- Read a restaurant menu while seated inside, and pay your check.
- Enter a concert or sporting event.
- Use a parking garage or park your car on the street.
- Receive packages or retrieve purchases.
- Complete the sign-in process for work, banking, or government services.
- Attend school events or communicate with your kid’s school.
- Access health care and other kinds of appointments.
- Take public transit.
- Get a taxi.
- Get into a gym or fitness class.
And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan.
Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in.
We can fix this, and some people are already showing how.
How we got here
Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.
Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10.
In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it.
Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.
I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.
The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.
Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.
But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.
by Rachel Cohen Booth, Vox | Read more:
Image:Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images
[ed. I've experienced this just trying to pay for a parking spot in Seattle. First, had to get the app. Then register. Then follow all the instructions for punching in a special code for my space, license plate number, and finally estimated time period of parking. Took me nearly 25 minutes. Not to mention trying to read the small type on the sign and memorizing the special app url. Supress scream.]
