But is this not abuse of the smartphone rather than inherent to the smartphone itself?

I'll put it another way: can you have a smartphone without infinite scrolling, microtransactions, advertising, overloading of notifications, etc.

Certainly the answer is "yes".

We can have GPS without tracking. We can have notifications without advertising. We can have phone calls without spam calls. We can have games without microtransactions. We can have software without locking everything down. So on and so on.

You might call this a pipe dream, but we're just talking about technical feasibility here. There's no doubt we can do those things! Funding those things is a different conversation, but it can't start to happen if we don't even recognize that it is possible. We can't make progress if we don't have direction. The pipe dream doesn't have to be completely achieved to make success, it stands as direction to work towards.

  > but we all carried dumb phones

I'm sure this would be better too, but it is also better to blow my nose when I'm sick but the Kleenex doesn't cure my flu. It treats symptoms, relieves them, makes them less problematic, but it does not solve them or address the underlying issues. By not fixing the underlying issues we still leave the environment setup for abuse. To be blunt, I think you are illustrating my concern.

Why do we have to try to fix everything with duct tape? That's not a fix, that's a patch.

And let's be honest, getting rid of a phone with internet and GPS is basically a non-starter for most people.

Its possible, but the point is that people don't really want it.

People don't want what? To get rid of their smartphone? To be tracked? To have the problem solved?

There's too many ways to interpret your sentence, you need to be more specific

They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone and get for example a dumb phone.

I can't speak on behalf of others but whilst I do spend a little too much time scrolling, I would like it taken away from me too. But that doesn't fix anything, before endless scrolling we simply had more and more pages of information.

Smartphones were not always as addictive as they once were, the tiktok, reels, shorts have really tapped into something we haven't had before, which is essentially TV or breaking news on steroids.

Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc and we need to treat it carefully and be able to pull ourselves out of it. I have had smartphones for over a decade and I no doubt use mine way more in the past say 5 years.

> They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone

> Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc

So people can't moderate themselves due to the addiction, which is completely different from "don't really want". This is not at all surprising given that a huge industry is dedicated to make the addiction stronger. The latter is the actual problem, not people or smartphones.

Honestly, it seems like you agree with me...