The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age

by Nicole Aschoff

Overview

Addresses how tech empowers community organizing and protest movements to combat the systems of capitalism and data exploitation that helped drive tech’s own rise to ubiquity.

Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It’s time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit.

Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the rise of smartphones has led to corporations using consumers’ personal data for profit, unmonitored surveillance, and digital monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that have garnered control over our social, political, and economic landscapes.

But people are using their smartphones to fight back. New modes of resistance are emerging, signaling the possibility that our pocket computers could be harnessed for the benefit of people, not profit. From helping to organize protests against the US-Mexico border wall through Twitter to being used to report police brutality through Facebook Live, smartphones open a door for collective change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807061688
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Nicole Aschoff is a writer, editor, and sociologist. She is the author of The New Prophets of Capital, an editor-at-large at Jacobin magazine, and managing editor of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. She holds a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and previously taught at Boston University. Her writing about corporate power, inequality, and social movements has appeared in the Guardian, the Nation, Dissent, and Al Jazeera, among many other places, and she contributes regularly to podcasts and radio shows. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Connect with her on Twitter (@NicoleAschoff) and online (nicholeaschoff.com).

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1
New Divides (or, Old Divides Made New)

CHAPTER 2
New Titans

CHAPTER 3
New Frontier

CHAPTER 4
New Politics

CHAPTER 5
New Spirit

CHAPTER 6
New Map

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Aschoff introduces a creative and appealing way to discuss societal issues; this book will make readers contemplate their relationship with their phone and their own place in society.”
—Library Journal

“[Aschoff] encourages us all to be more deliberate, thoughtful, and aware of how we impact our phones and how they impact us.”
—Booklist

“Aschoff’s analysis of our relationship to our phones is relevant and urgent. She gives us enough context to understand our addictions, our willingness to be surveilled and manipulated, and, better yet, the avenues of resistance against the tech titans that increasingly control our time, attention, and futures.”
—Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and CEO of O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing

“An antidote to the typical screen panic, The Smartphone Society reframes our phones as a new frontier of American life. It’s a useful read for anyone worried about how we live with technology, and that should be all of us.”
—Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials

“The Smartphone Society pierces the fog of the Silicon Valley fantasy, showing us how these little pocket computers control our lives for profit—but also how they open new paths to justice. Nicole Aschoff has given us that rare book, packed with insights and written with verve. I will never look at my smartphone the same way—and after reading The Smartphone Society, neither will you.”
—Jason W. Moore, professor of sociology and author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

“The Smartphone Society is not your average tech book—it’s one about who controls our future. In our New Gilded Age, the book persuasively argues, it’ll be either dictatorial tech giants or the democratic power of free citizens. I know which outcome I prefer, and I can think of few better intellectual defenders of a better, more just future than Aschoff.”
—Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher, Jacobin magazine

“In The Smartphone Society, Nicole Aschoff gives us fresh insight into how the device and our everyday lives have morphed into one another. She considers the good and the bad, and helps us to understand how the smartphone has reshaped society in innumerable ways. With accessible prose, she looks into selfies and social media, politics and protest, profit and women’s unpaid work. It is a cogent read in the era of the smartphone.”
—Rich Ling, Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Nanyang Technological University

From the Publisher

2019-11-20
How the ubiquity of smartphones has transformed society.

Sociologist Aschoff (The New Prophets of Capital, 2015) provides both historical context and political insight, showing what is new in the current technological revolution and recalling earlier times when technology upended the status quo. As "the new Gilded Age" of the subtitle suggests, the author reminds us of how the automobile changed everything, especially the economy. Yet while radical change was widespread, society survived the aftershocks and advanced. "People have always been anxious about new technology," writes Aschoff, without minimizing the profound imbalances the smartphone underscores, especially in terms of economic and social inequality. She shows how activists have used the smartphone to document police brutality against black citizens while police (and the government at large) have employed the same technology of interconnection for monitoring and surveillance. Two of the most important recent social movements—#MeToo and Black Lives Matter—are both phenomena that have spread virally through a culture enabled by smartphones. At the same time, this culture has allowed the mobilization of white nationalists and other dangerous elements. We get our news on our phones, form our political beliefs, and see them echoed by like-minded partisans. The smartphone has all but dissolved the distinction between the personal and the political while changing the way we shop, date, and present ourselves to the outside world, with which we so often connect by smartphone. All the while, we are enriching and enabling global empires through collected data and underpaid labor. "Our fantasies about the digital frontier," writes Aschoff, "hide the hierarchical and ecologically destructive relationships of global capitalism." The author doesn't advocate for opting out, nor does she believe that the worst-case scenario is inevitable. Instead, she offers advice for pushing back and establishing some personal autonomy in the fight for "digital justice."

A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.

Kirkus Reviews