It’s the predatory corporations, stupid
I don’t want to be too pedantic. When people – some of whom are well-informed, even brilliant – become hysterical about the alleged damaging effects of mobile phones, in particular on young people, I know they’re not proposing that we give up on decades of technological progress or deprive our kids of access to knowledge. They’re worried about harm to our children, which is very reasonable. Honestly, I get it. But what is it about these devices that they’re actually upset about?
Is it the portable supercomputer? The general-purpose powerhouse they’re carrying around with them? The device that’s capable of running a complex AI model, shooting and editing a 4K video, translating speech in real time, making a 3D model of your house? Or is it the universal communicator? The multi-channel messaging device they can use to reach essentially anyone on earth (including you), to share their creations worldwide, to locate and contact practically anyone? Or is it the unlimited access to information? The infinite photo album they can flick through on the bus? The continually-expanding encyclopaedia of human knowledge, the inexhaustible library of movies and books? The deep archive of world art and creativity they can access in class or in breaktime?
Of course not. It’s none of these things. What is it then? Well, if you don’t mind my saying so:
It’s the predatory corporations. Excuse me while I state the obvious: the problem is the corporations. And not all of them, either. Just the handful of vast, stock market-listed businesses whose robotic, out-of-control profit-seeking cannot apparently be impeded.
This is a variant of capitalist realism – the sense we all have that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. We’ve convinced ourselves that, somehow, a modern state – a nation, a people – cannot say ‘no’ to manipulation and exploitation by these huge companies, with their trillion-dollar valuations and their megalomaniac management. It’s a remarkable bind to have set for ourselves. The seventh largest economy on earth – a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN security council etc. etc. – cannot even try to protect its population from the various depradations of the platforms – from the anxiety and misery they produce to the literal fraud and theft that they enable on their platforms to [insert your own risk here].
Remarkably, in the Guardian, Torsten Bell – a famously clever man, a superlative communicator and now an MP – cannot imagine any exit from this dilemma better than chucking our children’s smartphones – the most sophisticated technology most of humanity will ever own – in the bin and replacing them with something from an earlier era – from the era, to be specific, before they became general purpose computers. Steve Jobs called computers bicycles for the mind – capacity multipliers, accessible devices that would amplify the capabilities of human beings in remarkable ways. The smartphone is perhaps the ultimate expression of this vision – a powerful computer you can carry around in your pocket and use to transform reality, create and communicate.
But, for some reason, instead of asserting our sovereignty, expressing the independence and the self-confidence of an ancient democracy, Britain must just cave in, dump the smartphones and surrender our kids to primitive, pre-IT era kit. Here in this advanced economy, in the nation where the stored-programme computer was invented, we must not expose our children to the unlimited possibilities of the computers in their pockets but rather shelter them from the evils of the computer era because we have no idea how to tell Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to fuck off.