We are being enslaved by the smartphones that once liberated us

Big tech is ruthlessly exploiting the Covid crisis to make us even more dependent on their products

How liberating it felt when I had my first Blackberry – if you remember them. No longer did I have to stay at home just in case someone emailed with something important. I could carry on working on the go – and no-one had the faintest idea of where I was. But nearly two decades on, we are no-one being liberated by our smartphones; we are being enslaved by them.

As I wrote here the other day, I didn’t feel like going out for a frozen pint on Monday, but 78 year old David Walters did. Having recently lost his wife, it felt to him an important opportunity to get back to some kind of normality, some kind of social interaction. But he never did get his pint. He arrived at his local – the Angel Inn in Corbridge, Northumberland – to find that it would only accept orders via a smartphone app. Walters, who uses an old plain vanilla Nokia phone, was stranded. He isn’t the only one. While smartphone use is nearly universal among the young, according to Ofcom only 51 percent of over-55s own such a device. 

The landlord insisted it was only a short-term measure and will be lifted for full reopening on 17 May - for which I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But it seems an awful lot to me like yet another big push in the campaign by the digital industry to make us utterly dependent on its services – a campaign which is ruthlessly exploiting the Covid crisis. Test and trace, vaccination passports, forcing us to contact our GPs by phone app, trying to make people use digital payments by advancing false claims that cash spreads Covid – all are being driven by a vast lobbying operation by an industry which wields huge influence on the government.