Cutting the cord: 50 yrs since the cellphone set us free, bound us in new ways

Motorola demoed the world’s first cellphone call in 1973, which is also the year in which another history maker, Sachin Tendulkar, was born. Weighing 2 kg, that first mobile phone was heavier than any of Sachin’s cricket bats.

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A decade after the demo, in 1983, consumers could buy Motorola devices for about $4,000 (about ₹40,000). In today’s terms, that’s roughly $12,000 or ₹10 lakh.

In the past half-century, as Moore’s Law marched on, the cellphone shed its kilos and its high price tag and went from a geeky gadget to a sleek supercomputer in the hand. Mobile phone service started in India in 1995. Globally, Nokia ruled the roost for about 12 years, before St Steve’s magic touch ended the dominance of feature phones with keyboards.

Today’s iOS and Android devices are shining icons of both technological progress and complex socio-economic realities. The intellectual property publication IPWatchdog estimates that 250,000 patents protect the technologies that go into the world’s smartphones today. The techno objet d’art is made possible in equal parts by the intellectual riches of Nobel laureates and by the Herculean physical labour of subsistence mining workers, toiling away in the depths of the earth. A phone’s display is lit by blue-light light-emitting diodes or LEDs, whose inventors (Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura) won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics, while the 2019 Chemistry Nobel winners (John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino) are the ones to thank for the long-lasting lithium-ion batteries.

Entire product lines (cameras, calendars, calculators and mail, to name some of the most prevalent) have been steamrolled, as these objects and services were replaced by apps.

The statistics are staggering. App analytics company App Annie (now data.ai) estimates that companies spent $336 billion on mobile ads and that consumers spent $167 billion on app stores in 2022. On average, we spend five hours, or a third of our waking time, on the phone. Gartner estimates that 7.2 billion smartphones were sold over the last five years.

Based on data from the World Health Organization, more people in the world have access to a phone than to a toilet. According to the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union, there are more phone subscriptions than people on the planet.

The cellphone is integral to modern life. It wouldn’t do for a modern-day Henry David Thoreau to just go to Walden, any more. In order to commune with nature or write in peace, he would have to trade down to a feature phone and turn the ringer off.

Conversely, it is almost impossible to navigate modern life without a smartphone. One needs it to verify one’s identity, and to access services in fields ranging from banking to health and education to e-commerce. A cellphone number is practically one’s middle name.

There are debates about what defines the poverty line. Academic arguments aside, being able to afford a smartphone is a good rule of thumb. Roti, kapda aur mobile (food, clothing and a cellphone) are the measure of life.

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They say Yashoda saw the whole universe inside Krishna’s mouth. The smartphone is not large, but it contains multitudes (thanks, of course, to the internet, with which it is intertwined). “There’s an app for that” is as close to a universal truth as we can get today. Even Vipassana centres, where one goes to meditate in extreme silence for days at a stretch, have smartphone apps where guests can make bookings.

The smartphone is the gateway to books, music, movies and shows. It is the Kamadhenu (or wish-granting divine bovine) of content. A modern-day Aladdin’s lamp that grants infinite wishes. What one can do with it is limited only by how deep one’s pockets are.

The mobile phone may have morphed into the rich person’s remote control for their world, but spare a thought for those being summoned. The millions of delivery workers, snaking through traffic hazards every day: where is their deliverance?

In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses sealed his soldiers’ ears with beeswax and tied himself to the mast of his ship to resist the Sirens’ song. Today, the smartphone is both Siren and bewitching but illusory escape pod. In January, 89 Russian soldiers were killed in a Ukrainian missile strike because some continued to use their cellphones, despite a ban, and the cellphone signals gave their location away.

It is so difficult to wean oneself away from the smartphone that the Cambridge Dictionary declared “nomophobia” its word of the year in 2018. The term is short for no-mobile-phone phobia, or the fear that comes from being without one’s phone or being unable to use it.

The mobile phone is also at the centre of geopolitical rivalries. The tug of war over a TikTok or Huawei is a proxy battle for global dominance between two hegemonic powers, and a battle over the access to the treasure troves of data that these devices can reveal. Dismay over a rival country’s hostile actions is expressed via a ban on their apps. In a similar fashion, displeasure over a domestic law-and-order situation results in a suspension of that lifeblood of the smartphone: mobile data services and the internet.

The very nature of how a cellphone works — by linking up with the nearest cell tower — blurs lines between privacy and surveillance, the personal and the political. But that vigilance can work both ways. The camera in every pocket has enabled the silenced and suppressed to speak truth to power, and have their voice heard beyond the walls set up to confine them.

The device is presented as proof of the arrival of Amrit Kaal, the eternal good times. Instead, it has sped up the hedonistic treadmill, conditioning each user to forsake the real in favour of the virtual, as they chase each new shiny toy or bit of faux adventure on offer within its many worlds.

The planned obsolescence strategies — a smartphone could easily last decades; instead it is made to sustain its user for only a few years — combined with our status-seeking behaviours have created a crushing wave of non-sustainable consumption. Electronic waste accounts for 2% of the total waste dumped in landfills, and 70% of the toxic waste in these dumps, according to data from the World Economic Forum. The environmental impact of this waste is incalculable.

Meanwhile, the more capable our communications devices, the further we seem to drift from connecting with each other. Family dinners are spent in silence and blue light. The mobile phone brings out our dark side and enshrines the seven sins of social media: humble bragging, compliment fishing, angry trolling, fake liking, silent stalking, compulsive posting, and mindless scrolling.

Like Alice in Wonderland, we are so mesmerised by the distractions, it’s hard to care where the rabbit hole leads. Pair that with shrunk attention spans and literal pains in the neck and it’s no wonder that Silicon Valley titans don’t want smartphones near their children.

Warts and all, though, the mobile phone, along with its twin marvel, the internet, remains one of modernity’s greatest inventions. It is our addictive Achilles’ heel and triumphal crowning glory. It is perhaps the first invention since domestic electricity that we have been this tightly tethered to.

Soon, the Wonderland path will be strewn with content created by artificial intelligence, including Midjourney art, deep fakes and ChatGPT takes. The phone has already merged with the watch, the fitness tracker, the spectacles. Perhaps it will soon be embedded even deeper.

It is hard to imagine exactly what form the tether will take in another half-century, but the device is sure to remain a mirror-selfie of life itself.

(Kashyap Kompella is an industry analyst and a visiting professor for artificial intelligence at the BITS School of Management)