I wondered what the stupidest thing I'd read on the internet today was going to be, I'm pretty sure now.

Some nobody "philosopher" pulls some gestalt-mind-theory out of his ass about smartphones making us part of a meta-consciousness (mainly because he apparently has connection-anxiety) is ridiculous.

Haidt, et al, are doing really important, interesting, compelling work showing that for all the utility smartphones provide, devices like this are doing literal cognitive and emotional damage to young people. A vast array of negative social markers from loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide all SURGING coincidental with widespread access to smart phones.

Certainly young people are more vulnerable, but to suggest older people aren't being harmed in similar (but likely less deformative) ways would be unlikely.

Smart phones are FANTASTICALLY USEFUL. No question. But I can speak for myself that a good chunk the broad breadth of knowledge I used to have in my mind I now have to look up (that could be senility, too). Who even knows their kids phone numbers anymore?

To insist that people who want to get off the smartphone ecosystem are somehow impaired or dysfunctional itself flies in the face of a growing body of research the other way 'round.

I remember back in 2005 (and before that as well) about 2 years before the iPhone launched .. people were getting +5 Insightful for posts that said we need to have a separate device for everything and smartphones are a dumb idea without utilizing any brain cells thinking that tech would get better/improve. And this was SLASHDOT .. supposedly tech people,. The same fools who today argue against full-self driving cars, AI, robotics, and satellite broadband services.

Reference .. against smartphones:

[1]https://har [slashdot.org]

[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163341&cid=13644435

> admits long-distance friendships have become "nearly impossible to maintain."

I guess nobody owns those "computer" things anymore...?

What Clark seems oddly sanguine about is the fact that a smartphone isn't just yours. It has a variety of masters, some you've invited in deliberately and voluntarily, some which were only ever a bargain you felt forced to take; some which are baked in from the factory and effectively unremovable without nontrivial expertise.

The most obvious ones are screaming for your attention and demanding engagement from whatever notifications area your OS of choice (all of 2) provides. The slightly less obvious ones

I really don't know where to begin to respond to this nonsensical article. But somehow, I managed to live about 75% of my life without a smart phone (and indeed, probably 60% without a mobile phone) and my cognitive abilities are OK.

There is one kernel of truth in the article, though... it's getting harder and harder not to have a smart phone. For example, if you want to see a concert, a lot of venues require you to have the Ticketmaster app for those annoying mobile tickets with the moving blue bar. Th