THB smartphones turn people into purposeless fools

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Week 11

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Motion: THB smartphones are a multi-purpose tool
Role: Deputy Leader (opp.)

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I do not own a smartphone. Out of curiosity, I once borrowed my “legendary” girlfriend’s mobile phone and held it in my hand in a kebab restaurant after a meal. I went online into social media and tried to run my business there. It was hopeless. The arrows did not follow my directions. I could not get anything done. I could watch but I could not interact. It was a miserable experience. I do own a mobile phone of the old school for calls and texts. The tardiness and unresponsiveness of mobile phones is still their major drawback. Even if they would work wonderfully with the fastest available 5G connectivity, most people cannot afford that but have to rely on something cheaper and nastier.

Addiction to Mobile Phone Is Like Chainsmoking
People use their mobile phones like a life-long smoker employs cigarettes, cigars, e-cigarettes or snuff. Smartphoning and tobacco products provide a break in the grey monotony of everyday life and a bridge to some alternative universe. The relief of the mobile phone is external, the relief in nicotine internal. The experience can also be built into a chain, as we have seen happen. People cannot always stop their online co-existence; just look at all the people in public transportation with devices in their hands complete with a source of noise and earbuds, just the same as they may light a smoke from the stub of the earlier one and thus build a continuity.

There is also another dimension that they share. Both are ritualistic, routine behaviours, where ritual, sameness and similarity is key. People usually smoke a certain brand and are loath to swap it for something else, even if tobacco brands smell alike and probably also burn alike. When people surf on the Internet, they usually divide their time between few destinations, unable to choose alternative ones, even if the internet is a vast, oceanlike place with lots of places to go. A habit forces people to just consume the content of a select few sites.

Mobile Phones Fit Into One’s Breast or Other Pocket
There is also the similarity that a mobile phone is handy in the same way a pack of cigarettes is; it can be fitted into most pockets in one’s garments. It is easy to produce. Both are rectangular in shape. Earlier mobile phones were not so similar. Nokia Communicator, for instance, was different in shape, so it did not bear the likeness of a pack of smokes. You also need to protect both against humidity and moisture. A mobile phone won’t work around wet, and ciggies don’t catch fire if they are damp.

What I’m saying is that smartphones are alike packs of cigarettes. It has been said of the latter that at one point they were “the World’s cheapest status symbol”, which meant that they were brand products that even peoples in the underdeveloped world could buy and have. I fear that that distinction now goes to smartphone, as it so readily available all over the world. Refugees have smartphones. Their spread is alike that of Marlboro Reds that are also everywhere, like Coca-Cola is. And then there is their affordability. Smartphones have that quality as they can usually be bought in installments on an installment plan, and that is why they are affordable to everyone and also bought by relatively poor people. Loco alimenti circenses ludicras habent.

Smartphones Are the Postmodern Equivalent of a Pack of Cigarettes
I think that I have proven that smartphones are not a multi-purpose tool that they are claimed to be but rather something more sinister. They are the postmodern version of a pack of cigarettes. A drug. A drug of the upper and/or downer family. Surprisingly many things unite the two as a common factor, as has been demonstrated above and earlier on. And what does that mean by extension?? That – they’re bad for you!! of course. 

Like smoking has been phased out by successive steps in society, beginning in 1995, when the first anti-smoking measures were imposed legislatively, it is likely that smartphones could go toward the same fate, except that there is no such legislation so far, not even bills in the pipeline. All the same, changing that is just a matter of time, not of opportunity. Parliaments could swiftly turn against smartphones with help from imaginative MPs and multipartisan committees.    (Here is a related article I discovered only later on.)

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t). Käyn mobiilia yhteiskuntaa vastaan vahvoilla argumenteilla, jotka pohjautuvat todellisuuteen ja sen luonteeseen. Minua ei haittaisi, vaikka faxit, kaapeli-tv, lankalinjat ja puhelinkopit olisivat vielä käytössä, koska niihin liittyy 1900-luvun romantiikkaa. Vastapuolen edustajista ja heidän assertioistaan tuskin on pulaa, koska älypuhelimet ovat lyöneet niin hyvin itsensä läpi yhteiskunnallisesti, joten tästä tulee rehellinen ja tasaväkinen väittely.

THB we should revisit our relationship to tobacco, before biding it goodbye for good

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Week 35

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To smoke is to practise something which is akin to lunacy.

Motion: THB we should revisit our relationship to tobacco, before biding it goodbye for good
Role: Deputy PM (gov.)

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During the 2000’s, tobacco products have faced many backlashes and setbacks, while they have also taken one step forward. Vaping, with its popularity among a crowd that is urbaner than traditional smokers of old, is somehow different than regular smoking, a little more sophisticated inwardly and outwardly. There has always been something ambivalent about smoking. It has been at the same time an act of conformity (“I & the others smoke“) and defiance (“good people don’t smoke“) and something that is both domestic and familiar and foreign and strange. A person’s ethnic foreignness is sometimes signalled with a tobacco product.

Smokers’ Relationship With Tobacco Is a Mystery to Me
Personally, I don’t understand why people smoke. Judging by how it alters or more crucially does not alter people’s behaviour, it seems to have approximately the same kind of bracing effect as coffee or tea has. Smokers’ thoughts are probably clearer after inhaling, but they can leave that activity fast and move onto doing something else. In literature, movies and pulp, smoking is usually linked up with doubts, truths or truth-seeking, even if it is also connected to downright frivolity or life’s more trivial moments.

When I was younger, I associated smoking girls with easier-to-get girls. In my young adult mind, I somehow thought that girls that would go on doing mildly or slightly “sinful” things – such as smoking – would proceed to doing gravely sinful things. How wrong I was. If something, smoking girls are more disinterested in sex compared with regular non-smoking girls. Smoking may make women see the world for what it is or constrain the blood vessels that control arousal. Whatever the root cause, a shared cigarette is not an invitation to bed, as much as people who offer a flame to each others’ cigarettes would make it look like. There is, of course, a popular stereotype of a prostitute who smokes between clients at her boudoir – she both has sex and smokes – but the implied connotation is usually that she is doing it somehow against her will and does not enjoy herself.

My Own Feelings
When it comes to my own feelings when I inhale tobacco smoke, it has almost always an adverse effect on me psychologically. After nicotine and the rest absorb into the bloodstream, I come down varyingly with an impostor syndrome, a self-esteem drop and a slight paranoia. All of that is negative; none of that feels good. I don’t care about the carcinogenic qualities of tobacco in small doses, but no doubt would I care if I smoked habitually.

My DNA is not entirely against tobacco. My grandfather was a lifelong smoker, introduced to tobacco in grade school; my father smoked from teenage to the age of thirty, and I have dabbled in smoking but never taken it up. We can see how tobacco has gradually lost its power over my family line, much like it has lost its power over the general population. And, of course I could smoke if it was required on some artistic, ceremonial or ritualistic grounds for some effect. Then, it would not probably even feel that bad. We also have to remember that tobacco’s effect – good, neutral or bad – wears off fast, and it has this in common with a lot of other vein-coursing drugs.

What If August and September Were Months When Everyone Smoked?
There is still something about tobacco that intrigues me. I find it irresistible in early autumn when the nights are already dark. A burning, glowing orange cigarette head against the dark is atmospherical, to put it mildly. Its blood-vessel-constraining effect does not matter, either, in that part of the year. As a consequence, I have been thinking that maybe people could smoke for the duration of these two months of the year and abstain from tobacco during the rest. Even kind people could smoke then. Namely, smoking is hell during the cold, icy, long, snowy winter, and I do not see an upside then. It’s just degrading.

I think we would see nationally recognisable health effects if people restricted their smoking to just two months per year. Lung cancers among heavy smokers would drop, understandably, while they might rise among former non-smokers, understandably, but the balance and sum total could still be an improvement to what we have now. And what about weaning off nicotine? Well, we already have a well-established nicotine-replacement industry in the form of nicotine bandaids, nicotine chewing gum, loose and pouch snuff and vaping. Using those and letting the dose decrease by the week would take care of that monkey. I think that smoking just a little annually might be the gold standard between not smoking at all, 21st Century style, or smoking like hell, 20th Century style.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t). Tupakointia on puolustettu ennenkin, yleensä sen vaarattomuutta todistelevien asianajajien toimesta, mutta muu keskustelu aiheesta kaipaa tuulettamista. Väittelystä tulisi lähinnä epäväittely, erilaisten mielipiteiden kavalkadi.