> iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste. To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled a

> iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste. To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled around. I would tend to agree with you about the rest; the internet didn't strike the average person as very useful, or at least as revolutionary as it did with the advent of the smartphone. Arguably the iPhone was the mainstream breakthrough there. But this is what kills me, and you said it yourself: "It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life." That was a good thing when the titans of today's web didn't employ armies of psychologists to hijack your attention to sell ads, inadvertently destroying the fabric of society. I don't have to tell the HN crowd how algorithms tuned to increase engagement blindly steer us toward outrage and division. I recently posted comments about how I went from the Apple ecosystem to as open source as feasible. Nowadays the FairPhone only does duty as a GPS (hardmounted to my car). I have to be able to receive phone calls so I still use a Nokia, but it lives at home as much as possible. For me personally, the total invasion of every aspect of life by the internet, and more specifically the tech giants in Silicon Valley, has killed all the joy and excitement I used to feel at the bleeding edge of tech. The bright-eyed sci-fi future turned out to be just another avenue for greed. It's just a laptop now, and a gaming PC for the (very) occasional game with friends. If my house burned down with those in it, I doubt I'd feel loss.