This exists in China right now. You need a phone to show you've not been in close contact with covid cases. Many places only accept WeChat/Alipay for payment. A phone is a necessity.
Yeah. Partial list of things you currently cannot do in China without a phone (at least, where I live):
- Go to the supermarket (you can ask a friend with a phone to help you order online)
- Take a taxi (usually, depends on the driver)
- Eat at a restaurant
- (Basically, enter any place of business)
- Go to the hospital
- Travel to another province
- Visit any scenic area or large public park
- Get a Covid test
- Visit your friend’s apartment (usually)
What if your battery dies? Super-reliance on cell phones means this is a solved this problem: it’s trivial to rent a charger anywhere there’s a convenience store.
To be clear, I also see this as an anti-pattern. The presence or absence of an expensive connected device should not restrict what a person can do in meat space. A person not carrying a mobile phone is still a person.
But I don’t see how you actually do contact tracing at scale without this. In the beginning of the pandemic, entering a supermarket meant writing your contact info (including ID number!) on a paper ledger at the entrance. Fuck that.
Not really, they're just inconvenienced for part of a day. As long as your phone number is linked to your national ID, it's easy to get another SIM card, and you can just ask a friend for help buying another phone.
The person who smashes their phone, on the other hand, would be totally screwed. Ubiquitous surveillance means that cell phone theft is basically not a thing anymore because the thief is pretty much always caught.
