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The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age
Addresses how tech empowers community organizing and protest movements to combat the systems of capitalism and data exploitation that helped drive tech's own rise to ubiquity.
Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It's time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit.
Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the rise of smartphones has led to corporations using consumers' personal data for profit, unmonitored surveillance, and digital monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that have garnered control over our social, political, and economic landscapes.
But people are using their smartphones to fight back. New modes of resistance are emerging, signaling the possibility that our pocket computers could be harnessed for the benefit of people, not profit. From helping to organize protests against the US-Mexico border wall through Twitter to being used to report police brutality through Facebook Live, smartphones open a door for collective change.
Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It's time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit.
Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the rise of smartphones has led to corporations using consumers' personal data for profit, unmonitored surveillance, and digital monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that have garnered control over our social, political, and economic landscapes.
But people are using their smartphones to fight back. New modes of resistance are emerging, signaling the possibility that our pocket computers could be harnessed for the benefit of people, not profit. From helping to organize protests against the US-Mexico border wall through Twitter to being used to report police brutality through Facebook Live, smartphones open a door for collective change.
216 pages, Hardcover
Published March 10, 2020
3 people are currently reading
213 people want to read
About the author
Nicole Aschoff
5 books18 followersNicole Aschoff is the author of The New Prophets of Capital and an editor at Jacobin magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets including The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and Dissent magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 26, 2020
Feel the Planet: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Smartphones have enabled us to sense, visualize and share information about the world we live in. The author addresses how tech companies are empowering people and abuse power. A few corporations have dominated the infrastructure of modem social, political, and economic life. Regular folks use their hand machines to socialize, learn, connect, and have fun, while tech companies extract personal data of users for generating revenue.
The book starts with an analogy between emergence of automobile industry in early 1900s and the recent technological development of smartphones and social media, and the lesson to be learnt here. The author argues that user personal data should not be collected and sold to other companies. And regulation should be in place that fundamentally change the business models of tech companies that depend on user data for marketing and product development. We must also note that any personal data to be used to advance our collective knowledge also diminish the potential gains from big data and machine learning. Besides, corporations are striving to serve the interest of its stockholders, and more regulations could hurt their progress and economy. There should be a balance between the two strategies.
The book largely focuses on users and tech companies, but governments have also used the technology to advance their interests. Evidence suggest that the Russian government influenced the outcome of 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and they are doing that again in the upcoming 2020 presidential elections. Religious extremists have used smartphones as a tool to promote terrorism. Fake news has been promoted in real time to coincide with real news. Census data collected by the government resides in government databases to which other federal agencies like FBI and CIA may have access, and they could potentially harm the interests of the citizens of this country directly or indirectly: Countries like Russia and China have hacked into the government database for political and economic gains.
Technology creates our world; it creates wealth, economy, and our way of living. Does technology, like biological life, evolve? Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico have concluded that the answer is, Yes! They have been pursuing a revolution in science and economics. Ignoring the boundaries of disciplines, they are searching for novel fundamental ideas, theories, and practices that integrates a full range of scientific inquiries that will help us understand the complexities of reality. Pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions in his book “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves.” Branching networks are found at every level in biology from a single cell to the ecosystem. Human-made networks could share the same features; and if they don't, then it might be profitable to make them do so! Nature's patterns tend to arise from economical solutions, and this may have happened when matter (non-life) turned into living cell (life) 3.8 billion years ago on this planet! Evolution propagates this flourishing organization. It creates new niches into existing organism or human technology. This respectively creates new creatures or new technology. There is a parallel, according to author Brian Arthur.
The book is arbitrarily organized, and the chapters do not connect well which makes reading a challenge.
Smartphones have enabled us to sense, visualize and share information about the world we live in. The author addresses how tech companies are empowering people and abuse power. A few corporations have dominated the infrastructure of modem social, political, and economic life. Regular folks use their hand machines to socialize, learn, connect, and have fun, while tech companies extract personal data of users for generating revenue.
The book starts with an analogy between emergence of automobile industry in early 1900s and the recent technological development of smartphones and social media, and the lesson to be learnt here. The author argues that user personal data should not be collected and sold to other companies. And regulation should be in place that fundamentally change the business models of tech companies that depend on user data for marketing and product development. We must also note that any personal data to be used to advance our collective knowledge also diminish the potential gains from big data and machine learning. Besides, corporations are striving to serve the interest of its stockholders, and more regulations could hurt their progress and economy. There should be a balance between the two strategies.
The book largely focuses on users and tech companies, but governments have also used the technology to advance their interests. Evidence suggest that the Russian government influenced the outcome of 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and they are doing that again in the upcoming 2020 presidential elections. Religious extremists have used smartphones as a tool to promote terrorism. Fake news has been promoted in real time to coincide with real news. Census data collected by the government resides in government databases to which other federal agencies like FBI and CIA may have access, and they could potentially harm the interests of the citizens of this country directly or indirectly: Countries like Russia and China have hacked into the government database for political and economic gains.
Technology creates our world; it creates wealth, economy, and our way of living. Does technology, like biological life, evolve? Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico have concluded that the answer is, Yes! They have been pursuing a revolution in science and economics. Ignoring the boundaries of disciplines, they are searching for novel fundamental ideas, theories, and practices that integrates a full range of scientific inquiries that will help us understand the complexities of reality. Pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions in his book “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves.” Branching networks are found at every level in biology from a single cell to the ecosystem. Human-made networks could share the same features; and if they don't, then it might be profitable to make them do so! Nature's patterns tend to arise from economical solutions, and this may have happened when matter (non-life) turned into living cell (life) 3.8 billion years ago on this planet! Evolution propagates this flourishing organization. It creates new niches into existing organism or human technology. This respectively creates new creatures or new technology. There is a parallel, according to author Brian Arthur.
The book is arbitrarily organized, and the chapters do not connect well which makes reading a challenge.
May 16, 2020
Aschoff's book is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complexity of digital technology in the first two decades fo the 20th century. What's important about her book is that it is not necessarily anything too new for those who are paying close attention to the possibilities, problems, and controversies of digital technology. Rather, her work is a miraculous and accessible exploration of all those things, drawing together nearly all the people, research, and ideas into one book. The book's power is in how coherent she pulls these things together into a compelling conversation that naturally evolves from one subject to the next with clear language that is never condescending but still instructive. Coupled with this discussion of current technology, Aschoff makes sure to draw useful and meaningful comparisons with previous technological shifts throughout history to show how the possibilities, promises, and problems also plagued previous technological changes in society. The change that comes through most clearly in her work is the scale of changes and power leveraged by the new titans of technology. Yet her work is critically balanced in that she also highlights the way that resistance continues to happen in new and unexpected ways. If one is looking for a solid and concise breakdown of the complexity of digital technology in society, this is the book to read.
September 7, 2024
"We can and should tell our own stories about the kind of society we want to live in, technology and all. In doing so, we can foster new ways of thinking about our digital-analog future. But what stories should we tell? How do we deal with the myriad issues raised by our smartphones? - privacy, autonomy, addiction, surveillance, precarity, narcissism, commodification, democracy. A growing number of voices are weighing in on these questions, which is a good thing because, unlike the techno-determinists who until recently have received a disproportionate amount of airtime, it assumes that we can do something. If our future is not to be Silicon Valley´s Dis-Utopia then what is it to be? What is our version of Utopia? Or a more manageable question, What relationship should we have with the technology and corporations that have, largely through our smartphones, come to play a central role in the US and global economy in the past decade?"
Nicole Aschoff
Nicole Aschoff
May 26, 2020
I've read several books now that have touched on the comparisons of contemporary times to the Gilded Age, and the comparison of the tech titans of today (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) to the robber barons of the prior age (Vanderbilt, Morgan, Carnegie, etc.). This book does as well, but really does a great job of explaining the parallels and the similar causes - unrestrained capitalism and lax antitrust policy chief among them.
What's different about Aschoff's work as compared to other books I've read on the subject is that she gives some criticism to the notion of walking away from the tech companies. She (rightly, imo) points out that walking away is only available to those that possess a certain amount of privilege (for starters, for many rural Americans, smartphones is their only connection to the internet). Rather, she also acknowledges the good the technology has done in empowering certain groups in fighting systemic issues that have not gone away.
I think what's particularly insightful about the book (at least for me) is understanding who is producing the content for these tech companies (us, the people) and how the narrative of the story often told by the tech company is a myth - they have utilized unrestrained capitalism and deregulation in building on top of what the public (via the government) made available, and then profited from it without acknowledging the help they got along the way.
It's a challenging book to read, in all the right ways; one I will be thinking about quite a lot and will use to inform my thinking going forward.
What's different about Aschoff's work as compared to other books I've read on the subject is that she gives some criticism to the notion of walking away from the tech companies. She (rightly, imo) points out that walking away is only available to those that possess a certain amount of privilege (for starters, for many rural Americans, smartphones is their only connection to the internet). Rather, she also acknowledges the good the technology has done in empowering certain groups in fighting systemic issues that have not gone away.
I think what's particularly insightful about the book (at least for me) is understanding who is producing the content for these tech companies (us, the people) and how the narrative of the story often told by the tech company is a myth - they have utilized unrestrained capitalism and deregulation in building on top of what the public (via the government) made available, and then profited from it without acknowledging the help they got along the way.
It's a challenging book to read, in all the right ways; one I will be thinking about quite a lot and will use to inform my thinking going forward.
November 14, 2020
This book is not so much about smartphones but more a long examination of the collective disillusionment of neoliberal capitalism, which is fair. Does feel like a book that has a limited widow of opportunity to read it.
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September 28, 2021Check out our Books in 5 review of The Smartphone Society!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvX9j...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvX9j...
May 17, 2022
Former Jacobin editor (and friend of mine!) Nicole Aschoff tries to get us past proclamations of doom, utopian nonsense, and “what’s the deeeeeal with phones?!”-level analysis in this work of popular sociology. Fun fact- the last event I had scheduled before covid was her (cancelled) book launch!
The smartphone is a big goddamned deal, arguably a bigger deal than the personal computer (except there wouldn’t be the former without the latter), and we dismiss that at our peril. It serves many functions, and moreover combines functions, in a tiny, portable, relatively affordable package, that genuinely does change the way we do a lot of things. Aschoff discusses some of these- dating, work, politics.
But she doesn’t leave off at either the possibilities that smartphones present at the moment (filming cops!), or their dangers (the Uber-fication of labor!). If there’s a target in this book, it is technological determinism, in either its utopian or dystopian guise. It is true that the shape of the smartphone’s functions, like that of any important technology, shapes society. But it’s also true that society — and social power, who wields it and to what ends — shapes how we use the smartphone.
Right now, that power is squarely in the hands of a coalition of Silicon Valley giants and major governments, and loaned out to other employers. The smartphone, in its current use pattern, empowers the powerful more than it does the powerless (though it does help the latter in a number of instances). The smartphone is a powerful tool in their hands to further their goal of instantiating a data-driven hypercapitalist hellscape.
There’s some interesting stuff here on “spirits of capitalism.” I know Aschoff is a big Luc Boltanski reader based on reading her earlier work, and his thesis that neoliberalism ushered in a “new spirit of capitalism” to replace Weber’s crusty Protestant ethic (NOT “Protestant work ethic,” a phrase which drives me up the wall). Aschoff argues we need a new spirit to envision a future where technology works for us. It would have been interesting to have gotten more on that — Marxist and Weberian insights mix in interesting and volatile ways, people on both sides (well, in my experience, more the Marxist side, but I know more Marxists) often treat the other as verboten — and what it might mean for leftist praxis. But I also understand Nicole wanted to write an approachable, short book.
For all the ways smartphones keep us hooked to the bosses and their values, disconnecting from our phones, while it may be useful (even necessary) for some, isn’t really a good option if we are going to redistribute power downwards. Instead, we need organization- and there’s an extent to which smartphones can help with that. Realistic perspectives on technology, not mythology, needs to guide our organizing understanding if we’re going to seize power and if we’re going to use it sensibly when we’ve got it. We can’t ignore it on the idea it’s not “real politics,” and we certainly can’t buy utopian promises of it eliminating politics. When the power is in our hands, we can use (and, if needs be, limit the excesses of) our technologies for the common good. ****’
The smartphone is a big goddamned deal, arguably a bigger deal than the personal computer (except there wouldn’t be the former without the latter), and we dismiss that at our peril. It serves many functions, and moreover combines functions, in a tiny, portable, relatively affordable package, that genuinely does change the way we do a lot of things. Aschoff discusses some of these- dating, work, politics.
But she doesn’t leave off at either the possibilities that smartphones present at the moment (filming cops!), or their dangers (the Uber-fication of labor!). If there’s a target in this book, it is technological determinism, in either its utopian or dystopian guise. It is true that the shape of the smartphone’s functions, like that of any important technology, shapes society. But it’s also true that society — and social power, who wields it and to what ends — shapes how we use the smartphone.
Right now, that power is squarely in the hands of a coalition of Silicon Valley giants and major governments, and loaned out to other employers. The smartphone, in its current use pattern, empowers the powerful more than it does the powerless (though it does help the latter in a number of instances). The smartphone is a powerful tool in their hands to further their goal of instantiating a data-driven hypercapitalist hellscape.
There’s some interesting stuff here on “spirits of capitalism.” I know Aschoff is a big Luc Boltanski reader based on reading her earlier work, and his thesis that neoliberalism ushered in a “new spirit of capitalism” to replace Weber’s crusty Protestant ethic (NOT “Protestant work ethic,” a phrase which drives me up the wall). Aschoff argues we need a new spirit to envision a future where technology works for us. It would have been interesting to have gotten more on that — Marxist and Weberian insights mix in interesting and volatile ways, people on both sides (well, in my experience, more the Marxist side, but I know more Marxists) often treat the other as verboten — and what it might mean for leftist praxis. But I also understand Nicole wanted to write an approachable, short book.
For all the ways smartphones keep us hooked to the bosses and their values, disconnecting from our phones, while it may be useful (even necessary) for some, isn’t really a good option if we are going to redistribute power downwards. Instead, we need organization- and there’s an extent to which smartphones can help with that. Realistic perspectives on technology, not mythology, needs to guide our organizing understanding if we’re going to seize power and if we’re going to use it sensibly when we’ve got it. We can’t ignore it on the idea it’s not “real politics,” and we certainly can’t buy utopian promises of it eliminating politics. When the power is in our hands, we can use (and, if needs be, limit the excesses of) our technologies for the common good. ****’
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews