Your Smartphone Doesn’t Belong to You
It belongs to the advertisers and tech companies exploiting you
I remember the moment that I realised that I don’t want to own a smartphone. It was 11AM on a Monday morning, everything was falling apart and I was stood outside an abandoned building that used to be a double-glazed window storage unit. It had been repurposed as an ecstasy-drenched, sweat fest.
I was exhausted, confused and high on fatigue. My limbs were frazzled, my brain reduced to an insignificant smudge; a barely recognisable blip on the horizon of what used to be reality. That was all normal.
All that was left was my equally weathered gaggle of acquaintances — a mixture of long-standing friends and total strangers I’d just met — who are stood with me in a random carpark.
Sure, a high street is only a 15-minute walk away. But it had been a long morning. I’d been awake for 48 hours and my mental state is beginning to crease, crumple and fold in on itself.
Should we brave the walk?
We’re bound to be confronted by a concerning amount of ‘normal’ people. You’ve seen the type, right? Wearing their suits and ties, with painfully stressed facial expressions, they dash off purposefully in a million different directions, to complete menial tasks that slowly but consistently contribute to the on-going deterioration of their heart and soul. You’ll swear they are flashing you funny looks. That’s because they are.
“We need to get an Uber,” someone declares in between perpetual conversations about nothing. Well, guess who is not going to order one on their phone, before being filled with empty promises of refunds: me — because I own a $9.99 phone bought from Walmart.
My phone is magnificent, and not just because it has the original version of Snake on it. It’s the kind of device that is usually reserved for small-time cannabis dealers, or someone who is waiting for an insurance claim after falling asleep on the Tube and waking up with — surprise, surprise — empty pockets.
It’s what, in any urban centre, they call a ‘shotter line’ or ‘a burner’. I’m no drug dealer; I just find that having a shit phone is more convenient than owning a good one. And more fun, because I get to write pretentious articles about it.
Back outside the party, I can’t possibly order the Uber; that would be, quite literally, impossible. So, the very same people who periodically take the piss out of me for paying an annual fee of $10 for a desktop app that allows me to post on Instagram, are now paying for my journey home.
Not only that, but getting an Uber simply because I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to walk home from the pub isn’t an option for me with this phone. Sure, I have to walk 15 minutes, hey, I don’t have to deal with that mortifying moment that I look at my online statement and it reads like this:
Uber — $12.65
Uber — $8.25
Sainsbury’s — $2.65
Uber — $11.65
Uber Eats ––$26.05
Uber — $9.25
Uber — $10.12
The Uber thing is one of the many reasons that I personally believe that everyone should sack off their smartphones and get a $9.99 model. I know, it’s an extraordinarily forceful assertion to make, and I’m sure many of you will disagree.
I will concede that life is marginally more difficult without the Citymapper app; particularly when you have to write down directions from Google Maps at home, or deal with the strange look that you get from tourists when you accidentally ask them where something is. But the benefits of having a drug dealer-esque phone simply outweighs this mild annoyance.
Along with not wasting all of my money on Ubers, here are some other things I don’t do on account of having this phone: respond to work emails when I’m not in the office (no internet); walk into a coffee shop and ask if I can charge my phone (my battery lasts for a week — it isn’t limited if I don’t buy the latest model); save up for ages to purchase the latest iPhone (my phone cost a tenner); and walk around with a smashed screen (my phone isn’t designed to slip out of my hand like a bar of lubricated soap in the bath — it will probably last for a decade).
I don’t think that marketing companies are recording my conversations to tailor my ads, because I can’t have apps. Plus, I have Snake — the best game in history, in my opinion — which is more than enough to distract me when avoiding eye contact with someone in a lift.
But, more important than all of the above, I can get more stuff done. Human attention is a highly valued commodity, right? Yes. I mean, look at this exchange for example: I’m sat here on a Wednesday afternoon writing anything that will keep your eyes on this website (please don’t leave me, my friend), to hold your attention for as long as possible.
Because of the content renegades, like myself, who are determined to waste all my time, it was taking me way too long to achieve even everyday tasks — I was probably checking my phone hundreds of times a day. It wasn’t even consensual by the end, it was pure muscle memory. I was always somehow back on the Facebook app; it was like I’d been hypnotised by Zuckerberg himself.
You have to remember that, despite paying a pretty penny for it, your smartphone does not belong to you. It belongs to the people exploiting you — tech companies, advertisers and governments who want to hack your phone regardless of whether you are suspected of committing a crime or not.
You should be getting paid to have the smartphone; by owning one you’re getting less done on a daily basis, not achieving your goals, and instead merely making more money for advertisers and tech companies. None of this revenue will ever be shared with you.
It’s not a symbiotic relationship, you might have been subconsciously socialized to think so, but you get nothing out of it. As long as you are hopelessly reliant upon your smartphone, you are not a sovereign state with full autonomy over your life.
Now I only look at my handset if someone calls, which is great, because, you know, there are only so many viral videos I can watch before I think about impaling myself on a huge spike, or gorging on a feast of glass and razor blades. There are only so many WhatsApp group chats, with 257 unread messages since yesterday, that one can consume before they start to doubt everything in life. There is, reader, so much more to life than having a good phone.
[Author’s note: I wrote this in 2019 but it never got published until now. Full disclosure: I now have an iPhone which is required for my job. If I lost my job, I would be straight back on the shit phone train.]
