I don't mean to pick on you but this is a common platitude and fallacy: > I think it's increasingly hard to live without a phone or without a smartphone. Ma

I don't mean to pick on you but this is a common platitude and fallacy: > I think it's increasingly hard to live without a phone or without a smartphone. Maybe for you, for the set of choices you have made in life. When I see this sentiment I smile a little because I have a Nokia dumb phone that I use only a few times per week. The less I use my phone the easier life becomes, quite literally. To address the examples you give; In my town there are amazing restaurants all along the beach where we pay cash, know the waiters by name, you can still go out safely and date people you meet, and we have record shops that sell vinyl and CDs. Sometimes I like to go for days without a mobile phone at all. (And in case you're wondering, my life is filled with many heavy responsibilities that I manage in other ways) With the greatest respect, I see a fair few HN comments that speak to parochial lifestyles, with sweeping statements like: Everybody does this Nobody does that now What people want is this <thing> is inevitable <other thing> is ubiquitous now Sweeping statements generalised from limited personal experience and quite narrow horizons make me think "That's will make these people consumers not innovators. They accept what they are given". > But maybe this is just the march of technology. It's not the "march" Armies and ants march. It's the "flowering" or diversification of technology. Some people are using technology in different ways than others. Which is what we'd hope for and expect from a liberal democracy, right? If we wanted everybody to do the same, think the same, and buy the same, we'd vote for communism surely? Or are some digital technologies ushering in a form of communism on the sly?