I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity. * There is something addi

I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity. * There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform. * They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process. * It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos. * They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way. * They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention. * They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation. * They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model. * The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing. * Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy. The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit. All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system. If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.