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.
Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!
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: Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform (23 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
Decentralizing My Smartphone With Single Purpose Devices
Lately, I’ve become nostalgic for the days before smartphones, when the internet was a place we went to deliberately, and not a place that lived on all of ou...
Android without the mothership
The success of Android has brought Linux to many millions of new users and that, in turn, has i [...]
Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
Catalogue
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.
Runcible - Circular Open Source Anti-Smartphone by Aubrey Anderson - Indiegogo
The heirloom, smart pocket device made of sustainably sourced hardwood and upgradable electronics.
Pluralistic: Are the means of computation even seizable? (14 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies – taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API – was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.
No, Smartphones are Not Destroying a Generation
A recent article in the Atlantic claims that smartphones and social media have ruined a generation. That's not the full story.
Pluralistic: Big Tech joins the race to build the world’s heaviest airplane (09 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.
Osservatorio Nessuno
A deep dive into Cellebrite: Android support as of February 2025
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (Published 2018)
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”
Carl Pei Thinks the Phone of the Future Will Only Have One App
Nothing’s CEO speaks to WIRED about how he sees the smartphone market playing out in an era of AI, and where he thinks the competition is going wrong.
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money: