Society as Designed Requires Us Tethered to a Thing
August 5, 2025
Yesterday we posted an item from NextCity that compared smart phone dependence to car dependence. The author believes we are moving down a parallel road where we are going to make people dependent on phones the way we are dependent on cars. At this moment in time, we require people to have them in order to participate in society writ large.
The problem with this is made evident when warning systems are tied to social media. Many public safety agencies and cities are now only posting to Facebook and formerly named Twitter which is a big problem. Not just because the algorithms are likely to show the alerts a few days after they are important or only to logged in users, but because it also requires some sort of device to access them.
Even the systems we’ve set up to provide transportation aren’t easily accessed without a phone. As Owen Haacke notes in his NextCity piece, transit many times requires people to access schedules on phones or even the means to pay rides. For some this reduces friction to use, for others it can keep them from participating all together.
And it may just be that people ultimately replace owning a car with owning a phone, which in some senses could be an upgrade in convenience for those that have access. But then there are those who don’t have access, or maybe because of how they melt our brains, don’t WANT access to phones.
As we develop new technologies that can serve a great purpose, sometimes as a society we become over reliant on them or don’t build parallel infrastructure paths that allow people to participate meaningfully without them. Many technologies coming down the road are likely to have this problem including the emergence of extreme computing power which people are currently calling artificial intelligence. I’m not sure how that ends, but I don’t know if I like where it’s going.
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