How the phone swallowed the modern world.
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (Published 2018)
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”
Mobile Phone Museum
We are a not-for-profit entity created to safeguard the rich history and design diversity of mobile devices which have been launched over the last four decades.
Pluralistic: Installing Android phones in Blackberry chassis (23 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As much as I admire the techlash, I have some serious reservations. I worry that there's some pretty useful tech babies that we are at risk of throwing away with the bathwater.
Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
Berlin Biennale | All Problems Can Be Illuminated; Not All Problems Can Be Solved
We can all tell this story: The rails of human advancement stretching from the Enlightenment to a Bitcoin start-up; innovation measured by increased reach, increased uniformity, increased predictability and size and quickness. The telegraph to the landline to the mobile phone to the Bluetooth wearable; the abacus to Pascal’s mechanical calculator to the room-sized computer to the palm-sized device a million times more powerful than equipment a thousand times its size from only ten years ago; the stone tablet to the book to the internet offering everything, no excuses. We are all connected. We’re at the bright tip of a comet hurtling forward. We can place ourselves, with mild satisfaction. Thank god it’s not then. What kind of person uses a BlackBerry? (Old people!)
Berlin Biennale | All Problems Can Be Illuminated; Not All Problems Can Be Solved
We can all tell this story: The rails of human advancement stretching from the Enlightenment to a Bitcoin start-up; innovation measured by increased reach, increased uniformity, increased predictability and size and quickness. The telegraph to the landline to the mobile phone to the Bluetooth wearable; the abacus to Pascal’s mechanical calculator to the room-sized computer to the palm-sized device a million times more powerful than equipment a thousand times its size from only ten years ago; the stone tablet to the book to the internet offering everything, no excuses. We are all connected. We’re at the bright tip of a comet hurtling forward. We can place ourselves, with mild satisfaction. Thank god it’s not then. What kind of person uses a BlackBerry? (Old people!)
Fairphone
Nearly three years ago, we started a crowdfunding campaign to finance the creation of our first-ever phone. We had a
Runcible - Circular Open Source Anti-Smartphone by Aubrey Anderson - Indiegogo
The heirloom, smart pocket device made of sustainably sourced hardwood and upgradable electronics.
THE RISE OF ANDROID: How a flailing startup became the world's biggest computing platform
Android is now one of the biggest computing platforms in the world. But it wasn't easy to get the industry to buy into Andy Rubin's radical vision.
The Second Smartphone Revolution - AVC
Benedict Evans tweeted out this chart yesterday: We sometimes think of the shift to mobile as finished, or almost finished. It isn’t. pic.twitter.com/l5gaiMlaoU — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 12, 2016 The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, Whatsapp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class […]
Apple at 50: eight technology leaps that changed our world
From Apple II to the iPhone, time and again this extraordinary company has anticipated the value of opening up computing to everyone.
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
Why are people talking about an everything app? Also what do you mean by everything? Because the real everything app is the mobile OS. Do we mean a handful of social/information modalities + payments? I mean that’s cool if the ux makes sense and better than separate apps. It’s not “everything”.
1. Steve Jobs realized that "People hate their phones". Apple invented a better one, made bank, & changed the world. Academics hate their scientific publishers. Bluesky invented a better publishing platform, & could bank some of the ~$20B/year sci pub revenue, changing science 🧪 @toni.bsky.team 🧵
