Originally posted by GI_Jack
View Post
I understand your frustrations, believe me. I'm not a fan of what the smartphone became. I'll make the argument, its less the phone, and more what is on it. Most of the issue is social networking, and a lot of apps that connect to these monolithic large companies. The ethical lapses can in fact be tied to what made these companies so big.
I can believe companies or CEOs are evil, some of them anyway, even if just by random distribution. Whatever. I just have a hard time believing something as simple
as a corporation can be so clever to mastermind such a mess (I'm not trying to excuse them or diffuse their responsability because once the results are evident they still have the option to just stop their business if they can't fix it). Maybe the results would emerge just from the combination of connecting people beyond their cognitive abilities, offering them pocket computers as cognitive prosthetics, and not giving them the ability to "grow" those prosthetics themselves as they can "grow" their brains, but instead making them dependent on others. That is, if you allow borrowing marxist terminology, "alienating cognition, by separating intellects from their means of intellectual production". You can argue that any computer would do that, but I think the amount of time a day you live with or without a computer can change how dependent on your cognitive prosthetics you are. And mobile device make prosthetics available constantly, leaving no time to grow natural capabilities.
Free software should change something, in that it distributes better the capacity of "growing your prosthetics" yourself. But you still need phone hardware with very centralised production, and unless some big changes in efficiency come around, complex enough services as backends that it may not be viable to have the systems and the administration at home to run them. The software complexity itself makes it hard to keep on top of things even with 100% free software, but it improves much from anything else. It improves parity (no discrimination on who or how many people can undertake the effort to handle that complexity). And it improves knowledge diffusion, fuzzying as much as possible the distinction between users, admins and developers, so that it's harder for ones to impose on others. Maybe the main advantadge is not security, privacy or quality, but just being able to better learn software from free software, and those doing so improving the understanding in society of the compromises involved in each use of computers, or just eroding the blind faith in screens and enabling critical thinking on computing.
Is that enough to offset the connection overload, distractions and trapping people in internet disregarding their immediate environment? Are these factors more or less neutral (maybe just catalyzers for faster change, not necessarily for worse changes than otherwise) and the bad results are just from the abuses of current popular software and service providers ? Maybe. I don't have the expertise to argue it convincingly enough. But I also don't have so much faith in humanity as to think it'll be just fine when free software takes over smartphones.
I for one, love a device that intergrates
* Comms, and is internet connected and will run any comms I need. VoIP, email, signal, phone/txt, IRC, jabber, email, whatever other protocol I use for communications is now mobile.
* Comms, and is internet connected and will run any comms I need. VoIP, email, signal, phone/txt, IRC, jabber, email, whatever other protocol I use for communications is now mobile.
But yes, it has benefits too, and as long as the software makes it easier for the user to control when, how often and how much of their attention the phone requires, it could be manageable.
* Music player. Walkman and CD player are yesterday
* Radionav/GPS - never lost
but in general I'd said it gives more freedom of movement than it takes.
* Quality Camera/Camcorder - lifes precious moments you are never without a Camera.
I'm a bit worried of the society resulting from people constantly self censoring because they can be video recorded at any moment, so never
really feeling able to let themselves go because someone could take a photo of silly them that can ruin their life later on. I mean silly things,
not crimes. It's like when you can't deviate from norms in silly things you cannot evolve to something outside the norm, which could be terrible but could also be inspiring or just good.
Also a bit worried about people overobsessed about how they look as if they married every single day or something. Might or might not be related to having
a camera always on hand (and others too).
So sure, it's convenient to have a camera when you need it, but it is convenient that everyone and their dog have them too 24/7 ? Bufff...
* PDA - Notes, Calendar, and my address book is never lost.
Before, that would be easy $1k worth of devices replaced that would be bulky and awkward to EDC all of them.
But I don't mean to say smartphones are not useful. Your preciousss obviously has to offer you some power
in order to in the darkness bind you. But from casually following more open projects to develop phones it looks
like these highly integrated devices imply too much complexiity, and the cost to develop them might not be sustainable
without the privacy invading, advertising, short lived security, dismal repairability, and programmed obsolescence.
Or maybe it just needs a better ecosystem, more time to evolve it, less hardware variability, more critical consumers...
I'm speculating too much.
Facebook abuses your freedoms. Free Software would fix that. Almost completely. Because it was Free, it'd be more transparent, and easier to duplicate and create clones in case it became too evil. It would never get to be so big because it would have never made as much money. A free app would either not spy on you, or someone would just strip out the spy features and re-release it. If it was Free, than open specifications would allow anyone to write a 3rd party secure app.
I just named Facebook because I thought was the easiest to blame, not because I thought other desocializing networks are sane. My point wasn't so much to
criticize here the desocializing networks but to wonder how much the constant influence a mobile device affords them harms people. It was more like "there
are bad things out there, maybe we don't want to live there all day" than "look how bad those things are".
One of the biggest failures of social networks, is advertising, the carrot with lots of $$$ that encourages the abuse.
But I still fear any means that makes people always more connected with distant people in cyberspace than with the human beings in the meatspace around them.
Being occasionally connected with many people in many places is good. Taking all of your time to talk to people you like better than the stranger next to you is
about the opposite of being social. Being always alone is bad. Being never alone (or only when out of battery) is also bad . And I'm here talking to you inter alia because I'm no extrovert. Otherwise I'd be in the nearest cafe meeting someone. But the OLED illuminated zombie faces out there in the tube (underground, metro, U-Bahn, colectivo?) are just weird. Not sure it would look better with just a GNU head logo in the projected screen on their forefront.
Anyway, I don't really know how it would be with free software in mobile phones and federated services, maybe if people are clever enough to switch to free software they'll be clever enough to unzombie themselves. For today I'll just have a bicycle ride to lunch with some old friends (and their smartphones), so I may not fix the world just today either.
Best regards, long live free software, and thank you for your valid points on the bright side of cyberlife.
Leave a comment: