I’m a complete outsider when it comes to cell phones, having always been without one. Lately, however, I’ve been feeling like that guy in the first Matrix movie who had been red-pilled, but wanted to go back and rejoin the Matrix, because it was more appealing.
Although I really don’t want a phone, I still sort of wish I had one, so I could be a part of what everyone else is doing, and not feel so left out. I’m literally the only person I know without a smart phone.
To make matters worse, I’m not on Facebook or Instagram or any of the other standard social media platforms. From the perspective of the common culture of the 21st century, I simply don’t exist.
A few years ago I wrote about visiting a crowded Starbucks and noticing that of all the customers in the place, there was only one other person not looking at a little screen (phone or tablet) — and she was roughly my age. The younger people were all absorbed in their hand-held devices.
These days, the count is more often 100% — that is, everybody in the place but me is a devoted denizen of the Matrix.
Cell phone culture doesn’t seem all that appealing to an outsider. It often resembles compulsive behavior — people appear driven to interact with their little devices. But that may just be sour-grapes projection on my part, needing smart phone devotees to be unhappy in order to justify my not having one.
And then there’s cell phone addiction. This afternoon I read an interesting piece about grappling with the problem, “What Happens When You Give Up Your Phone for 3 Days?” I happened to find the article when I was looking for a picture of people absorbed in their phones who didn’t all look happy and carefree. When I started searching for a photo to put at the top of this post, I discovered that the vast majority of phone photos show cheerful people visibly having fun. It was creepy, because it doesn’t line up with the reality that I see every day: in most cases phone users are frowning, scowling, grimly intent on whatever it is that so interests them on their little screens.
The prevalence of happy phone pics on the web tells me that there must be a psy-op aspect to the cell phone craze. It can’t be accidental that 99.5% of the media images of people with phones make them look happy and fulfilled. Anyone who pays attention to the habitual behavior of cell phone owners knows that’s nonsense.
My status as a cell phone outsider is what I was thinking of when I coined the word “phoneliness”. Before starting to write this essay, I did an internet search on the word, because in most cases anything I think of has already been thought of by somebody else. And, sure enough, the word was already out there.
But it doesn’t mean quite the same thing I was thinking of. The urban dictionary says it means:
That feeling that comes over you when the people you are with are more interested in their phones than you.
So my take is a little different. As Pink Floyd sang, “I’m the man on the outside looking in.”
It’s that sort of loneliness.
I use one, but my life partner lives on it. I doubt the phone feels I am in the way, but I know I am in the way. And smart? Maybe, the phone is. However, the amount of ‘smart’ given seems little or nothing.
If I had the means – this behavior will go without me. It has reach that point as the phone cannot not be put down.
Well said.
Never had a smartphone myself. As a result I had the ability to watch people’s behavior change over the years – and notice it, being outside the change. Distracted drivers, seemingly suicidal pedestrians, people who literally walk like zombies. An that’s before getting into social media and its impact.
Humans developed situational awareness for survival, but now many people are devolving. They have no awareness of their surroundings and even less care for those around them. In addition to making travel on the road more hazardous than need be, it also poses societal problems. Oblivious people are not good caretakers of the world they live in. Ask yourself how when a particularly odious policy or trend is implemented, few people object. Maybe it is because they have their heads in their phones and don’t even know what is going on. Was it Huxley who wrote about technology being used to keep people entertained and docile?
No you’re not alone. I don’t have a smart phone either. I was forced by my boss to get an Apple 3. Which were bl**dy expensive back then. I told him: YOU want me to have a phone, so YOU pay for it. He did. After he died I was laid off and I never used it again.
It’s over rated, most of what they are looking at is crap, but it is shared crap. They can all talk about the same shared crap which was pushed in front of them on their phones. They all know the same things because that is what they have all been delivered . If you don’t passively accept the phone’s “news feed” and search your own information you are still an outsider.
I think when future historians are sitting around the campfire, roasting some rat kebab or locusts while debating how the modern world came to an end, they will refer to pre and post smartphone societies.
I am fortunate enough to have grown up in an era pre-smart phone, pre-internet, pre-video-game, and even pre-widespread personal computer. That being said, I have a smart phone like almost everyone else I know and have come to depend upon it for all manner of tasks.
And to be honest, most people including people of the same age as myself are dumber than boxes of rocks (or Kamala Harris) and I much prefer reading about whatever interests me or following message boards for my hobbies than engage in mindless conversation whenever I have to be around others.
I am probably an outlier since I have a smartphone and use it very frequently but am completely tuned out of whatever it is that most people use theirs for.
I see it as a magnifier or amplifier, similar to alcohol, of whatever intelligence or ability or personality someone naturally has. If someone’s an idiot, a smartphone with the sum total of human knowledge and history at their fingertips is still going to be an idiot. They aren’t going to read histories of the Peloponnesian Wars or classical literature. Or even how many feet are in a mile or mundane knowledge like making an omelet.
For women it is even worse. Almost all females, my wife included, use it for social media and to make other women jealous of their perceived superior (fake) life or to be envious and feel miserable because of posts of exotic vacations, new cars, clothes, or whatever it is that another female ordered for lunch at a restaurant.
I could live without mine with effort and adjustment. I still buy and read a lot of books and don’t rely upon my phone for basic knowledge. I don’t see how most people and almost all of women could survive for any length of time without their smartphones. It might just be that shutting down the wireless networks and destroying the servers; making them useless pieces of glass and circuitry will be a necessary jolt back to reality before any substantial change to society becomes possible.
Never could understand the smart phone fetish and my experience on social media found it to be mostly stupid with all the substance of plain lime jello.
I like your definition. Good article.We need to think more about how phones are impacting our culture.
I had an idea for a New Yorker cover, though I doubt they’d accept it as a submission: an army of Chinese paratroopers parachuting down, armed with bayonets, right in the middle of Manhattan, and no one even noticing since their heads are all down, faces buried in their phones.
I have a “smart phone” but actually believe it is kind of dumb.
It is also a tracking device in case you don’t know. So I always leave it at home . So you can’t track me ma-fas.
It also may listen into your conversations so we just use sign language around here.
And usually it is just turned off.
As am I by entities trying to spy on me…
Lol…
I agree with you.
I was once in a train and made a loud noise.
Nobody reacted.
So I think (not that I want to do it orr encourage it!) you could walk through a train and slash the throats of everybody and if no blood touches someone else or someone is kicked by one of those you kill, nobody would notice anything.
When I hear that some muslim thug goes through a train then my reaction is, why the hell did he yell or scream? If he were silent he would have a much higher bodycount.
But on the other hand: Then nobody would notice that he was waging war against the evil unbelievers.
Western people are not meaningless but over half have meaningless BSjobs and the candy of social media is open before us all of the time.
In a previous occupation we had to think through the job to take all the necessary tools but as soon as we were supplied with two-way radio communication we were calling others to bring the tools that we had forgotten.
I have never had the mobile and now I work alone at night in the bush where I accept responsibility for any failure to plan and take credit for my sensible response to contingencies just as my predecessors had to.
Far from feeling left out, I feel relieved to have instead developed the resources to occupy myself and to account for myself
Baron, as an attempt at encouragement not to give in to temptation, I offer this profundity:
Nothing Lasts Forever.
Technology has been weaponised.
The technophobes were right all along.
Avoid the echo chamber that is the internet, when ever possible.
The technology may have evolved….
But mankind certainly is not.
My attachment to my PDA (I won’t call it a phone, because calls are less then 10% of what I do on it) revolves around one thing: The Kindle app. I was always the guy with a paperback book in my back pocket, and now I have over 3,000 books available whenever I want. (And, yes, they’re typically more interesting than whoever I’m with, aside from my Better Half, who uses an actual Kindle device rather than a cell phone).
Of course it’s a psyop.
A Bolshevik one, at that. Part of the grand scheme of owning the collective reality by turning it into a pseudo-reality. Mass robbery, essentially! Or conquest is the better word. Warfare, actually.
It’s about turning OUR reality inside-out where those who DON’T subscribe to the new enemy-reality get literally excluded from the psysical reality of LIFE. Life without the Smart Leash is being gradudally made more and more difficult, sometimes impossible — so that the enemy can claim that it’s your own choice to remain a Phonely… “You’ve had a choice” — they will claim. That “choice” is actuallly a blackmail: “my way, or the highway”, literally:
In Hungary a new regulation is soon coming into effect on mass transport: you will only be allowed to ride some intercity buses in the country, if you have a smart phone with the right app on it and you buy the ticket in advance. (For the time being you can buy a ticket from the driver when you get on the bus.) That will literally imprison the older generation (above 60) into the villages they live in — because they usually do not own a smart phone. Add the war on cars to it. Smart Genocide: getting rid of the old. And the dissident.
It is all part of the war on the basic human right to free movement, as prescribed by the Agenda21 and Agenda 2030 enemy operations.
And then there is the now-infamous grocery store, Aldi’s NWO Test Project in Greenwich UK, that requires a QR-code and a special app on your “phone” for entering, and you cannot pay in cash either. For food! What a conditioning! The sheeple will be trained to accept the New Order very quickly with this Pavlovian reflex: “no code, no food”. And I’m sure that the Greenwich Aldi project is in itself a pilot operation that uses the Streisand-effect. So that even if you publicly criticize it, you further the enemy cause with the negative ad you create.
So this is the New Normal being rolled out.
That’s the New System the Rona Psyop was all about, actually. There were propaganda articles at the time with interviews with Hungarian celeb doctors who warned the sheeple that whoever does not take the jab should “GO LIVE IN THE FOREST”. They literally said that.
The Phonely are the Kulaks of the NWO!
They’re the dissidents that do not toe the line and therefore are exluded from society, persecuted, robbed, annihilated. In fact, the individual as such gets annihilated, as well — because you get plugged into the Common Hive Mind, or else.
That’s why it is essentially commOnism for the hoi polloi.
Those understandably sour sentiments the Baron admits he has had, are the INTENDED RESULTS of actual PSYCHOLOGICAL (and increasingly psysical) WARFARE. I know it because I’ve never had a smart phone either — and I’ve had the same bad feelings of being excluded… Which is true: I AM being excluded to some extent, by not owning a Smart Leash and not plugging in the Matrix.
Now, whoever fails to cognize that negative emotion deliberately induced by the enemy, will succumb to it. (Because uncoscious motives, in this case planted by the enemy, cannot be handled.) And that’s the goal of the enemy.
So the Baron’s great essay helps making this psyop conscious.
Some really GREAT insights here!
I’ve had flip-phones (for outgoing/emergency calls only) since the ’90s. However, I’m one of the last 16 or so who continue to rely on a land-line for everyday communication. Sadly, a coupla years ago, the phone company terminated their decades-long copper-based land-lines in favour of optical fiber. Big mistake, in my opinion.
In 40 years at the same address, there were only two times when I lost dial-tone with the copper-based land-line system. In both cases, the cause was due to a telephone- or cable-tech having disconnected the wrong “pair”. Even during the three week-long power outages I’ve experienced over the past dozen or so years, whenever I picked up the handset to the Bell “Princess” phone, I had light (on the keypad) and dial-tone. The phone was the ONLY thing that [always] worked, because power (to the phone) was supplied by the phone company.
In contrast, power for the fiber-optic system’s supplied locally, supplemented by a bank of 12 D-cells as an “up to 24-hour” backup in the event of a power outage. Last week, we had the first two-day power outage since the copper-based system was replaced with fiber-optics. The optical fiber system failed after about six hours when the D-cells ran outta juice. Amazingly, I don’t generally keep a dozen fresh, fully-charged D-cells on-hand for each day I may need to use the phone in the event of the next outage.
Brave new world, indeed.
What blows my mind isn’t the ubiquity of the phones, but the fact that I have met several people over the years who don’t even have a computer at home. They rely 100% on their phones. Such a lifestyle requires them to keep most of their data “in the cloud.”
But anyway, smartphones can be convenient as long as you’re willing to spend some time learning how to use one. That’s the point I’d focus on – whether you think it’s worth bothering to learn a totally new OS for a pocket-sized gadget.
For me, there are two main points:
(1) The tiny little screens. I suffer from sever hyperopia compounded by wet macular degeneration. It is actively painful for me to try to look at those screens (even tablet screens are too small). That’s the main reason I’ve never been interested in cell phones.
(2) The fact that they’re baby monitors. If you use a smart phone, the telecoms (and by extension, the government) know exactly where you are, who you talk to, what your interests are, where you bank, what you buy, etc., etc. Furthermore, the government requires that there be backdoors in phones that allow the microphone and/or camera to be turned on even when the phone is not in use. Anyone who uses a smart phone voluntarily gives up any semblance of privacy.
No cell phone for me, thanks.
I used to worry about the privacy thing, but I think at this point it raises more eyebrows amongst the security organs if someone doesn’t have or use one. Anyway, so many people have them that the feds don’t even need you to have one to still spy on you. They can simply follow you from someone else’s device or from the myriad of unlikely devices in one’s home.
Anyway, anything that is posted online already is available for the perusal of the fascists, and I would rather prefer that they know that there are those out there who despise them and would not hesitate to kill them and their families when the balloon goes up. Perhaps they think that they know who all the wolves are. I am certain there are far more of us than them, and knowing that one’s families are also at risk from traitorous acts they commit is likely to have a sobering influence.
As to the screen size, I certainly can understand that. My eyes and vision are better than 20/20 but I prefer larger screens anyway. It makes typing easier too.
“I would rather prefer that they know that there are those out there who despise them and would not hesitate to kill them and their families when the balloon goes up.”
I think it goes without saying at this point that: THIS, THEY KNOW.
That said, I reckon it best, generally speaking, NOT to give the government any more “ammo” than they already have.
“In battle, confrontation is done directly, VICTORY IS GAINED BY SURPRISE.” —Sun Tzu
Maybe not a major issue, but when I’m in a pub with my partner, or a friend, we’re appalled at the number of young(er) people gathered in a group, paying attention to their ‘phones/devices rather than the people they’re with, which seems to us just rude.
It is rude.
Well, to our generations at least. It seems to be normal for younger generations though, so to each their own.