Obligatory:
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If smartphones can keep the peace, and make people turn away from violence, it’s a step in the right direction.
I really don’t see how they would, but perhaps the cartoonist knows.
Boy, that ignore feature sure is a nifty invention, when it actually works correctly.
I think that last update may have been hinky; certain features are now not functioning properly.
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This.
The fact that someone can’t see those phrases you quoted as part of the problem ties right into what I said above about fish and water.
If we saw a picture of a bunch of kids playing in a polluted lake with garbage floating in it, no one would question that it makes us feel sad that those kids have no other place to play, or even outraged that those kids don’t even know what clean water looks like. But when that lake is society, and anyone dares point out the pollution and trash floating around us, and wonders why we can’t clean things up, we’re told that we’re destroying things. How dare we want a clean, healthy environment. A certain faction starts bringing more trash to throw in, because we’ve managed to take some out. They say that we’re cleaning up the right way, or that we’re cleaning up too fast, or we’re not respecting those who like catching sick from all the junk in our environment. That their kids have a right to be ill and throw trash at others. Some may even mock their kids if they see them picking up a piece of litter and throwing it in the garbage can instead of the lake. Others will say things like “well, not all of us have diverted our trash wholesale into the lake, so you complaining about the lake is insulting. And your cleaning efforts are making it hard for me to enjoy my swim.” Just because you (generic, not aimed at @TornPaperNapkin, or any other individual) occasionally only pee in the lake while others have hooked up their entire household sewer system, doesn’t make you innocent.
If you aren’t willing to be part of the solution, and you block the efforts of and attack the people who are, then you are part of the problem. #notall? Well, if not, then why all the defensiveness when we say #yesall?
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Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming your strawmen are unintentional, you’d get a lot more traction here if you didn’t let your assumptions get in the way of actually listening to what people are trying to tell you.
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You’re the only person using the term “repent”. Think of it, rather, as “become aware, and learn to do better from this day on”. And yes, your father (as mine, who is also of that era) has the same responsibility as any other person with innate privileges to try to be part of the solution moving forward.
How many times was he sexually assaulted because of that situation? Because I can tell you what happens to 16-year-old teen girls who are in similar situations. And, they make a lot less money in their part-time jobs, which means they often have to rely on the kind of ‘boyfriend’ who wants a girlfriend who is in dire straits.
And did he act out at all in school or life because of his situation? If he had been black, he would have been put in adult prison for decades for even the smallest infraction.
He may already be well ahead of you on this path. Why not join him? If nothing else, toxic masculinity is largely responsible for the significant age difference in average life expectancy between men and women. You’d be saving yourself, as well as your son. And, you know, other people who didn’t have as many advantages as you have (even if you’ve also had some disadvantages).
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The goal of ideology is not to create new possibilities, that’s capitalism’s job.
The goal of ideology is to carefully edit those possibilities into a reasonable and intelligible stasis
The national health service didn’t invent the pacemaker. It just makes it possible for people to both make and get them. And it probably makes it harder for new pacemakers to be invented! But that’s ok.
Feminism didn’t invent the mobile ecosystem but if they can imagine a better way for humans to have them, that sounds great! As long as they’re not just complaining about their existence, we’ve got boomers for that
I suspect it’s more due to testosterone. A castrated male can live between 5 and 15 years longer than an uncastrated one (depending in part on the age at which the testicles were removed)
(Not that toxic masculinity isn’t also a factor, but I suspect it’s not as large as you might think.)
I am going to keep posting this, you know. Over and over and over and over again.
The old techies, the original ones who actually invented all of the technology vast multinationals are using the screw us all over, the ones who wouldn’t know an IPO from a hole in the ground, but who have really strong opinions on sorting algorithms, have, without the benefit of feminist analysis, known that the only way computerized systems are not tyrannical and malicious if for the users to control the means of information processing. As it were.
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While the concept is interesting, i think it still needs more work:
They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
This does seem to be more of a problem with social media, rather than a phone per-se.
My phone isn’t taking over my life, even though it’s turned on a lot of the time, because I don’t really have any kind of social media on it. So pretty much the only times my phone goes ‘ding’ is when someone I know wants to contact me, and I can reply at my leisure.
It’s a tool, and you get to decide what you use it for, and it’s not like “don’t use facebook” is a tricky technical hurdle to pass.
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Certainly there were diehard unrepentantly proud sexists in any class of “old techies”.* There was also never a class of “old techies” that didn’t include people who were informed by feminist analysis, or (before people called themselves “feminists”) an awareness of how gender inequality warped power hierarchies.
For that matter, I don’t think anyone using modern language to critique power relationships can do it free** from some “benefit of feminist analysis”.
*Boing Boing is probably not an ideal place for forgetting or erasing the contributions of some of the early techies. I don’t think you’re trying to do that, just noting the situational irony.
**Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
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Um yeah… so cough a few months ago, I got this link for an online test… from maybe from this bbs (heck it may have even been from you–I honestly can’t remember right now, it may well have come from a friend working in Austin on this matter)… and the first thing I noticed is that this implicit bias test is being offered by Harvard…
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Before taking it, I dug a bit deeper because I was curious about methodology, and went to the Project Implicit research group’s page before taking the test:
https://www.projectimplicit.net/about.html
Project Implicit is a non-profit organization and international collaboration between researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition - thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control. The goal of the organization is to educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet.
Project Implicit was founded in 1998 by three scientists – Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia). Project Implicit Mental Health launched in 2011, led by Bethany Teachman (University of Virginia) and Matt Nock (Harvard University). Project Implicit also provides consulting services, lectures, and workshops on implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, leadership, applying science to practice, and innovation. If you are interested in finding out more about these services, visit https://www.projectimplicit.net/organization.html.
Hmm.
Pushing aside my own assumptions about the makers of it, I took the test in good faith, and even as a woman of color it has been and is still abundantly clear I have plenty of uh room for improvement. Oh dear. 
There’s a big ol’ intersectionality right here, not the least of which is who owns and what happens to the Big Data that gets generated taking an online test by Harvard, or any of the million data points generated largely secretively by our dang phones. Fractal genies out of fractally increasing numbers of AI bottles and not a single bottlecap worthy of the name in sight.
A friend who works in infosec told me ~10 years ago that Facebook was a perfect turnkey operation for all things surveillance. He added smartphones to his opinion a few years after. Crimes like Cambridge Analytica’s etc. have only ossified his position.
I sense now that the de facto training our smartphones have been providing our upcoming generations consistently warps and ossifies user behavior [as described in the OP]. IMO we have scarcely begun to quantify this formally.
Complaints characterizing Them Dang Youngsters With Their Dang Screen Devices as clueless / unwilling / rude for not knowing how to conduct healthy human-to-human face-to-face relationships is but the mere tip o’ the iceberg and will take generations to undo.
Reclaiming the best parts of our humanity–all humans–will be the work of lifetimes.
I look at wee kids in grocery carts, pacified by screens whilst their parents are shopping, and I see the warping, the addiction, and implicit cultural programming going in far far earlier than my infosec friend had ever predicted.
Sheesh I think I am going outside to walk the dog now. 
Maybe I’ll flip a coin to decide whether I should take my smartphone.
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I don’t know what OS your smartphone runs, but iOS requires user consent for any type of notification and you can also disable those completely whenever you get one.
I find this reasonably straightforward.
Old techies had every sort of virtuous and terrible sort among them, no question about it. And, absolutely, some of the oldest were women. Indeed the oldest techie team of all time (Lovelace & Babbage) have an even 50/50 gender split.
However, the reasoning behind why computers should serve the user is orthogonal to the feminism or chauvinism or, God help us, fascism of the people who espoused what Steven Levy calls the “hacker ethic.” It’s a strange tech-focused ideology and is compatible with a surprisingly wide range of political and ideological positions. Some of the people who espouse it are terrible, horrible, and vile but… they think you should own and control your own data processing devices.
So, while some of the people who were Ye Olde Techies may have had any amount of feminist analysis at their beck and call, their position vis-a-vis user control of computers would have been exactly the same of some disgustingly reactionary Ye Olde Techie or some who was entirely ignorant of the existence of feminism and the reaction to it.
Hence why I said: ‘without benefit of.’ It’s not an erasure, so much as a nod to the fundamental weirdness of that long-ago community(?).
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I’m sure I’m not the first to say this but misogyny is baked into the foundation of capitalism. It just happens to be expressed in a wide variety of forms despite seeming not.
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It can’t be said enough, though.
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First, kudos on using “trousers,” instead of “pants.” It classes up the joint.
Second, it’s crazy that this has been an issue for years, and still isn’t addressed: Foreign tech companies hire tailors to fit new iPhones in customers’ pockets – New York Daily News
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I’m a Brit, so pants mean something else here.
I cannot see the link, being in EU, presumably they don’t comply (or want to) with the GDPR/cookie regulations.
You would have thought though that enough people had damaged their phones sitting on them or dropping them from hip pockets (or just found them inconvenient) to warrant a major shift in the design at least of fashionable items.
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Male/cis here, and my phone lives in a case clipped to my belt, precisely because a) if it went in a back pocket, there would be an inevitable >CRUNCH< sooner or later, and b) there’s no way I’m putting a radio transmitter into a front pocket, right next to the yarbles.
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