the onda

This morning's XKCD really struck a chord with me, not because it is a criticism of Apple's approval process, but because it reminded me of two things I find horribly wrong with this whole "smartphone explosion:"

1. Carriers have replaced banks as the retail presence that is destroying urban areas, and their gross commercialism around getting people to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone (and associated $100/month plan) is even more obnoxious than all of the mortgage advertising. Where I live in Cambridge (Harvard Square), the one benefit of the mortgage collapse was the clearing out of all of the banks that seemed to have no trouble paying the jacked up rents that landlords were seeking. But just as quickly as they moved out, Sprint, AT&T, and now Verizon are moving in with giant human-sized replicas of their latest toys, flashy billboards, and sales people handing out flyers to unsuspecting pedestrians on the sidewalk (people they are smartphones not raves!). And no matter where I travel: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, the same blight is visible everywhere.

2. If these devices really are the future of personal computing, it's a little sad to see how much of the positioning is around consumption: listening to music, downloading movies, playing games, reading reviews— and how little of the value expressed seems to be around creating or producing interesting content and data from a mobile device. I love the line in the comic about the stick man who wants to spend life "restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming" for this very reason, because it gets right to the heart of what seems to be just off about putting so much computing power and possibility into users' pockets only to expect them to never again miss "Desperate Housewives" while on the move.