There’s a new iPhone. Again. Improbably, we are on the 17th iteration (give or take) of the product that single-handedly ruins our lives every day with incessant vibrations alerting us to some horrifying calamity, plus every song in the Bruce Springsteen back catalog. Coming up with new features for the never-ending information machines we all keep in our pockets isn’t easy, but this time, Apple managed to develop a big (or should I say small) one. There’s now a thinner iPhone Air, which is being marketed as the thinnest iPhone ever. These gadgets have never exactly been gargantuan, so it’s kind of like identifying the tiniest grain of sand in the desert. Still, people around the world are fascinated by the sheer lack of phone here.
Technology, design, and art are all trending toward a certain scarcity model, prepping us for a lack of bells and whistles, as though both your parents are unemployed and they want you to expect fewer trips to Disneyland. Life on Earth feels more and more like the experience of entering a Sweetgreen – beige, spartan and unobtrusive. Sure, iPhones haven’t gotten cheaper, but they have certainly gotten … lesser. The iPhone Air is so small, I feel like I’ll sit on it and it will slide seamlessly up my rectum, never to be seen again. For some, I’m sure losing your device inside your bowels might be a feature, but I think it’s a rather uncomfortable bug.
Social media is a big part of the problem but still a symptom of the same systemic issues that phones are a symptom off.
Modern Phones are pocket-sized personal computers that are heavily restricted in what users can do, heavily tailored to what consumption our corporate overlords want to maintain (social media being an example, predatory games another).
Just like social media (facebook) is near impossible to avoid because all your local businesses don’t have a website and only inform and communicate trough a social media page (thanks my partner still has an account) you cannot simply not own a phone because scanning qr codes is now often a required part of participating in society, often unexpectedly.
I still have Instagram but what I did that helped was to uninstall the app and just use the website as a pwa, no notifications or anything, now I can open it every few days to see the memes my wife sends me and see what local activities are happening in town