You know, I had been thinking of buying a smartphone recently.
Thank you for reminding me that it's not at all worth it.
I don't really like to talk about my personal life and/or personal events, but I kind of need to.
So I had a very recent issue involving the smartphone. All of a sudden, it changed its locking pattern (which I never actually wanted to set, I was coerced by some apps into setting one in my "own" phone, at least I was the one buying and paying for it some years ago, neither Google nor banks nor governments). All of a sudden, my old locking pattern stopped working, it was changed. It was my own pocket, which, somehow, got enough entropy to emerge a correct order of:
1. Unlocking the phone using the current pattern
2. Opening settings
3. Then opening settings for changing pattern
4. Then setting a new pattern
5. Then confirming the new pattern, locking me into doom.
Yeah, it seems very unlikely, on the verge of impossible, for a pocket to achieving this. No, nobody used my phone, I'm not the social kind of person (I'm a schizotypal kind of person who distances themselves from other's intimacy). Perhaps someone did that (literally) behind my back, or perhaps I was the one who did that and I forgot I did (I don't remember of any memory lapse... but I wouldn't remember if I ever had one). All I know is that the pattern I set stopped working.
Then it began a Kafkaesque bureaucracy from the technological dystopia where I was coerced into existence. Android can't use Google Account to bypass things ("For your security"), so I either guess what the Lady Entropy chose for my new pattern, or I would need a factory reset.
"Luckily" (I thought), my phone was (somehow) unlocked, so I could still tinker with it, except when I'd need to access some apps or features which would ask for this new, unknown pattern. Fearing a BFU (Before First Unlock) state, I avoided restarting it. This means I couldn't remove the SD Card (more on that later).
I tried everything: ADB removing system files regarding the screen lock (but it didn't work because it's not rooted because I'm NOT ALLOWED to root MY OWN PHONE or a plethora of apps would stop working). Tried "Find my Device" hoping that I could find an option to reset a lock pattern remotely (it used to have such option, now one can't do it anymore, For Your Security™). Tried to stochastically input patterns hoping that I could see the option "Forgot pattern?" (older Android versions used to have such option, but you guessed it... For Your Security™). I even thought of trying every single mathematical combination possible, only to face the mathematical fact that I'd be an herculeous attempt (thousands or millions of possibilities? I don't remember).
Then I decided to proceed with wiping. Seemed like Find my Device was the proper way to do that, because a SW factory reset (from settings) would ask the mysterious pattern, and a HW factory reset (from physical buttons) would risk asking it as well. I "backed up" entire gigabytes of phone's files, from photos and images (including the arts I've been drawing, along with their "source-code" TIFF files) to music and videos, documents and notes (including my poetry, past oniric experiences (a.k.a. "dreams") and past thoughts, published and unpublished). I barely use cloud storage (I don't trust delegating my personal files to the "cloud", which is just other's computer somewhere out there), so it was all inside the phone's storage, which I copied to the SD Card. I could've been tried to upload it to my laptop via Wifi or USB cable, but I couldn't risk being locked out of my own phone during the copy process. Copying to the SD card was the only faster option and "hopefully safe" (I thought).
After having copied almost everything to the SD Card, I started the irreversible: pushing the virtual red button from my laptop, triggering a fuse that would implode everything digitally, including the pattern carefully chosen by Ms. Randomness, clicking the "Erase my data" from within Find my Device. I confirmed it. Twice.
Then it began. The erasure. I thought it would affect solely the internal storage because "the SD card has nothing to do with the smartphone's shenanigans", how naïve of me. After a couple of minutes, the phone was ready, the digital amnesia was in place, except for its distant remembrance of a Google account previously set.
After lots of boring screens, I finally got to the "Home screen"... "Home", as they say. You expect that all the boxes from your moving are waiting for you inside the truck outside...
Except THERE WAS NO TRUCK OUTSIDE! All the boxes from the moving simply vanished out of existence. And there's more: they were probably encrypted (For Your Security™) so it won't matter if I try Recuva or whatever tool to try to recover the old partition table from within the digital confines of the SD Card. Cloud's backup was encrypted, too, and it couldn't be decrypted without the Lady Randomness's secret.
I'm kind of a digital hoarder. I downloaded many things I deemed interesting, mainly arts I found on fediverse. I kept my notes, expecting me to use them on posterity. I had plenty of a digital Dark Expo. It's all gone now. My own arts (at least their sources, their origins, their "birth certificate", their unpublished side) are gone. It's like a part of me was moved to /dev/null.
There are mundane things as well. Things I needed to keep in order to be a "citizen": receipts for tax-related affairs, for example. Gone.
Conversely, it's like a burden was taken out from me. It's like the anchor anchoring me to this mundane existence is partially gone so I could sail somewhere else out of this world. Perhaps my meeting with the Lady of Darkness is sooner than I think... Thanks, digital Kafkaesque dystopia! (And thanks to my parents for having brought me to it)
You know, I had been thinking of buying a smartphone recently.
Thank you for reminding me that it's not at all worth it.
On the one hand, a smartphone is really not worth it. After all, we don't "own" the phone, because we can't really choose what we want to do with either Android or iOS. There are alternative mobile OSes such as PureOS, but they don't always work with banking apps and state-owned apps (often due to the "For Your Security" argument/fallacy).
And that's where the other hand enters: the world has been heavily digitized, and non-digital principles (such as money, as in the physical bill or dimes) are already being seen as "otherworldly". Some places don't even allow cash payment anymore.
Where I live (Brazil) it's even worse: despite being a third-world country, Brazil has something called "Pix" (developed by our Federal Reserve called "Banco Central do Brasil"), a fully digital, wire-transfer-like payment method, which was heavily adopted countrywide. There are places which only accepts Pix ("Só aceitamos pix"). The heavy adoption of financial institutions ("Nubank", "PicPay", among others) instead of well-established banks (Santander, Bradesco, etc) by Brazilians makes it so cash withdrawal is something "auxiliary" rather than "essential", with those financial institutions charging for every cash withdrawal. Even those well-established banks have been transitioning entirely to digital functionalities, putting physical cash completely aside... I mean, it's still available, and they often offer a few free cash withdrawals monthly, but it's (cash withdrawal) becoming less and less available as a banking service.
Even analog tech is something seen as "otherworldly" nowadays. I'm very nostalgic of the analog tech that we used to have around: CRT television sets tuning and receiving analog PAL/NTSC signal, cassette and VHS tapes, carburetor cars (such as Ascona known around here as "Chevrolet Monza", VW Beetle known as "Fusca", Ford Corcel, among other pre-2000 brands and models) and so on. At that time, people weren't used to use mobile phones and even after Nokia phones became popular, it was still something optional, something enjoyable and fun to use and own... At that time, we could really own things: you bought it, it'd be forever yours. Nowadays, the rental/subscription models dominated every single aspect of life, everything became another required subscription, and digital, blackboxed tech rules every aspect of our lives.
Those times, where we could own technology (rather than technology owning us), it's a time that would only return if somehow, at some time, the current technology stopped working entirely (some kind of cosmic EMP blast frying every single black mirrored slab and every single data-center around the world).
Back to my displeasure with current technologies: It's been a while since I've been displeased by current "modernities". I mean, my entire life was built on top of technology (I used to professionally work as a programmer since 2013 and coding is something I still do personally sometimes), but I am willing to lose it all because, in the end, those things can't even be taken with me after my inevitable death.
And the drop in the ocean, the straw that broke the camel's back, was seeing a large portion of my digital life simply vanishing out of existence before my eyes, not because I wanted it, but because Google wanted it, because a big tech wanted it. "For Your Security" they often argue.
Every aspect of modern life have been compelling humans to dystopia, so ditching this dystopia somehow requires us to find ways to ditch those aspects of life in the first place. And that's far from easy, it's almost impossible. One could live in a very rural place, but it requires lot of money to afford a property and, even so, it would be tied to digital things (digital contracts for purchase and sale, digital certificates for land ownership, etc). Humans are forbidden to live among the wilderness and going back to our real, early roots, so society is imposed upon us, which in turn imposes (due to the "you live in society" argument/fallacy I often hear from some people) all the strings attached.
So, back to the start: yeah, phones aren't worth it, but even I can't see how to really ditch our tech dependency and that's pretty infuriating and very depressing.