Kill the Corporation in Your Pocket

From Slingshot Issue #143: Winter, 2025

In Summer 2002, Slingshot published an article against the growing social dependency on cellular phones. There were no dumbphones at the time — a flip phone was only considered “dumb” not due to the supposed technological superiority of other devices on the market, but instead because of the things it fostered: isolation, dependency on the state and large corporations, ecocide in the Congo and across the world (yes, folks were talking about this decades ago), and a lack of autonomy and critical thinking skills for whoever was unfortunate enough to get sucked into buying one.

Getting Pushed Around By the News

from Scholium

As information technology penetrates deeper into our lives, the news cycle increasingly takes center stage in the public mind. Because we always carry little internet machines with us, we get news beamed to us at all times. In social media, the place we go to socialize, we are bombarded with articles, reactions, and news-related memes. In text group and loops, our friends and family share articles with us that stirred some emotion in them, hoping they will do the same for us. Everywhere we go, there is no escape, we are followed by the news.

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