Relevant meme...

The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

We didn't get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc...

But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It's a camera, it's camcorder, it's a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald's ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can't do.

You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.

Does anyone disagree with this? My city gives out smartphones to people who can't afford them because it's cheapest way they can get access to city services. Much more efficient then having staff in an office to enter data and make calls on their behalf.

I'll tell ya, it's getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.

As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you'd need still exist. You'd just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions.. But you could do it.

What's interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.

And even if you have a smartphone, you are strongly encouraged to get WhatsApp and donate all of your data to Meta that way. Not too long ago someone told me about having sent me messages through a channel don’t even use. I wonder if WhatsApp still shows me as online even though I haven’t used the app in more than 10 years.

Up until long-covid and being over-worked kicked me out of a job and onto my ass for a few months, I was a caseworker for adults with severe mental illness for years.

Helping people get a government phone was a necessity if we were working on transitioning them out of their residential care facility into more independent living.

It was such a frustrating struggle for the Clients without phones.. Reminders, telephonic appointments, me being able to reach them was so much more difficult if they didn't have a phone. Even being in RCFs, the resident line was always busy or misplaced, and staff at those facilities are not always the most stellar employees...

When covid hit and everything went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible for my team and myself to reach our Clients without cellphones...

Cellphones have become so ingrained in society and are essential for access to not only normal community resources, but also essential for adequate coordination and access to one's treatment team and resources.

It's getting harder and harder to function in society without a cellphone. That trend will only continue. I don't think it's necessarily/inherently a bad thing; it's the evolution of our society. But it certainly is a terrible thing if you do not have one...

The thing is, we don't know how viable this is in the long term.

For all we know, every 200 years the Earth is hit by a major EMP sunspot event that will fry our cellpones, cell towers, and satellites.

This isn't just speculative. In 1859 a major solar storm took down most of the electronic communication of that time. Back then, that meant telegraph communication. The first major telegraph message had been sent only 15 years before, so world-wide communications didn't suffer too much.

If we had a major storm now, the winners would be those countries and institutions that still retained paper-based communications and information management systems. The losers would be everyone dependent on electronics communications.

Yeah. Restaurant I was in about a month ago. You need a phone to order, to pay, and to see the menu.

You can almost imagine the conversation

Boss: so we will move everything to app based

Underling: but what about people without cellphones?

Boss: people without cellphones have no money.

Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I'm only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn't have a smartphone? What if I didn't want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren't allowed to go to this gig without one, and it's a small thing, but I don't like how the option is out of your hands.

Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.

The one thing that really makes me sad about common cellphone usage is the lack of face-to-face connection. It's a trip because I went through middle and high-school without smart phones, everyone did. I miss those regular, everyday connections with people.

Those that haven't gown up a significant amount of time without smartphones don't think the difference is that severe, or that the connections we've replaced them with are the same or superior, but it just... isn't.

I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.

Modern life is difficult without internet access, but yet you can live without internet, the question is, how long?

My phone borked on me recently but I got it up with a complete system upgrade and install from scratch. Meanwhile I realized how dependent I am on it for everything from communication to identification to transportation to deliveries to intercom and beyond. I don't like it with this single point of failure.

I have two personas. One with a google phone with FB (to talk to my mom to Greece), and a macbook. And another with a de-googled Murena eOS phone and Linux laptop. One of these two personas will die once I move to Greece next year. I don't mind not being able to talk to friends on FB or IG. If they want to find me, there's email, or they can join federated social media. I won't miss them.

A friend of mine has no smartphone (still an old Nokia mobile) and thus has no access to a train ticket in his state in Germany. There is no way of a non-digital ticket. That's so f'ed up

Yes! So many things that where previously websites require apps nowadays. Makes it hard to function in society for me as I (with very few exeptions) refuse to install closed source software on my computer or phone.

It how swift it has been. Friend and I went to a "mall" we hadn't been to since we were kids. He pointed out "holy crap, this is where it used to be rows and rows of payphones. Even in 2010 I didn't have a mobile, and only got one as all the payphones vanished.

Now so many things require an app or online sign-up.

I mean we quit reddit, right?

I can't love a modern life without following of what's going on in the world. Internet is the only thing that allows us to do this efficiently.

I moved out the western slope of Colorado, to the high desert, after I got an MS diagnosis. I've never had more concentration in my life. I was able to focus without a chime or someone else needing to contact me. Just me and how to move forward. Years later I moved back to the city.

It took my a while to get back to city life when I left, the busy everything, the phone going off, the lights in the sky at night blocking the stars. How do we all do it?