Yeah that's me quoted above, and yes arguing against smartphones.
I believe smartphones are a net loss to people's happiness.
All of these liberating technologies are fun for the early adopters, but then become oppressive once you are expected to have them. We are quickly reaching that point.
What they really are are surveillance transponders that we carry around voluntarily.
The privacy issues are real, but you're only a slave to the device if you want to be (or you let others force you to be).
Where you see oppression, I see convenience.
If I'm on vacation and forgot to turn the thermostat down before leaving, I can use an app on my phone to do so remotely.
If there's a cold spell and the furnace fails, that same app will notify me when the house gets too cold so I can find someone to go check on it.
My wife can add (or remove) items to the shopping list while I'm already at the store.
When I'm at the doctor and want to confirm what drug I'm taking, I can bring up my online account from the pharmacy.
When I'm on the bus home and watch to finish reading the book I was reading at home on my eReader, I can bring up that book on the app on my phone -- and it will start up on the page where I stopped reading last night.
I do have my work email delivered to my phone, but I turned notifications off -- I only see a work email if I intentionally look for it.
I do have a notification app from work installed on my phone that can notify me 24 hours a day when I'm on call, but even that is more convenient from when I carried a pager and only got a numeric page so I couldn't tell whether or not it was something that had to be dealt with immediately or could wait until I got home later -- I'd have to dial-in to find out (and I had to literally dial-in on a physical phone line since in those days my phone wasn't a hotspot that can give me internet access anywhere, or I can just check on the service with my smartphone instead of having to get out my laptop)
There are lots of ways the phone makes my life more convenient.
