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'Everybody is looking at their phones,' says man freed after 30 years in prison
- insane_dreamer 2y agoI own an iPhone and it's useful and a technological marvel (other smartphones too). But I strongly dislike and am saddened by this impact that it's had on society.
- jajko 2y ago[flagged]
- gjsman-1000 2y agoThis is too political for HN; and downplays any concerns regarding the alternative, that may have incentivized people to abstain rather than support either.
- xerox13ster 2y agoTrump was a reality show star, the other people were not. I think you made it too political for HN by bringing up other politicians and concerns about them that are irrelevant when talking about the effect reality tv has had.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoNo, it’s just a statistical fact. Trump gained 3 million votes post 2020; the Democratic Party lost 6 million. At best, you could say 3 million swung to Trump, and 3 million stayed home. Combine that with the first popular vote victory in 20 years (edit: for a republican candidate), and the quality or perception of the candidate is a statistically likely cause.
- radlad 2y agoHuh? Biden won the popular vote in 2020 and Obama in both 2008 and 2012. The only outlier was 2016. (edit: thanks for the clarification.)
- gjsman-1000 2y agoI was talking about Trump, who won the popular vote in 2024 (edit: The first Republican popular vote winner in 20 years), with 4 million less votes than Biden and 3 million votes more than Harris. If you think about it, the story is more about how badly the Democratic Party stumbled, than how well Trump performed. The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- radlad 2y ago> The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly This is true, but it doesn't invalidate grandparent's idea either. Maybe Dems should run a reality show star.
- tzs 2y agoNote that Trump won the popular vote by a plurality, not a majority. Biden had a majority as did Obama both times. Bush also had a majority for his second term.
- scarface_74 2y agoThe total number of votes don’t matter. It’s just the votes in the swing states. If 75% of the people in California stay home, it doesn’t matter. They only need to change policy enough to keep from pissing off deep blue states and to flip a few swing states.
- xerox13ster 2y ago
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago[flagged]
- codr7 2y agoJust wow, I would encourage you to retrace the steps mentally from this discussion to Trump, you might learn something.
- qingcharles 2y agoI just spent several months helping someone who got released after 40 years. He got used to smartphones very quickly. He'd seen them in movies and TV, and they have tablets in most prisons these days to download music and movies and do texting. Had to teach him how to pay with a debit card and PIN for everything as that wasn't a thing before he went in. Humans are very adaptable.
- idoubtit 2y agoIndeed, while still in jail, this man surely knew smartphones existed. And, of course, basic usage of a smartphone is easy; it wouldn't be addictive if it was hard. The point of this (low quality) article was that, after 30 years far from the usual life, the man points out juste 2 changes during the period: "Everybody is looking at their phones" and a 2023 wildfire. He knew people had smartphones, but I guess he didn't not know to what extent. It's a/the most important part of the life for many people. Last week, I saw a couple riveted to their screens while walking their dog on the river's edge. The woman didn't raise her eyes when she caught and threw the stick the dog had brought. I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention.
- kflgkans 2y agostick is life
- mingus88 2y agoYeah that’s true. Movies and TV would not be very engaging if the characters were doing real life stuff like walking around face down barely aware of anyone around them. So we depict this romantic view where the phone can do everything we need but nobody is addicted to it
- andrewinardeer 2y ago> I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention. I don't know how strong your prey drive is, but for me, chasing a thrown stick and returning it to the boss is good fun.
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- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 2y agoBillionares are the opposite of parasites (they're the host for parasites)
- moritzwarhier 2y agoBecause they create money out of thin air? Who are the "parasites"? People who work?
- RajT88 2y agoParasites can also have parasites. Just like predators can also be prey. Some species mutually prey on each other. All metaphors break down eventually.
- brnt 2y agoI was a huge nerd for having a PDA in primary school. I still am surprised every time I step in public transport and see hundreds of heads bent down staring at tiny screens.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoHa, I didn’t in primary school but people still thought it was nerdy. I had a Palm Tungsten T5 I used throughout high school. Mobile calendars and reminders were a lifesaver for me. I couldn’t organize myself on paper if my life depended on it.
- PixelForg 2y agoI don't know about others but I stare at my screen to avoid eye contact with strangers. It's not like I don't want to, it's that a part of me thinks that it is rude to be looking at others if you don't know them. Don't know from where it got instilled into my mind.
- Symbiote 2y agoLondon is famous for the lack of any interaction on public transport. Before phones, the most organized people would read books or newspapers they'd purchased. Less organized people would read the free newspaper, look idly at the advertising, or stare out of the window — even in a tunnel.
- jjgreen 2y agoThat's how you spot the tourists, they speak to each other.
- niceice 2y agoI heard someone say this last week and they never went to prison.
- rednafi 2y agoAnd didn’t appear on the front page of the orange site.
- ryandrake 2y agoI still can't get used to it. It's totally creepy. Every time I'm out in public, it feels like the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where 99% of the people have been replaced with alien, but physically exact, replicas. And they're all just zombied out on their phones. It's an addiction that's run through the population completely wild and unaddressed. Often dangerously, scrolling messages while driving 75mph down the freeway. I used to host movie night, but we stopped because 5 minutes into the movie people were just ignoring the movie scrolling Instagram. You can do that at home, guys, jeez.
- callc 2y agoStartup that movie night with the rule that all phones get stored away. You will have a good time
- dharmab 2y agoPhones go into a shoebox. Shoebox goes on the shelf. Everyone participates.
- joquarky 2y agoThen you face the fallout from the other silent epidemic: everyone thinks they have a reason to be an exception to the rule
- BowBun 2y agoI don't know if you feel this, but there's also a sort of social pressure where if I'm in a situation and everyone's on their phones, it's hard for me to start up a conversation with someone since they seem 'focused' on whatever they're looking at. So I inevitably take out my own phone.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI think a society was just not meant to be this connected. When a brain is this hyperconnected you get problems and the world hyperconnected becomes sick. >A hyperconnected brain is a brain with increased connectivity between regions, or hubs. This can be a response to neuropathology, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia. >Hyperconnectivity in the brain can contribute to epilepsy by increasing the likelihood of seizures. This can occur due to a number of factors, including injury, disease progression, and changes in brain structure. The world is in one big epileptic fit right now due to tech hyperconnectivity and I’m unsure how to fix that.
- AndriyKunitsyn 2y agoPerhaps in the future, governments could put strict caps on the amount of data one can download. For example, 1GB and no Internet for a person for the rest of the month.
- RHSman2 2y agoThere is no meant. We are evolving into what we create.
- Smithalicious 2y ago'Everybody is eating hot chip,' says man freed after 30 years in prison
- selimthegrim 2y agoI feel like you skipped a few key steps in the meme
- hnclimategroup 2y ago[flagged]
- Loughla 2y agoYes things do change in unexpected ways. That is what happens.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoSays this man who's lived 60 years. Don't have to be in prison to notice it's an epidemic.
- Symbiote 2y agoI notice it most when the situation is different to my memories. Earlier this week I took a bus at school ending time. Several children — roughly 8-12 years old — spent their whole journey on their phones.
- conductr 2y agoThis is sad to me as the school bus was some of the best memories of my childhood. I don’t even know why particularly, but I think after being in cooped up in school all day we just got to act like fools and joke around on the bus. We even did this thing where we’d run as fast as we could to get the back seats of the bus. Having typed all that I realized my kid is in a bus free school, we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Was more of a sign of the times for my era than a necessity for a good childhood but, if you’re on a bus with dozens of peers and all glued to your phones, it does feel like some missed opportunities
- Symbiote 2y ago> we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Taking a normal city bus home from school was wonderful for me. I think it was the first time I had some independence from my overprotective parents. I could "miss" the bus, which gave me 15 minutes to look round the Warhammer shop (or similar) before the next bus. I could more-or-less spontaneously go to a friend's house and phone my parents from there — they wouldn't be left waiting to pick me up from school.
- azundo 2y agoI've recently tried to get into urban sketching and spending any time observing figures in an urban scene makes this immediately obvious. So many people staring at phones everywhere you got. I'm equally guilty but once you start looking it is quite stark.
- ViktorRay 2y agoI saw this while browsing Hacker News on my phone. I wanted to say something but I don’t know what I could say without sounding hypocritical. I guess I’ll just leave this comment and put my phone down. And try to be more mindful to not browse sites like this aimlessly. But I’ve tried that before too.
- codr7 2y agoI try to stick to my laptop, at least it gives me the option to be creative which feels so much better. Being stuck in scroll mode for most of the day is soul killing.
- lostmsu 2y agoHm, do you browse HN aimlessly? I'm not. My entire life revolves around stuff discussed here in almost the same proportion.
- mikeh1111 2y agoI hate my phone. For years I've been mad at the content on the device - the interruptions - but I realized that was all misplaced. I hate the device and ecosystem itself. Felt right to finally figure that out
- fallinditch 2y agoI know that feeling. It takes some self discipline and effort to use our phones in non-unhealthy ways. I'm still working on it myself: to configure software, notifications, reduce mindless scrolling. I'm naturally curious and so I often find myself asking an AI chat bot about things: sometimes about random stuff but more often my AI chats are aligned with my learning goals, and I love that proximity to knowledge. I guess this could become a somewhat unhealthy behavior, but I don't consider it a problem yet. For me the most important thing is to be mindful of the power and addictive tendency of our phones, and crucially for me: to use the phone as a tool, especially for creative endeavors.
- bmacho 2y agoThe sad thing is that children are forced by the school to register google, facebook, and share stuff there. One can say that it is a matter of willpower, but I'd say that it is more like forcing them to carry drugs around and expect them to stay away from it.
- mattlondon 2y agoGenuine question: why didn't you just turn notifications off and logout/delete yourself from social media? It's not hard. The devices are amazing tools, just don't use social media and you'll be fine.
- _sys49152 2y agoselfies and filming events with your phone are diseases
- ttul 2y ago“All right already. Let’s see. Give me a second.” She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. “I know—I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impress me with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?” I egg her on. “For example?” … “People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?” Excerpt From Girlfriend in a Coma Douglas Coupland This material may be protected by copyright.
- kylecazar 2y agoA half-solution that seems to have cut my own phone time down was to remove any app that lets me browse. HN is the only aggregator/exception, because there isn't a lot of bullshit here without intellectual value. Instead, if I want to use my phone I have to deliberately look for things.
- markus_zhang 2y agoElectronics is an escape for people who don't like talking to other people. Turns out most of us don't like talking to others. I definitely don't. I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
- artursapek 2y agosad!
- markus_zhang 2y agoWhy is it sad? I always found having to communicate f2f sad -- less efficient and more friction.
- jackcosgrove 2y agoI don't dislike talking to others. It's just hard for me to say what I want to say at the speed of normal conversation. I write more slowly and carefully, can edit what I've drafted, and check facts too, all before I hit the submit button.
- markus_zhang 2y agoThis is a good point.
- koakuma-chan 2y agoThis.
- kennysoona 2y agoYou just need to find the right people to interact with, people who can match your pace and preferred level of articulation. It's not like they don't exist.
- markus_zhang 2y agoI just want to mention that although in general I dislike f2f communication, I'd love to talk about technical stuffs or hear other people passionately talking about technical stuffs. But again most people don't really have the luxury to find the right people to interact with. We weaklings don't control our own fate.
- ujkiolp 2y ago[flagged]
- codr7 2y agoI've stayed at a Yoga school for up to 6 months straight. Best part, all gadgets are locked up in a safe on arrival and returned when you leave. https://www.yogameditation.com/ https://www.yogameditation.com/
- runjake 2y agoCommenters are criticizing the man for knowing that cell phones exist and for being surprised by it. I bought smartphones before the iPhone. I stood in line for four hours to buy the first iPhone (never again). I still use an iPhone. Yet, I am regularly surprised by how often everyone is looking at their phones. (Context: I live in a rural area outside a metro area and don’t go there often, except for work.) When their kid is at a crowded city park, the parent is glued to their phone. When their kid is performing, the parent is glued to their phone, their thumb scrolling. During any break from activity, they whip out their phones. I used to be skeptical about the claim that devices contribute to societal brain rot through dopamine hits. However, the more I pay attention, the more I notice it. Even though I'm quite disciplined, I still catch myself instinctively pulling out my phone. I can easily see this man having that sincere thought. You know smartphones exist, but you have no idea how much they are used. I truly believe we are at a stage where one could argue that smartphones qualify as cybernetics. 1. Insofar as no apps on phone, minimal social media usage at all, and willful focus on a return to my 70s/80s roots where I embrace active boredom doing nothing.
- onionisafruit 2y ago… oops didn’t mean to comment and can’t delete this
- kvakerok 2y ago[dead]
- nabla9 2y agoEven when people are not looking at the phone, they need to know it's nearby. Some young people feel anxiety without their phones to the level they don't go out even for a few minutes without a phone. They still lose their phone inside their homes, but they feel comfortable because they know it's nearby. But if you are asking someone to come to help carry something, takes max 2 minutes, and they refuse until they find their phone. It is same for taking out the trash, and visiting the nearby shop (5 min max).
- koakuma-chan 2y ago
- thrance 2y agoHas this man really been wrongly jailed for 30 years? That's the insane thing here.
- artursapek 2y agoyeah they totally glossed over that detail lol. what a tragedy.
- seydor 2y agoEverybody is a nerd now. They were not before. We beat them. We won
- joquarky 2y agoThat's certainly a positive way to look at it. On the other hand, the gold rush tech bros have made the industry miserable for us OG nerds.
- sinuhe69 2y ago“getting used to just how connected people are now.” Ironically, I think we have never been as lonely and isolated as we are now.
- captainclam 2y agoEspecially with the proliferation of generative AI, I anticipate something of a tech backlash in the next decade, and performatively NOT looking at one's phone will be part of it. I'm sure that this already exists to some extant in certain subgroups, but I'd bet a small amount of money that this will grow to be a visible trend. Just a fun thought!
- Tycho 2y agoIt got really bad in the last couple of years, I think because the last group of people who were too old to get into technology are no longer seen much in public, so you go into a cafe and everyone, youth, adult or pensioner is just looking at their phone screen.
- creer 2y agoSci fi authors imagined future worlds where reality would be masked by drugs. The drugs have arrived. They just take the form of phone and computer screens which keep games, forums, but even selective news true or fake in front of our eyes, sometimes BS office memos. We don't know how to make drugs alter our vision, mood, perception of the world to outright provide a "better" one. But we don't really need them. We know how to achieve that with screens and software. (And for the rest, SSRIs and such can alter our mood without even bothering to change the stimulus.) It is surprising when you look up (from your screen) in the train and see everyone captured by their own reality - which is our new shared reality? Kind of? Pretty close for sci-fi. The BS office memo asks us to justify our usefulness by Monday fist thing or report to reactor shielding (too soon? too soon.)
- gatane 2y agoNot only this. Every group (work, school, uni) now uses whatsapp/other for communication, and if you own an older device you sometimes cant use said apps, so you are obligated to have a newer phone or else you will become isolated. And Android/iOS has closed source code that makes you unable to update.
- qudat 2y agoBefore phones everyone was reading newspapers.
- mattlondon 2y agoYep people miss this a lot I think. The commuter trains used to be literally littered with discarded newspapers. Now it is a novelty to see one at all as people read things on their phones instead. People just don't like being bored (funnily enough). We didn't live in some utopia before smartphones and 3g where everyone was nice and spoke to the person sitting next to each other in genuine conversation for their entire journeys. People were still selfish and rude. If a stranger (cluse is in the word there - strange-er... And that word has been around longer than phones) struck up a conversation with you on the bus or train you changed seat or carriage at the EARLIEST opportunity even then.
- therealdrag0 2y agoI only had my teenage years before smartphone, but I always had a paperback with me.
- OutOfHere 2y agoThe story that went untold here is how he had to be in prison for 30 years for a crime he quite likely didn't do.
- addicted 2y agoHow does one go from a hung jury with a single juror convicting to a unanimous conviction with a death sentence? Also, isn’t this double jeopardy?
- nunez 2y agoWell, yeah. Mobile apps and their business models are designed for maximum addict^H^H^H^H^H^Hengagement. Journalists have written stories about social media and gaming companies hiring psychologists to better understand how to make their apps more engaging to people, even. Unfortunately, it seems that state, federal or country-level governments have no interest in reeling this in. In fact, they actively enable this behavior by using ex-Twitter et. al. for official communications! It's even worse than that, too; many businesses _only_ advertise or maintain business hours on social media platforms, so people that refuse to use these services are, effectively, digital dinosaurs. I don't think things like checking your phone (usually social media) at a stoplight or a long stretch of road while you're driving becoming become more-or-less socially acceptable was what the iPhone team had envisioned when creating the phone, but here we are. To be fair, though, this would have been just as much of a problem in 1994 as it is now if we had the technology back then. TV addiction was all the rage back then.
- Ferret7446 2y agoI'm going to be honest, as a bookworm growing up, I feel a little bit of twisted satisfaction from this. I was treated as odd for having my nose in a book all the time. WHO'S THE ODD ONE NOW?