Not Owning Mobile Phones
It's not about resistance for resistance's sake; it's common sense
According to statistics that I recently heard and read, over a million people in England do not have a "mobile phone" (in the US they're commonly called "cellphones"). One of the reasons I quit Sirius in 2022 was their demand that all staff gets an Android phone (I never had such a thing; I did my research). It wasn't the main reason but the last straw - that and the fact the company quietly registered itself using a bogus address - a fact that I confronted the CEO about (over the phone, it lasted about 40 minutes) only a day after I had noticed that (I routinely checked my employer for any dodgy activity and had good reasons to do so). I basically demanded to talk about this after they had made fictional, false excuses to avoid that sort of conservation (the typical "I'm busy" and variants thereof).
Some years ago we shared correspondence related to that. At one point I told them I'd not sign any agreement related to a "phone" and also said that if they sent me something to sign, then I'd need time to go check through the whole thing with a lawyer. The lack of "blind faith" in the management was a "rub", but there was nothing they could do about it. So they left me alone. They'd stop trying to force me to get a 'free' Android phone.
After all those years I still don't have a mobile phone. My wife bought one in 2012, but it's one of those "Galaxy" phones; she hasn't bothered since. In life, concentration requires not having those sorts of things. But the main benefit has nothing to do with concentration; for one thing, it's about dignity and human rights.
Any time someone says to me that he or she got a new "smartphone" my immediate gut feeling is, not only does this person inhibit prospects of focus/concentration; it's a mindless act of consumerism.
To place a phonecall you do not need anything new.
I fully recognise that many employers demand some sort of "mobile" so they can contact you any time. That's hardly a selling point to you, maybe it is for them. But there are many employers where no such requirement exists, not even tacitly or implicitly. For accessibility reasons - set aside the statistics above - there are always fallbacks.
They say that sometimes not having something is harder than just having something. The other day Andy wrote about his mother: "It is not because she is a "Luddite" that my mother passionately hates the "cashless society" which means she cannot park her car, or the inability to book a doctors appointment while standing right in front of the doctor… it's because these are patently stupid and regressive ideas. Our inability to reflect and challenge the failures of technological society is one of many modern threats."
"We've lost a generation," Andy explained, "perhaps two, of people capable of making decisions about technology because they've learned to completely defer thinking about anything at all (other than perhaps money). We endure a default and arbitrary course set by whims of those interests served by gratuitous over-manufacture of hardware, software and attendant policy."
The closing paragraph has reluctant hope: "The cynical hope of neophyte cultists, technofascists and proponents of faux "progress" is that change will happen one funeral at a time. The hope is that resistance to insanity will simply die out. Based on what I've seen of the youngest Gen-Alpha I've some bad news for those hoping that. Radical revision and re-examination of the technological project is alive and vibrant within the youth. It is conspicuous how those voices are being muted. This time it is clear that reluctance is not coming from just the older generation. Once again we are united across ages in a shared interest in technology. This time it is not excitement, but a visceral unease around so-called "AI". Perhaps it is time for the older generation to once again step-up to help the younger ones to understand and navigate the technological world so that wisdom as well as enthusiasm will have some say in human development."