I was, to my wife’s exasperation, a (very) late adopter of mobile phone technology; I have luddite tendencies, after all.
Anyway, this isn’t about me (it turns out some things aren’t! Who knew).
This is about how we think about mobiles. They are sold as wonderboxes that have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. As devices which will help you get laid, get paid, not be frayed etc.
But it turns out, obvs, that at both a personal and societal level, the coming of the mobile phone has made us frayed and afraid.
Technologies do this – they enable some things and the disable others. They come freighted with different possibilities (and anxieties). Academics, bless them (cough, cough) talk about “affordances.”
So, I want to propose that we think of mobiles as hellmouths, gateways, portals, whatever – to our individual and collective “id” (Freudian, Jungian, whatever).
Freud conceived of the id as the unconscious source of bodily needs, impulses and desires, especially those related to aggression and the sexual drive.[9] The id acts according to the pleasure principle—the psychic force oriented to the immediate gratification of impulse and desire.[10]
Freud described the id as “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality”. Understanding of it is limited to analysis of dreams and neurotic symptoms, and it can only be described in terms of its contrast with the ego. It has no organisation and no collective will: it is concerned only with the satisfaction of drives in accordance with the pleasure principle.[11]
source: Wikipedia
Where does this come? Well, yesterday I read an interview that the people at Renewal did with an American I was dimly aware of – Will Stencil. In it he pushed for analysis of political thinking that isn’t just (or even) about how ‘the economy’ is going.
One of the things that social media does, and that I think is really striking, is shape our perception of other people’s opinions.
Frankly, based on my experience, I suspect that most people’s political opinions are essentially the same as what they perceive their friends political opinions to be. If they see all their friends believe in something, or think that all their friends believe in something, they’ll likely believe it too. That’s why so much political discussion centres on this idea of ‘well everyone is saying it’ or ‘everyone knows it’.
I think that one of the things that social media does is that it gives us an inaccurate sense of what the consensus opinion is, while giving us a perception that we know what the consensus is. I can go on Twitter and see 1000 posts from 1000 people. And human beings are very in tune – it’s just part of our social wiring! We like to, you know, vibe out what the consensus view is on this, that, or the other. And social media creates these sorts of artificial social consensuses that really help drive opinion.
and continues in this vein (It’s a good interview).
And then today, this about the UK right going off the deep end and egging each other on. The whole thing is an important read. This bit leapt out:
Ted Heath led the British right in a very different age. Partly that’s because he didn’t have Reform to contend with – if you’d called him an “elitist”, he’d surely have been baffled you meant it as an insult – but partly too because he didn’t have the internet. Heath will surely have been aware of popular support for Enoch Powell. But he didn’t have a buzzing box in his pocket to remind him of it, and how easily it could be mobilised against him, let alone an app owned by a foreign billionaire designed to radicalise his own views.
I remember, as a union steward in the NHS during the early 2000s, when a new payment system was introduced. Even though everyone would be better off, some (particularly nasty and petty) people were aggrieved because they would be on the same “band” as relatively newly qualified staff. i.e. it’s about status, positional goods etc… And this was pre: smart phone of course.
What is to be done? Oh, universal housing, universal basic services, bans on advertising, true democracy etc etc. Ha ha ha ha ha ha . We’re all going to die gruesome deaths thanks to climate change. So it goes.
marchudson.net 
We are truly fucked Marc. At least I get to read your blog before the end. I’d like to think a ray of hope is that people are increasingly getting wise to the “platforms” such as facebook, tiktok etc as well as any kind of corporate media for providing an accurate representation of the world.