Smartphone design has been getting worse and worse while the industry itself has become an environmental and humanitarian nightmare, writes Phineas Harper.
Ned Ludd probably didn't exist. The mythical textiles worker, thought to have led daring acts of 18th-century industrial sabotage, was, most likely, as real as Robin Hood – a fictional folk hero to rally a political cause behind.
His followers were very real though. The Luddites were concerned that new automated weaving machines were fuelling inequality and deteriorating manufacturing standards. Unable to challenge their wealthy factory-owning bosses and denied voting rights, the disgruntled workers destroyed the machines that threatened their world, declaring "Ned Ludd did it".
When the best inventions of modern life are getting worse year-on-year, something has gone wrong
For over two centuries the media has worked hard to discredit the Luddites, turning their name into a byword for those who oppose any and all technological development. But this characterisation is wrongheaded. The activists were not anti-technology itself, but against the way powerful magnates used their new machines to control communities and churn out bad products.
Like the plucky young Americans in Daniel Goldhaber's 2022 thriller How To Blow Up A Pipeline, the Luddites understood that not all new technology automatically brings new benefits. In the wrong hands, some technology causes profound harm and must be challenged – or even smashed.
I have been thinking about Ned and his eponymous movement of misunderstood frame-wreckers ever since my editor suggested a piece exploring the enshittification of smartphones. I know wiseguy commenters will be quick to accuse this column, on how our phones are getting worse, of retrogressive Luddism. So let me preempt them: we should be intensely excited by the possibilities of new innovations but never romanticise technology for its own sake.
What tech could hypothetically be used for is far less important what tech is actually used for. And when the best inventions of modern life are getting worse year-on-year, something has gone wrong.
I am old enough to remember a time before mobile phones: when meeting a friend meant calling their landline, hoping they were at home, agreeing an exact moment and place to rendezvous then, with no way of alerting them to delays, somehow never being late.
The advent of mobiles completely upended that culture. Detailed forward planning became largely unnecessary. Punctuality became a nice-to-have, while regular communication (and even pointless messages like "runing 2 mins late soz 😘") became expected.
My Android is now so big that I can barely operate it one-handed
Phone technology seemed to be irrepressibly bounding forward too. My first mobile was the Nokia 3210, a clunky brick from which text messages cost £0.10p per 160 characters and an infernally inefficient keyboard required the number "6" to be pressed three times to produce a single letter "O".
But my second phone, a folding Motorola M3, had a small camera and a colour screen. My third featured a QWERTY keyboard and could send email. For my generation, each time a new phone landed in stores it was sleeker, slimmer and boasted whizzy new features. Things – we thought – could only get better.
After the iPhone dropped in 2007, the template of rectangular touchscreen tablets packed with third-party apps was set. Within a few years pretty much all major phone companies were making some version of that original model. The future had arrived, but it has been gradually souring ever since.
Today the design, production and impact of phones are no longer exciting sources of positive change but increasingly alarming headlines: only 17 per cent of electronic waste is recycled, meaning of the five billion phones thrown away in a typical year, the vast majority are in landfill. The conditions cobalt miners suffer to enable the production of smartphones' lithium-ion batteries are nightmarish, as grim as some of the most exploitative labour practices in human history.
The products themselves are not improving either. My Android is now so big that I can barely operate it one-handed without straining my thumb to stretch across its bloated width. The baffling fragility of the glass screen means, unlike that tough retro Nokia, an additional rubbery case with reinforced corners is a non-negotiable.
The camera protrudes from the back rather than sitting flush as the early iPhone cameras did. Even Google's app icons have been confusingly redesigned into a slew of almost identical abstract shapes. And all of this deteriorating design quality even as production ethics crumble and handset prices spiral.
Our phones are getting bigger, but neither better-designed nor better for us
The tech is still getting more powerful, but to what end? Is having a 50-megapixel HDR camera really any more useful or fun than a 40-megapixel one? Like a gym bro lacing their already ballooned body with steroids, our phones are getting bigger, but neither better-designed nor better for us.
Where phones once saved us time, now they steal it. How often in writing this article alone have I found myself distracted by pings from Instagram or Hinge? Smartphones have slipped from gadgets that empower us into tools to surveil and hook us to fleeting jolts of dopamine.
Fifty-seven per cent of Americans say they are addicted to their phones, 71 per cent spend more time with their phones than with their lovers. We've created a $500 billion-dollar industry producing addiction machines that don't fit in our hands and are effectively made on the back of slave labour – the role of smartphones in contemporary life feels increasingly, and profoundly, stupid.
What to do? There are some glimmers of hope on the fringes of the smartphone world. The Light Phone is a sincere attempt to strip away the worst of the algorithmic addiction-fuelling apps, for example, while Fairphone is trying to make the hardware of handsets more ethical and repairable. However the big players like Apple, Google, Samsung and OPPO seem to be making barely any efforts to unravel the toxic issues underlying the industry.
In 1990, Chellis Glendinning penned a Neo-Luddite Manifesto, a prescient critique of new technology spanning from nuclear power to the contraceptive pill. In it, years before the launch of the World Wide Web, she warned that without critical oversight, new technologies could create "social systems and institutions that people do not understand and cannot change or control" – a strikingly accurate pre-emptive description of life mediated by Silicon Valley.
Instead, Glendinning advocated "the creation of technologies in which politics, morality, ecology, and technics are merged for the benefit of life on Earth". In the long tradition of the Luddites, she demanded technology "by and for the people''. Ned Ludd may be long dead, he may never even have existed at all, but he was right – and it's time we started listening.
Phineas Harper is the former chief executive of Open City. They were previously chief curator of the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, deputy director of the Architecture Foundation and deputy editor of the Architectural Review. In 2017 they co-founded New Architecture Writers, a programme for aspiring design critics from under-represented backgrounds.
The photo is by Andrey Matveev via Unsplash.
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