The Other Smartphone
What devices do to us, and what devices require of us
Modern technological devices have left an indelible, and unambiguously negative, mark on society. It was claimed that these devices would bring us closer together, but they have only driven us further apart. We were told that we'd be able to do more, and more quickly, with the aid of these devices, but we instead find ourselves bogged down by all the new demands they bring on our time. We get stuck in the repetitive and time-consuming habits they require of us. They are expensive. Their worst harm is inflicted upon children, our next generation. They make us slothful and sedentary. They keep us inside and alone, not outside and together. The companies pushing these devices use persuasive and misleading advertising to make us think that these devices are liberating and freeing, that we will be a different and better version of ourselves if we bought them. But that freedom is an illusion. To make matters worse, they also induce in the world a creeping sameness, an aesthetically bland mass culture, where everyone has one and they all look the same. We are told that these devices are great for work and play, but they end up making of work and play a greater drudgery than before. Making these devices a part of your life ends up bending your society and community to exist only at their convenience, to devastating effect on our families, cities, and nations.
Of course, I'm talking about cars.
A truly dominant technology has the quality of becoming invisible over time. We reserve the word ‘technology’ or ‘device’ for anything that has not yet settled into the background. If something is ubiquitous and unquestioned, we hardly see it. We plausibly assume that everyone will have a toothbrush, a pen, a refrigerator. And in whole swaths of the United States, we assume someone has a car like they have shoes: “Of course they have one. How would they get around without it?” You can tell that a device has been absorbed fully into a society when it even becomes a requirement for social equity.
It is hard to see the true effect of something you have taken for granted for so long. But for the next few minutes, let us do just that: make the familiar, unfamiliar. We can make the car less familiar, and more open to examination, by thinking of it like it was a smartphone. Earlier, in an attempt at subterfuge, I highlighted some interesting similarities. Keeping the similarities between smartphones and cars in our mind can help us make sense of the critiques and defenses of the car, especially because we already do spend a lot of time debating the influence of the smartphone. Extending these familiar arguments to cars is only natural.
In a typically thoughtful and contrarian way, Ross Douthat wrote a reflection in 2022 that made three main affirmative cases for the car:
The car gives the individual an opportunity to experience a kind of autonomy and freedom that makes them more capable
The car is uniquely suited to navigating the United States in all its enormity; this country is 'car-scaled' in a way that other places are not
The car builds citizens, as driving requires coordination, improvisation, and a kind of civic-mindedness for it to go well
Together, these arguments advance the case that there is a unique American-ness to the car, one that builds both the American individual and body politic. Blessedly, Douthat sidesteps entirely the questions of transportation planning, the environment, or traffic accidents. I want to do the same, as much as I love jawing about those topics, because we ought to spend more time talking about the kind of individual and society that the car makes. Thinking of the car as a device, and more specifically as a social device, like the smartphone is, can help reveal the invisible and familiar ways that cars direct our personal and social formation.
The freedom of the open road
When my eldest daughter was four, we went to visit some friends via car. As we were unloading ourselves, she looked across the street at our friends’ neighbor’s house and, with the cheery certainty of a budding problem-solver, declared how convenient it was that our friends would have such a short drive across the street to visit their own neighbors. Her concept of free movement had been so circumscribed by our own family's dependence on the car that she saw it as simply the most obvious means even for something as simple as crossing the street.
Thus, while cars can provide a driver with a sense of freedom, openness, and possibility, they do so by limiting our freedom and autonomy in myriad other ways. To make a city hospitable to the car and driver is to make it a harsh, forbidding, and dangerous landscape for everyone else. The car brings freedom, but at a price. To get access, you must spend thousands to buy, fuel, store, and maintain the machine that is your key to the open road.
You can see this same change at work with phones. They have become such a convenient tool for some things that they are fast becoming our default tool for everything. We do not blink at using it to check in at school, to pay for our groceries, to surveil our aging parents, or to pass an idle moment. By being convenient, it has become everything to us. In giving us a digital limitlessness we mistake for freedom, it has made us helpless and dependent in so many new ways. And like digital vehicles, the smartphone and a lengthening array of apps are the passkeys to civic society. Without them we are frozen out.
I will also briefly note the kind of freedom that Douthat described: “you enter space that feels unmanaged, unscrutinized, independent and anonymous.” This impulse to anonymity and imperviousness is found also in the way we use the phone and social media. We create fake accounts; we conceal our screens when with others; we hide behind lock screens and passwords our inner lives as they become entangled with the personal web. There are times and places and needs for all of it. But you do not need much of an imagination to think of why else we love that freedom from scrutiny, obligation, and mutual dependence.
From sea to shining sea
The call of the open road works uniquely well in the United States because it is a country of vast size. Car manufacturers invariably choose two picturesque settings for their marketing: the urban highway at night, where the empty roads and cavernous neon-lit streetscapes give a meditative thrill; or the wild and untamed backcountry of the American West, territory only properly comprehensible from the driver’s seat of a car. It is no mistake that, with apologies to the robust car cultures of many other nations, the United States has perfected the mythos of the car and built it suitable habitation in our sprawling suburbs almost out of evolutionary necessity.
We need cars to traverse this wide nation. There is no better way to do it. But because a device is useful for some things does not make it necessary for all things. Defenders of the ubiquitous smartphone point out very correctly that it is useful for navigating via a map, receiving a critical message, or looking up a timely bit of information. Of course it is! That is one of the reasons it was invented, and why it now has such dominant market share. But the critique of the smartphone device is that, by being a general-purpose, ‘everything’ device, it smuggles in malign uses with the benign. So too does the car, useful for hauling five young children or driving cross-country or visiting grandma in the rain, nevertheless do great damage because its convenience and easy familiarity makes us design our places to exclude all other modes of transportation.
That we demolish whole swaths of cities, choke the air with pollution and the water with microplastics, and live further and lonelier lives, is a secondary effect of the car's totalizing grasp on society. Consider also the way that the pocket-sized Internet intends convenience, and often delivers it, but brings also isolation, loneliness, inattention, and anxiety. Technology is not a passive entrant into the pre-existing social mores, physical infrastructure, and civic and business relationships of the present. It actively transforms the way we interact, requiring us to tear down and rebuild whole systems, both physical and digital, to suit its purpose. In the same way that the smartphone has reshaped our society, economy, and even in some respects our mind, the car has completely changed the way we live, work, and interact.
We often use the word ‘disruptive’ to describe new technologies like the smartphone. We say this because it does not just help us navigate an unfamiliar road, but it also bulldozes old ways of thinking and doing just about everything, offering new means and methods to anyone who owns one. The car, likewise, was not just relegated to long-haul driving across the vast openness of the American interior, but was made a first-class citizen in virtually every city. New cities were built with the automobile as the default means of transportation. Old cities were cut to pieces to make room for the car. This disruption made winners and losers. What makes this disruption of the American city unique is that it is practically irreversible. The physical infrastructure of a city, once laid down, can only be changed at great cost.
Citizen Car
But for all its faults, is the car good for us, personally? Does the responsibility conferred on drivers build a responsible citizenry? If the car demands virtues of citizenship to function effectively, a day spent on the roads may convince us instead of endemic societal decline. The roads are full of selfish and inattentive drivers, making either decisions calculated to maximize their own benefit, or else making decisions calculated only to immiserate their fellow drivers, and with no recourse. The blast of a horn is pitiful retort to an antisocial driver maneuvering a several-ton light truck with dark windows and anonymous features through a city or over an Interstate.
We all would have a better time on the roads if everyone attended to these civic virtues, but it is hard to see that this means of travel requires it of us, or builds it in us. You can certainly find civic-mindedness on the road: courtesy lane changes; zippering; flashing your lights at someone to remind them to turn theirs on. But these acts of good citizenship arise without specific incentive from the practice of driving itself. And are we not more likely to take what we can, without regard for others' needs, if we see others taking advantage of us all day?
We see these dynamics on the smartphone-mediated ‘information superhighway,’ as well. And so we develop netiquette, screen time limits, social media fasts, content moderation policies, and other attempts to develop good habits and civic practices within this digital commons. But these amount only to feeble protests against the utter onslaught of distraction and vileness contained within it. Nothing is sufficient. At least, not by itself.
The only durable safeguards arise if we have tangible obligations to real, human community. Interacting digitally with those to whom you have real obligation, trust, and love makes of that medium a precious tool for friendship and citizenship. So too would car culture be quite different if every other driver was a friend or acquaintance, and if you knew them (or their cars, I suppose) by sight. We even feel a mild self-consciousness if we happen to see someone we know while out driving: did I cut them off a mile back? Did I honk at them? Did I swerve into their lane while checking my phone? Was I speeding? Was I leaving the liquor store parking lot at 2PM on a Tuesday?
If we feel the subtle tug of those obligations to the real while driving, it immediately brings to mind the civic virtues of driving that Douthat outlined. But unless you have a penchant for bumper stickers or after-market paint jobs, cars are designed to be impervious to the outside gaze, high off the ground, heavily tinted, blending in to the crowd. We enjoy the relative freedom that the metal and glass shell provide, but that freedom arises because it disentangles us from inconvenient obligations. This kind of freedom may be more equitably enjoyed if we are all good citizen drivers, but the act of driving itself does not incentivize citizenship.
What is the “dumb phone” equivalent of a car?
It is because cars have become an invisible backdrop that we hardly even notice the impact they have on us or the profound ways they have altered our lives. We accept with mute equanimity the various petty tyrannies of the car. Even when we criticize the car, we tend to assume that its dominance is prescribed, a force of nature that we must live and make do with. But this is not the case. We made cars, and in their implacable logic, they wrought a strange and alien society around them. And in the same way that smartphones have made it difficult to do without them, so too have we designed the physical infrastructure of our cities and suburbs to virtually require a car for navigation.
We have made for ourselves a logistical prison while seeking freedom and autonomy, in the same way that the digital commons has become an inescapable trap. Even were we to dramatically change our transportation preferences and priorities now, we would be left with roads, bridges, houses, offices, malls, and city centers designed for cars, not people.
I perhaps gave too much agency to the car itself when I said that cars “wrought a strange and alien society.” They did not. We did. The accession of the car into the daily lives of the average American was made possible only by generations of determined public policy and planning, untold billions of dollars in investment, and the reinforcing cycles of mass media and mass culture. It will take a similar effort to remake the physical fabric of American society once again around its human citizens, not its mechanical assistants. And in our efforts to redevelop cities around the needs of human citizens and human bodies, we may find inspiration for the redevelopment of our media, our civic commons, and the orientation of technology more broadly to the cause of human flourishing.