Your Smartphone Doesn’t Belong to You

It belongs to the advertisers and tech companies exploiting you

A Nokia 3310: via Pixabey

I remember the moment that I realised that I don’t want to own a smartphone. It was 11AM on a Monday morning, everything was falling apart and I was stood outside an abandoned building that used to be a double-glazed window storage unit. It had been repurposed as an ecstasy-drenched, sweat fest.

I was exhausted, confused and high on fatigue. My limbs were frazzled, my brain reduced to an insignificant smudge; a barely recognisable blip on the horizon of what used to be reality. That was all normal.

All that was left was my equally weathered gaggle of acquaintances — a mixture of long-standing friends and total strangers I’d just met — who are stood with me in a random carpark.

Sure, a high street is only a 15-minute walk away. But it had been a long morning. I’d been awake for 48 hours and my mental state is beginning to crease, crumple and fold in on itself.

Should we brave the walk?

We’re bound to be confronted by a concerning amount of ‘normal’ people. You’ve seen the type, right? Wearing their suits and ties, with painfully stressed facial expressions, they dash off purposefully in a million different directions, to complete menial tasks that…