Because this topic came up in c/technology and I was wondering.
Would this be feasible? How bad would it be to your social life?
I’m looking for these scenarios:
-
No smartphone, but have a dumbphone and a computer
-
No phone at all, but have a computer
-
No smartphone, but have a dumbphone, no computer
-
Nothing at all
All of those are possible in Japan provided 4 allows having a landline.
That said, you’re going to end up using a smartphone anyway since the tax agency will have you do your taxes on a loaner device if you don’t have one. Several other things become more time consuming as well.
If you don’t have income option 4 is pretty easy, if you have income and it’s not your company where you have accountant that handles everything for you and arrives to your house with money every month it’s getting complicated and probably 1,2,3 variants are must.
it’s not even about a smartphone, it’s about being allowed to access services with said smartphone.
when the ticket machine was removed from a train station in rural sweden and replaced with a note on how to buy tickets online, it instantly locked three types of people out: people who don’t have a smartphone, people who don’t have a payment card, and tourists. because it required online verification, you basically needed a swedish phone number and id to buy tickets.
this was about eight years ago, so smartphone penetration was lower, but i still think about the people i met at the train station while i desperately tried to order tickets over the phone and kept getting stuck in their automated phone tree. they were basically stuck there.
Why would they lock out tourists from public transport?
it wasn’t intentional. they just didn’t think about how to implement it. took them four or five years to fix.
I guess it depends on how you needed to sign up to buy tickets, but I bought tickets on my phone in Sweden with my smartphone in Sweden with only a valid email address. The app even had an English mode.
yeah it works nowadays. didn’t when they first introduced it.
And did you have a payment card that worked in Sweden? Or was it not needed?
You needed a payment card of some sort.
Sweden is so backwater in it’s tries to be forward thinking.
You can’t even buy a bus ticket with a visa card (nor cash ofc ofc).
I bought a train ticket at a ticket machine with cash when I was in Sweden last year.
they reinstated the machines on large stations. this one was tiny.
Anecdotal evidence.
(I’m Swedish).
depends on the place. you can in stockholm, but not most places.
My mother in law gets by just fine without hers. But then again, she’s in Arkansas, so I’m not sure if that counts as a modern, or developed country.
It does not. I have family there and pretty much refuse to visit there lol.
Pretty sure America is still a developing country.
A friend of mine avoids smartphones as he is (rightfully) very concerned with his privacy when it comes to big tech. So he has a PC and a dumbphone.
I live in France. I did nothing at all for months, but I had and wanted no social life. I returned to my computer because I wanted it, and to a dumbphone because of banks. Without a phone number, there is a lot of things you can’t do with your bank, and I couldn’t access to my bank account anymore. I know people with a landline phone and no dumb or smartphone and it’s ok for the bank, for now.
I have mail, phone numbers, etc. But what’s really annoying is people are always with whatsapp or signal and I can’t. I feel left out of lot of things. I’m often the last to know social events.
Edit: and there are lot of services which requires smartphones, even state ones.
You can install WhatsApp and Signal in an Android emulator on the computer. We are using BlueStacks for this but there are other choices available. The emulated chat program wants to verify your phone number via SMS, just use your dumb phone and type the code by hand into the computer. That’s how my wife used Option #1 and only had social media at home. But as many services that could be used with a NFC/barcode plastic card are transitioning to app only mode this gets harder :-(
Yeah and people can chose another app. I tried a smartphone emulator for Signal, and I’m pretty sure I was the security weakness.
Removed by mod
I’m kind of living the 1) life, I have a degoogled smartphone in eternal airplane mode and only free software apps. So in practice I have none of the apps “required” to live.
In large cities, transportation is getting more and more difficult without uber. Bike/escooter rentals also stopped working without an app. I use osmand on my offline smartphone to find taxi stands, so that’s cheating by your standards, but stands are empty these days and the drivers are a bit surprised and comment that “most people order a taxi by phone these days”.
I’ve lost most of my friends when I quit facebook, when we randomly meet we still have a small chat but I don’t get invited to events (birthdays etc) any more. Big respect to the few that still don’t mind sending an sms or email (and even more respect to the 2 friends who keep an xmpp client with only me as a contact)
Increasingly, I don’t know what’s going on around me because businesses, libraries etc advertise only on “spotted” on facebook, have presence only on fb, and don’t even care about telling the local news about events or openings. I only know about that because of other people who use facebook.
Doesn’t difficult very much depend on what you think matters? You’re instantly missing out on anything app, anything QR-code related (ordering food in some restaurants, links, etc.), membership cards that no longer exist in physical form. Some places sell certain tickets online only and then you may need a printer or you’re SOL. I’m sure in missing something so that’s not extensive.
But at the same time, if you have a dumb phone, you can still stay in touch with friends and family. You’ll be missing out on images being sent that are bigger than 2 pixels. But you wouldn’t be completely out of the loop. And if you have an internet ready computer at home or at the next door library, just not on you at all times, I think that’s crucial. Without that you’re ending up in all sorts of trouble.
I would say it’s doable if you are good at not giving F’s. If at the same time you only want to use cash or just no credit cards you’ll be making your life much harder though.
In the U.S. older people still get by fine without all this stuff. I have family that still has a landline, nothing else, so I guess maybe that’s #3 in your list. It does mean they physically have to go to places to get things done (e.g. physically go to a bank).
Older people don’t care as much about social life beyond visiting/seeing the people/relatives they’ve always been seeing. A smartphone isn’t required for that.
I have a coworker that still has an old party line for their landline at the farm and if he wasn’t given a company phone he probably wouldn’t have one.
Oh man I wish my 90 year old parents would go back to a landline. They do not have that ability to use a smartphone.
I am forever trying to tech support for them on that.
I guess you have tried already, but maybe a different launcher? A simpler one :)
More and more official / administration things in more and more countries require a smartphone.
So: outright impossible, unless you want to unplug yourself from any “normal” living, earning money etc.
At the very least you make vast amounts of goods and services for unavailable for yourself and weather or not you can find a local aproximate depends entirely on how profitable it is to run that aproximate while the online version still exists.
In the US, it’s not a requirement. I use my phone for nothing but occasionally making or receiving calls, taking photos, and messaging friends, but all of that could be done without it. I just use it because I have it.
I live in Germany. For the moment, i do not require a phone for anything in my life. I use it as an nfc card reader for my ID, but there are usb readers that could replace that. All other things also would continue working without a phone. Email, matrix, osm, music all work on a laptop. I actually have this orangpi + powerbank + usbc touchscreen setup that works basically like a laptop. I could add a sim card module to it too.
“Nothing at all” would mean not being well informed about politics and i think that has moral implications i could not live with. I think “computer only + time limit” is a good idea.
Germany is great in this regard, you have coin machines everywhere and the cash and privacy culture seems to be very strong.
I didn’t have my first smartphone until my 20s.
I’d imagine it would be similar today. A purse full of maps, important phone numbers in my head, Skype on my computer to talk with my family and friends.
In the early days, I would go to the library to use the computer and Internet.
The difference is that, compared to before, a lot of services have shifted from interfacing with a human to interfacing with technology in some way. The ability to interact with a human in person may not be available or will have additional costs.
Same with using cash. A lot of places have become card only because it is cheaper to pay 3% processing fees than to handle the labor costs of dealing with cash, especially in a larger organization.
Tedious but doable as proven by a lot of older people.
