I Don’t Have a Smartphone…

54 points by cgrinds 10 hours ago on lobsters | 21 comments

technomancy | 7 hours ago

I'm not as extreme as having three different levels of shit-quarantine, but I do think of my mobile device as a quarantine that allows me to avoid putting some really atrocious shit on my laptop. If I somehow found a mobile I actually enjoyed using, I'd probably do a two-level thing and retain my current device as an ablative layer.

ploum | 9 hours ago

I’m somewhat confused by the fact that it was posted under "a11y". Do you think that is really how that piece should be read?

Not having a smartphone is for all intents and purposes a disability, so I believe the tag fits because the piece describes all sorts of hoops one has to jump through wrt access to banking.

ChrisDenton | 8 hours ago

That seems like a big stretch. Not having a permanent address or not having a bank account either locks you out of or makes accessing necessary services harder. But this is not generally called having a disability.

liberty | 8 hours ago

Accessibility isn't purely about access for people with disabilities. In this case it's about access for people without smartphones, or the desire for that to be possible.

ChrisDenton | 4 hours ago

Sure, I can jive with that. I just thought it sounded wrong to call not having a smartphone a disability in and of itself.

"temporary disability" is a real term referring to the fact that, for example, a mother holding a baby in her arms is as disabled in front of, say, an ATM keypad, as someone missing hands entirely.

It can work in the other direction: there are plenty of disabilities that preclude people from smartphone ownership/easy operation. The main interface is touch for input & sight/reading for output (yes, I know, both Apple and Google have barebones functionality for the visually impaired and voice interfaces).

Access to services should not necessarily be gated on such restricted devices.

fedemp | 8 hours ago

I have to agree with ChisDenton. The lack of a smartphone is more an accesibility problem than a disability. Accesibility is not about disabled people but about people in uncommon situations.

kevinc | 4 hours ago

I think if I had filtered out the a11y tag, I wouldn't have intended to filter out articles like this one.

How would you tag it?

regedit | 8 hours ago

I've deliberately started moving as much as I can toward local brick and mortar that doesn't require an app, email address, or even a phone number. My driver's license and a utility bill should be enough. Credit unions are usually pretty good about this.

addison | 7 hours ago

Just in my toilet, I’m supposed to have an app for the seat, an app for the flush and one for the ventilation.

What the hell kind of toilet did you buy? :D

Irene | 6 hours ago

Heh, yeah, allow me to recommend the older Toto washlets, which are controlled through infrared and do not have wifi or other radio-based features. I put a lot of work into avoiding the intrusion of general-purpose computation into new areas of my life, and this is one of the ways I do that...

misty | 6 hours ago

Yeah, my washlet is a few years old and it's just got a remote that sits on the counter next to it. That's perfectly fine by any standards I think. I'm not really sure what an app would buy me here unless I really wanted to be keeping... stats? I suppose?

addison | 6 hours ago

toilet leaderboards when

brudish | 4 hours ago

Really changes the whole tone of when people ask, "Did you win?" when you come back from the bathroom.

Irene | 6 hours ago

yeah even as somebody with Crohn's disease who has to pay a really quite unfortunate amount of attention to my poop, statistics are the last thing I'd want

hawski | 8 hours ago

A notion of a compliance device is kept fresh for me.

I keep hearing how nice Mudita Kompakt is from various sources. I hope this company will be able to sustain itself for a long time.

Sadly the repo for their OS hasn’t seen an update in over a year.

I have never purchased a smartphone. It's really interesting how that's been received over the years. Used to be a sort of "huh? what's wrong with you?" and even among more normal audiences it's shifted a bit more towards "I wish I could do that" in the last few years.

The simpler "oh, I don't do apps" doesn't seem to shock people nearly as much; most people are over having twenty gajillion apps on their home screen.