The phone has a transformational effect on those activities.
By modifying the pursuit of that activity in a number of ways, the activities become more addictive. It is more frictionless to begin them, reward is provided more instantly, and new ways to gamify the activity increase the dopamine response.
To say it is not the phone is true, in the sense that the phone on its own is not terribly addictive solely as a physical object. But the distinction is somewhat pointless when it has a large "addictiveness coefficient" to other activities.
A smartphone might well be a multiplier for addictive activities, but treating it as the object-of-hatred carries a risk of throwing the baby out with the bath-water.
Hate Facebook, if you like. Hate news services with apps. Hate the addictive ecosystems.
But hating the phone means biasing yourself even against phones with no addictive apps installed on them. It means fomenting a movement to get away from "smarts" in phones altogether, resulting in things like https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/1/17066494/li....
"Dumb smartphones" are a cute idea, but also a reactionary one; rather than just curating an apps marketplace to disallow these addictive activities, they entirely preclude this thing in your pocket from being a portable Turing machine, capable of achieving whatever functionalities you might want/need it to.
Consider an alternate world to our own, where we had had an established+successful smartphone-luddist movement for the last 5-10 years, most phones looked like the Light Phone, and you'd be breaking social norms to have a "full-fat" smartphone. Would these exist?
• ride-sharing apps
• WordLens (and its incarnation in Google Translate)
• password managers and TOTP 2FA (and mobile cryptocurrency wallets, if you like)
• podcasts
• maps with buildings and travel-times on them, and solid public-transit routing models
• competent voice-recognition (and thus the leaps-and-bounds-better accessibility for blind users we have today)
• the eBook ecosystem
• DSLR-quality phone cameras
• VoIP apps (and thus, the commoditization of cellular providers)
• streaming video-service mobile apps (and thus, demand for 4G cellular infrastructure)
All of these things are—at least in my opinion—unalloyed goods. None of them are addictive (or are addictive only to the background level of addiction we've already culturally come to terms with in entertainment products); they're just things that allow your smartphone to be the solution to a problem you've already set out to solve.
But, if we spin smartphones themselves as a cultural net-negative, I don't expect we'll see many more of these utility-type innovations.
> All of these things are—at least in my opinion—unalloyed goods.
Sure, many of these things are nice, but phrasing them as "unalloyed goods" I think it extremely one-sided and comes only from a techno-centric perspective. You don't have to be a Luddite to actually consider downsides of the things you mentioned and upsides of their alternatives.
• ride-sharing apps
Call a Taxi, ride a bike, get a ride from a friend, walk. How is a ride sharing app an unalloyed good on a glorious day for a bike ride?
• WordLens (and its incarnation in Google Translate)
Effort put into foreign languages "the hard way"--study, recall, practice--actually strengthens your mental capacity, rather than being spoonfed answers by an AR system automatically that never leaves space for you to grow, never challenges, and instead treats you like a complete know-nothing, which you will remain if you fully rely on it. Learn some language! It's fun!
• password managers and TOTP 2FA (and mobile cryptocurrency wallets, if you like)
I am not sure how a password manager is an unalloyed good? It allows you to have more accounts and more passwords and not remember anything, but it presents a security risk...
• podcasts
Radio. Books. Talking to people.
• maps with buildings and travel-times on them, and solid public-transit routing models
Learning the streets, navigation skills, learning how to read a bus timetable, asking people, talking to people on the subway--asking for directions!!!?
• competent voice-recognition (and thus the leaps-and-bounds-better accessibility for blind users we have today)
People are pretty good voice recognizers. Who do you want to talk to and what for?
• the eBook ecosystem
You got me there. Books are heavy.
• DSLR-quality phone cameras
• VoIP apps (and thus, the commoditization of cellular providers)
I dunno. People pretend like phones didn't exist before mobile phones. There used to be such a thing as payphones on many street corners, if you really really needed to call from somewhere. Hotel lobbies, bars, your friend's house, etc.
• streaming video-service mobile apps (and thus, demand for 4G cellular infrastructure)
For what really? I mean, so you can ignore everything else around you? I don't get it. Why do you just assume this is so much better than the real world? It just isn't!
By modifying the pursuit of that activity in a number of ways, the activities become more addictive. It is more frictionless to begin them, reward is provided more instantly, and new ways to gamify the activity increase the dopamine response.
To say it is not the phone is true, in the sense that the phone on its own is not terribly addictive solely as a physical object. But the distinction is somewhat pointless when it has a large "addictiveness coefficient" to other activities.