The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age

Nicole Aschoff

We can and should tell our own stories about the kind of society we want to live in, technology and all. In doing so, we can foster new ways of thinking about our digital-analog future. But what stories should we tell? How do we deal with the myriad issues raised by our smartphones? - privacy, autonomy, addiction, surveillance, precarity, narcissism, commodification, democracy. A growing number of voices are weighing in on these questions, which is a good thing because, unlike the techno-determinists who until recently have received a disproportionate amount of airtime, it assumes that we can do something. If our future is not to be Silicon Valley´s Dis-Utopia then what is it to be? What is our version of Utopia? Or a more manageable question, What relationship should we have with the technology and corporations that have, largely through our smartphones, come to play a central role in the US and global economy in the past decade?