> All of these things are—at least in my opinion—unalloyed goods. Sure, many of these things are nice, but phrasing them as "unalloyed goods" I think it extrem

> All of these things are—at least in my opinion—unalloyed goods. Sure, many of these things are nice, but phrasing them as "unalloyed goods" I think it extremely one-sided and comes only from a techno-centric perspective. You don't have to be a Luddite to actually consider downsides of the things you mentioned and upsides of their alternatives. • ride-sharing apps Call a Taxi, ride a bike, get a ride from a friend, walk. How is a ride sharing app an unalloyed good on a glorious day for a bike ride? • WordLens (and its incarnation in Google Translate) Effort put into foreign languages "the hard way"--study, recall, practice--actually strengthens your mental capacity, rather than being spoonfed answers by an AR system automatically that never leaves space for you to grow, never challenges, and instead treats you like a complete know-nothing, which you will remain if you fully rely on it. Learn some language! It's fun! • password managers and TOTP 2FA (and mobile cryptocurrency wallets, if you like) I am not sure how a password manager is an unalloyed good? It allows you to have more accounts and more passwords and not remember anything, but it presents a security risk... • podcasts Radio. Books. Talking to people. • maps with buildings and travel-times on them, and solid public-transit routing models Learning the streets, navigation skills, learning how to read a bus timetable, asking people, talking to people on the subway--asking for directions!!!? • competent voice-recognition (and thus the leaps-and-bounds-better accessibility for blind users we have today) People are pretty good voice recognizers. Who do you want to talk to and what for? • the eBook ecosystem You got me there. Books are heavy. • DSLR-quality phone cameras • VoIP apps (and thus, the commoditization of cellular providers) I dunno. People pretend like phones didn't exist before mobile phones. There used to be such a thing as payphones on many street corners, if you really really needed to call from somewhere. Hotel lobbies, bars, your friend's house, etc. • streaming video-service mobile apps (and thus, demand for 4G cellular infrastructure) For what really? I mean, so you can ignore everything else around you? I don't get it. Why do you just assume this is so much better than the real world? It just isn't!