/lit/ - Literature

I don't own a smartphone. I'm 23. But I think I should not care if others use smartphones. FC makes some compelling points in "Industrial Society and its Future". There's just no point in trying to reform society (in this case, by "solving" smartphone culture), we need a revolution which would destroy a significant chunk technology altogether, globally (which is one of the upsides of globalisation and the internet: it might act as a combustive agent for revolutions, catastrophes and so forth).

"Industrial Society and its Future" also has interesting assumptions about how larger scale changes of societies might work. Hint: not by small changes (they either amount to nothing because they are just a manifestation of a larger trend and therefore will be lost "in the tides of history", whereas large scale changes, i.e. reforms, which could actually transform society comprehensively, on the other hand, would necessitate changing many of the subsystems of the superstructure of systems in which we operate, and therefore might yield a new superstructure which would not correspond with the utopian superstructure you wanted; i.e. such changes are generally considered unpredictable by FC). Read "Industrial Society and its Future" if you're interested.

Something I found interesting in this thread is that some anons seem to have the notion of "boomers" usually being the ones refusing to take part in smartphone culture.
I have gathered some conflicting anecdotes as a European. The people here Americans probably would refer to as boomers are quite literally addicted to their smartphones, maybe even more so than the youth (I suspect it might have to do with age related loneliness; plus maybe hormonal/epigenetic changes induced by lack of exercise, unhealthy eating habits etc.); but the few people I know who don't use smartphones are actually younger people who actively decided against it. Maybe the situation is different in the US or other regions of the world, though. My anecdotal evidence most likely is skewed as I'm not quite the people person (who would have guessed). Let's see how things turn out in the next few years.