Get rid of your smartphone before it gets rid of you...

I no longer want to use my mobile phone, if you want to contact me to chat or arrange plans I will still be available on my email and SMS (whatsapp as well but not as responsive). Having the internet constantly tethered to everything has had a parasitic effect on me and I'd imagine it's been the same for others as well. On a systemic level, this reliance on mobile phones poses the biggest threat to our freedoms in the 21st century. Also there is nothing gimpier than scanning a QR code to order to your spoons table or paying with your apple watch thinking you're living in an episode of Tomorrow's World, you actual melt.

In 2004 my parents took part in the NO2ID protests to fight for our privacy, 21 years later I found myself trying to paypal a galloways over wigan eats cos I left my card at home. They've put our transport, our entertainment, our work timetables, our currency, our notepads and our conversations all on devices that record audio, video and location data even when the battery is "dead". They have dissolved our society in favour of these devices in which they can track, predict and capitalise upon our every move. In the process, we have all become passive single-minded seekers of consumption, being unable to separate our way of being from having a corporate entity inflicted upon us every waking hour whether we realise it or not (even when we don't acknowledge them as brands). 

Over this past year multiple mobile providers have proposed plans to remove their 2g/3g networks in favour of more 5g masts, with a concerning lack of backlash. They are taking away the right to access basic calls and texts for those who don't want tailored propaganda being scotty beamed into their fod every waking hour, giving the last sane members of our society a choice between upgrading to 4g and 5g networking devices or being left for dead, unable to communicate with the smartphone-dependent population and lost to the sands of time. If you genuinely get excited by the prospect of a 4k movie on your bus journey home you are a wasteman and an actual chronic victim. Give Dignitas a ring NOW. They have taken away your freedoms for a slick new addictive opiate you have to use for everything to navigate this decaying mess of a planet.

I know this is a "futile effort", I've given everything they could ever want from me already but I don't want to be tracked so closely any further. They will still see my search history and my emails and my whatsapp/SMS conversations but I refuse to depend on these pocket panopticons any further. If you want to chat to me properly then I am here for in person conversations, I am flexible and I will make the effort to travel to you if we're local. If you aren't, I will still be available to communicate digitally. This is not about trying to reclaim absolute privacy like some schizoid Kaczynski fanboy, it's a case of standing my ground so the piss can't be taken any further; apathy is used by these surveillance states to make us feel like any battle for our autonomy has already been lost and isn't worth pursuing. 

The ID card debacle is now back on the agenda, in some respects we've already lost this battle but complete submission is not the answer when we are dealing with a genuine humanitarian crisis that will ruin lives. Detaching from the smartphone ecosystem is one way of reclaiming what our government dreams of taking away from us. When both the UK and US governments want to track their citizens through digital databases which harvest from smartphones, it would be nonsensical to give up and let them take away our right to privacy. The tricky bit comes in how everything has slowly transitioned to the digital world, making our current society much harder to navigate without having an app for everything. The other tricky bit comes in how they've tricked us all into craving constant stimulation, a state of unrelenting hedonism that can only be satisfied by a device that you can take anywhere and do anything with.  

We are now at a point in human history where the capitalists, having seized all physical property, are in desperate need of another commodity they can harvest for growth; the next biggest resource available is our time. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the globalist project was put in place. This project was a move coordinated by the west to establish capitalism as an all-encompassing state of reality in which no other way of life can even be envisioned, let alone enabled. We now live in an age where we are encouraged through every avenue of our lives to continue consuming an overwhelming amount of "content" on a daily basis. We are all being pushed into a passive role, even when we think we're subverting it. Our culture has become nothing but reference points to what has come before, lining the pockets of the archive owners that lease out decades-old work to reap billions in royalties. New bands think they're creating something when in reality they're merely consuming the commodity of "modern" music through their instruments (the phenomenon now goes back as far as 70 years), consuming aesthetics of the past in their fancy photoshoots, having the illusion they're running the show when in reality all they are doing is serving the capitalist machine they think their "DIY/Indie" ethos exempts them from. Even I'm being passive now, I've probably just made a tenner for Mark Fisher's estate from this paragraph; that's how bad this condition has become.

The governments and their consumerist regimes did not lose the war against piracy, they simply used it to their advantage. In our digital age, the underclasses of society who were previously priced out of cultural commodities (music, movies, art, plays) have now been plunged in a state of paralysis from being granted unpriced, unlimited consumption, breeding mass complacency because you can simply distract yourself from the problems you face by diving into the ever-expanding library of free, fulfilling "media", instead of actually addressing them. It's also way more fulfilling to consume your esoteric goyslop than to socialise with others cos you don't know anyone in the real world cool enough to care about Miles Davis' 1973 performance at Filmore Hall, and there will never be anything/anyone cooler than electric era Miles Davis. We're all alone and powerless and the world is becoming more bloody and depraved every day but I am so unbelievably complacent for that live version of Bitches Brew. Thatcherism has me cornered, even musical counterculture enforces the status quo. 

I'm hoping that by detaching from the smartphone ecosystem, its malignant short-form slop scotty beaming and all its conveniences I will be mentally sharp enough to provide a detailed alternative. For now, I think people need to at least gain some awareness of their consumption habits and understand that they can actually make a change; from this we can find reasonable alternatives to our current way of being. Avoiding spending isn't enough, this is about the commodity as a whole and how we use it to pacify ourselves and turn ourselves into individualist wetwipes, like little thatcherite trumpton figures in a dead society. Community needs to be rebuilt, infrastructure needs to be reshaped and our habits need to change in order to accommodate for those who choose not to comply with this new smartphone-dependent world. If you're equally as frustrated with this condition then take this as your sign to remove yourself from the smartphone ecosystem. 

It can be done, I used to live like this for years until recently. This does not have to mean removing technology entirely from your life because it is very very useful! I am a total computer neek so I understand it will be easier for me to undertake this change than others but hopefully I can put together something to help separate people from this smartphone dependency that's pushed onto us at every interval. I might reuse bits of this to write a bigger piece cos I'm proud of the concepts I've written in this so stay peeled on the blog if this intrigued you. Also check out the Snapped Ankles KEXP session, this band are so heavy I love their crazy tree synths