Why Should it Bother You? An Inquiry to the Hegemony

Note: This is the fourth in a series of non-political post-election posts. You can view the previous three here, here,and here. The Toteboard will return to election analysis and political commentary soon, beginning with a preview of next year's midterm Senate elections.

Note also: This is the first Toteboard post that is written entirely in the first person.

Some time ago, I mentioned to a colleague that I have idiosyncratic tastes in movies. He gave me a simple deadpan response: “Go figure.”

So yeah, my interests and predilections haven’t always gone straight up the middle. Not that they’ve flown totally off the grid either, but they have often tended a little bit “niche” or outré. Perhaps this can be traced to my being the youngest child in my nuclear family by several years and (correctly) sensing that the family was already a fully-formed unit before I arrived. Or perhaps it was my being the only lefty in that aforementioned pentad. Or perhaps it was simply my developing at a very young age a pronounced sense of individual ego-self and a resistance to reflexive conformity. For whatever reasons, I have frequently gravitated at least a little bit toward the margins when it comes to movies and television, as well as with literature, food, clothing, hobbies, politics, religion, sports, and so on. Even as a professional academic, I tended to carve out intellectual and pedagogical spaces that many of the other eggheads recognized as a bit quirky.

During my teens and young adulthood, I quickly discovered that one of the dynamics that came with occupying this quasi-outlier territory was the frequency with which a range of other people would offer unsolicited – sometimes critical, or overtly hostile – comments about my particular choices. The long hair seemed to make an especially appealing target. “I like your hairdo, who’s your stylist?” asked one public school teacher. “Why aren’t you wearing a bra?” asked another. Contrary to what one might expect, such antagonistic commentaries were not always directed to personal expressions that may have carried political (i.e., “rebellious”) overtones. For example, one former co-worker was bent out of shape by my bringing hummus sandwiches to the office for lunch, which I guess was considered somewhat exotic back in 1978. “Why can’t you eat normal food?” she would grunt at me.

As you can imagine, I generally found such comments trying, and often bewildering, but I soon started responding with a one-size-fits-all comeback: “Why should it bother you?” If my initial deliveries of WSIBY betrayed a certain flustered defensiveness, I eventually grew genuinely inquisitive and began to affect a few different colors. “Why should it bother you?” Why should it bother you?” “Why should it bother you?” Why should it bother you?” While this is not to suggest that I was wholly without my own prejudices and blind spots, I also became increasingly aware that WSIBY applied to judgmental situations that didn’t involve me at all, like when people in my orbit might make disparaging comments about gays and lesbians, or girls/women who didn’t “dress up” or wear makeup (a college acquaintance once complained to me about her ex-roommate gaining weight), or just about anyone who for one reason or another impressed people as “weird.” By the time I finished high school, I had uttered WSIBY so many times that I probably could have trademarked it, or at least placed it as a fitting quotation next to my (long-haired) yearbook picture.  

Of course, I have had far fewer occasions to employ WSIBY during most of my adult life, in large part because within the careers, neighborhoods, and social circles that I have very intentionally chosen, my “idiosyncrasies” have seldom come off as particularly avant-garde. Frankly, no one in academia cared one way or the other about whether I wore an earring in 1980 or didn’t own a tie. And it wasn’t very hard to find fellow devotees of Gibson and Camp skulking around the Cambridge coffeehouses. Still, over the decades, I have remained attuned to those occasional WSIBY moments. One of the most memorable (and amusing) came during the summer of 2005, when a thirty-something (or maybe forty-ish) guy I met started randomly bloviating about “all these girls and young women” who are getting tattoos, and how they’re all going to regret it in thirty years’ time. “What do you think?” he asked, obviously unprepared for the can of earthworms he was about to open. After making sure he really did want to know my opinion, I said something like this: “You know, I have to say that I do find it fascinating how so many people devote so much mental and emotional energy to anticipating how people they don’t even know (or are ever going to see again) are going to feel three decades later about something they did that doesn’t even have any effect on them at all.” In retrospect, this was probably just a more clinical, more whimsical version of WSIBY. But like I said, those moments have grown fewer and farther between.

Until now, that is. For the time in quite a while, one of my recent “idiosyncrasies” has repeatedly drawn, and continues to draw, a conspicuous flurry of comments from intimates and strangers alike. I’m not talking here about a peccadillo that is particularly controversial, or one that is even particularly interesting. And yet, the fact that I still use a flip phone and have a strong preference not to get a smartphone seems to be a subject of tremendous interest to a wide variety of people. It really is striking how often, and how consistently, various people volunteer unsolicited remarks, ranging in tone from confused (“is that really your phone?”), to curious (“why don’t you want a smartphone?”), to amused (“oh, that’s precious), to snarky (“come on and join the twenty-first century), to confessional (“I couldn’t live without one”), to evangelical (“but they can do so much”), to altruistic (“I really think you’d be a lot happier with one”). What’s more, many of these folks seem to be caught in some kind of odd perseveration loop, as they repeatedly return to the subject, often attempting to initiate a conversation about the merits of our respective devices. This strikes me as really, really peculiar. I can’t imagine a similar cluster of reactions to someone who chooses not to make use of a different piece of modern technology that “everyone has,” like a car, or a microwave oven, or a garbage disposal. “Really, I can even stick celery stalks and banana peels in mine!”

As I try to process this anomaly with a degree of objectivity, I can only surmise that my use of a flip phone and/or my rejection of a smartphone is a source of some emotional distress for a distinct portion of the population. What I would like to do here is attempt to unpack the nature of that distress, i.e., to theorize exactly what it is that bothers them to the point that they feel compelled to comment, confess, testify, criticize, evangelize, and otherwise pay disproportionate attention to such a trivial matter. Of course, I have not conducted any rigorous ethnographic research on the subject, and I am always reluctant to make armchair claims about other people’s interior motivations and feelings. Still, based on my own experiences and observations, I am prepared to suggest a theory – a “theory,” as in an explanation (which one may always counter with a better explanation) – as a way to make sense of an otherwise puzzling constellation of behaviors.

But first, a little background to this explanation. It goes without saying that there are many principled reasons why someone might eschew the use of smartphones, most of which I really do not need to address here. It seems like the New York Times runs an article just about every week about how they damage young people’s intellectual and social development, or correlate with increased depression and obesity, or how they lend themselves to social media and political doom-scrolling addictions, or even how their overuse significantly increases the incidence of hemorrhoids. But I would suggest that the most pernicious aspect of smartphones is the way they increasingly colonize various venues and displace (or usurp) other technologies. Ordinary smartphone users tend not to notice (or care about) this phenomenon, but those who have resisted the bandwagon discern this pretty much every day.

What do I mean by colonization? I’m talking here about the insinuation of smartphone technology into situations where it gradually transforms itself from option to necessity. For example, over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to gain admittance to a wide range of locations – e.g., museums, theaters, athletic stadiums, etc. – without accessing tickets through a smartphone. In fact, you’d practically need a court order to get into Truist Park (home of the Atlanta Braves) with anything resembling an old-fashioned paper ticket. Along these lines, a number of venerable (and still immensely important) reference sources – roadmaps, dictionaries, newspapers – are rapidly vanishing off the face of the planet. Strangely enough, smartphones also usurp other technologies. You can do the NYT Spelling Bee on your laptop, but you can’t access your milestone “badges” without the app. Likewise, you can set up wi-fi in your home, but you can’t install a wi-fi extender without the app.

Some may read this last paragraph simply as evidence for why everyone should have a smartphone. I would argue that it is evidence for why this phenomenon bears further scrutiny.

It’s very easy to overlook the fact that this marks a significant departure from how the market ordinarily assimilates competing technologies, at least when it is functioning in a healthy and ethical manner. An air-fryer may represent several layers of improvement over a frying pan, but most frozen food items will include side-by-side preparation instructions for stovetop, microwave, and conventional oven. Driving is usually faster than walking, but an online (or smartphone!) map will provide navigation directions for travel by car, by foot, and perhaps even by bicycle or public transportation. Almost all utility and tax bills indicate how to pay by check, credit card, or electronic funds transfer. In all of these cases, the trend-line is toward including more, not fewer, options.

According to recent surveys, about 10% of the American population does not own a smartphone, which means that various commercial establishments are basically blowing off (or attempting to coerce) a sizeable minority constituency. To get a sense of scale, that’s comparable to sporting goods outlets simply deciding not to sell left-handed baseball gloves, or auto mechanics not stocking parts for or servicing Korean-made cars, or even drugstores choosing not to carry skin and hair products for Black customers. I suspect most people would find such actions pretty objectionable.

At this point, it’s reasonable to ask why businesses and institutions that would never knowingly participate in exclusionary practices are nonetheless complicit in smartphone colonization. Why do commercial enterprises make it so difficult for customers who don’t have them? Why do so many vendors actually reward customers who purchase products using their app? Why is all of this occurring more or less simultaneously?

Clearly, this market-wide phenomenon serves somebody’s interests. Or it serves the interests of a number of distinct somebodies. And in all likelihood, those somebodies are the corporations whose financial interests are served by fostering a dependence on the technology they produce or maintain. It’s not particularly difficult to imagine the cellphone, internet, and/or other tech lobbies making a coordinated effort to “persuade” various outlets to adopt a smartphone-only model for transactions and communications. After all, it is the companies they represent that have been caught up time after time in antitrust scandals, privacy violations, unethical data harvesting, and so forth, pretty much all of which chiefly occur under the radar and well beyond the public eye. This would certainly explain what has amounted to a real but largely unannounced paradigm shift, i.e., a wholesale conversion in how companies ordinarily do business.

Importantly, this type of colonization does not end with simply the manipulation of the market; it also involves the manipulation of perceptions. As smartphones increasingly become the only way to conduct day-to-day business, many people come to view them not only as a normal part of contemporary life, but almost as a natural part of it. In other words, they no longer view smartphones as mere objects that companies peddle and many people choose to purchase – they regard them as necessary life components, hard-wired into the very fabric of our social and material reality. And for someone who views the world this way, i.e., someone who accepts without critical reflection the emergent “smartphone hegemony,” it must be very hard to imagine why anyone would choose not to own something so essential.

I would now argue that this speaks directly to the original subject of this post, i.e., the reason why my use of a flip phone and/or rejection of a smartphone is a source of unarticulated emotional distress for a surprising range of acquaintances. To put it bluntly, their “post-colonial” expectations about cellphone technology have so suffused their worldviews – i.e., their ingrained understandings of how the world is and how it should be – that they experience something of a cognitive disequilibrium when they encounter a seemingly intelligent and like-minded person who does not “get with the program.” In short, when a person like me, who can easily afford a smartphone and does in fact understand the many things it can do, still chooses not to have one, this has the unintended effect of fragmenting their sense of reality. But of course, the reflexive response, as is generally the case with all hegemonic social and political structures (not unlike a dysfunctional family system) is to double down on the authority of one’s own perspective and problematize the outlier, i.e., to dismiss the other as “silly” or “retrograde,” or perhaps even to construct them as “stubborn,” “difficult,” or “rebellious.” And that’s what ultimately led me to haul that old chestnut out of rhetorical retirement and for the first time in a long while ask, “why should it bother you?”

So there it is, i.e., my working theory, my working explanation for a perplexing, though largely harmless, behavior pattern that I have observed regularly over the last several years. And by spelling it out here, I am happy to subject it to (as we academics say) “peer review.” That is, if any Toteboard reader disagrees with the substance of this argument, I encourage you to do the intellectually responsible thing and rebut it, or provide a better explanation, or interpret the evidence through a more constructive lens. The purpose of intellectual inquiry (and of this blog) is, after all, to hold things up to the light.

However, if this post is leaving any readers feeling uncomfortable or agitated, well, then I guess I have a question for them.