A new tether

“Aschoff introduces a creative and appealing way to discuss societal issues; this book will make readers contemplate their relationship with their phone and their own place in society.” — Library Journal

“A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.” — Kirkus Reviews

“[Aschoff] encourages us all to be more deliberate, thoughtful, and aware of how we impact our phones and how they impact us.” — Booklist

In the span of a decade smartphones have become ubiquitous. More than half the world now uses one. In the United States, 80 percent of the population, including 92 percent of young adults, owns a smartphone today. The smartphone is a high-powered computer that is always on and always with us. It’s a real-time, high-speed digital freeway, connecting us to others and others to us twenty-four hours a day. Most of us are rather blasé about this development, but we shouldn’t be. This perpetual connection is both unprecedented and deeply meaningful; it is central to radical changes in work, family, love, markets, politics, and ideas, and is fundamentally shaped by existing structures of race, class, and gender.

In this New Gilded Age corporations and governments have hijacked the digital freeway, co-opting our connectivity for profit and control. Network effects and aggressive efforts to control markets have turned platform companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon into modern-day monopolies with dire consequences for privacy, job creation, and inequality. Meanwhile, an unprecedented surveillance state has emerged that uses our phones to digitally monitor, harass, and even kill in countries across the globe.

But people are using their smartphones to fight back. After a long bout of quiescence to the neoliberal status quo, global capitalism is experiencing a growing crisis of legitimacy. In a moment when the boundaries between the public and the private and the digital and the “real” are increasingly blurred, our hand machines have reconfigured how people engage in politics and how we understand democracy and privacy. New modes of resistance are emerging, signaling the possibility that our pocket computers could be harnessed for the benefit of people, not profit.

The birth of the smartphone alongside the deepest financial crisis of the past seventy years have generated a society that looks qualitatively different from the one we’ve known for the past four decades. Yet the nature of this shift is not yet well understood. The battle over who controls our smartphones will determine whether our hand machines will tether us ever more tightly to processes of commodification and oppression, or serve as a liberatory tool to resist corporate monopoly and increasingly authoritarian governments—and build a better future.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE SMARTPHONE SOCIETY:

“Aschoff's analysis of our relationship to our phones is relevant and urgent. She gives us enough context to understand our addictions, our willingness to be surveilled and manipulated, and, better yet, the avenues of resistance against the tech titans that increasingly control our time, attention, and futures.”

– Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and CEO of O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing

“The Smartphone Society pierces the fog of the Silicon Valley fantasy, showing us how these little computers in all our pockets control our lives for profit—but also how they open new paths to justice. Nicole Aschoff has given us that rare book, packed with insights and written with verve. I will never look at my smartphone the same way—and after reading The Smartphone Society, neither will you.”

–Jason W. Moore, professor of sociology and author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

“The Smartphone Society is not your average tech book—it’s one about who controls our future. In our New Gilded Age, the book persuasively argues, it’ll be either be dictatorial tech giants or the democratic power of free citizens. I know which outcome I prefer, and I can think of few better intellectual defenders of a better, more just future than Aschoff.”

– Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher, Jacobin magazine

“An antidote to the typical screen panic, The Smartphone Society reframes our phones as a new frontier of American life. It’s a useful read for anyone worried about how we live with technology, and that should be all of us.”

– Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials

“In The Smartphone Society, Nicole Aschoff gives us fresh insight into how the device and our everyday lives have morphed into one another. She considers the good and the bad, and helps us to understand how the smartphone has reshaped society in innumerable ways. With accessible prose, she looks into selfies and social media, politics and protest, profit and women’s unpaid work. It is a cogent read in the era of the smartphone.”

– Rich Ling, Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Nanyang Technological University