Not an especially deep thought about the phones, but I had it so now you do too.

I was listening to John Gruber’s podcast, The Talk Show, on my walk this morning. He and his guest, Louie Mantia, were deep into a technical chat about the early days of iOS, but in that way thoughts can sometimes jag sideways, I found myself wondering why didn’t desktop internet fuck us up the way mobile internet has?

We had the web for a long time before we had smartphones, and there was some pretty kooky stuff going on even back then. But the world wasn’t broken in the same way it got later, and we weren’t as broken as we are now. I think the reason might be very simple: you can stand up and walk away from a computer. In fact you have to occasionlly, if only to take a toilet break. But you can’t really walk away from your phone unless you deliberately leave it behind.

It’s always there, isn’t it? On the bedside table while you sleep, in your pocket when you leave the house. It’s part of us now. And of course, once the tech companies realised this, they began to exploit it.

Do you remember the early days of mobile Facebook? It was a fucking joke. I recall posting somewhere, probably on Twitter, about how terrible it was and oh how we larfed. For what felt like an eternity in tech time—maybe six or twelve months—people were sorta questioning if this was the end of Facebook. Everyone was going mobile, and their mobile offering was hot garbage. Well, the Zuck showed us, didn’t he?

You often hear people lament, “It’s the phones.” What they really mean, of course, is the algorithmic exploitation of human frailty, organically located in the dopamine cycle. But the phones are the perfect delivery device for it. They made it so much easier to hook us than a desktop computer ever could.