"I can ring my little bell. I can give the "on your left" at max volume. But if I'm coming from behind someone lost in their phone, I already know that none of my heads up efforts will be sufficient enough. Those AirPods folks stay in the deadass center of the trail, and I have to ride onto the grass-like a DOG!-to get around them without accidentally committing manslaughter."
"My old GQ colleague Lauren Larson wrote a big thing on noise-cancelling shit a couple of years ago. Too much modern technology is designed exclusively to isolate its user from the outside world: smartphones, chatbots, earbuds, delivery apps, you name it. Human beings tend to be awkward and unpredictable, so these devices make your life easier by obviating the need to deal with those creatures face to face."
"Around Y2K, the sales pitch was that a cell phone would bring you closer to the people you loved. Carriers don't bother with that shit anymore. Now they'll just pay Billy Bob Thornton $2 million to tell customers that they'll never lose a signal, and that every data plan comes with all you can eat internet at a low price. That's all they give a shit about, and all customers do either."
AirPods wearers on bike paths often occupy the trail center and ignore warnings, forcing others off the path and increasing accident risk. Noise-cancelling and isolating technologies, including smartphones, chatbots, earbuds, and delivery apps, reduce the need for face-to-face interaction and enable avoidance of human unpredictability. Telecommunications marketing shifted from promises of closeness to selling uninterrupted service and unlimited data, prioritizing connectivity over interpersonal connection. That shift encourages greater investment in virtual worlds at the expense of physical communal awareness and correlates with political dynamics where isolated media habits influence partisan alignment and electoral outcomes.
Read at Defector
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