Mobilenormativity
The phone in every hand, and why we no longer see it.
Mobilenormativity
The phone in every hand, and why we no longer see it.
At 2:30 in the morning in 1987, someone walked into a 7-Eleven just off the Disney World property with a camcorder. Nothing much happened. Strangers joked with each other, the clerk laughed along, people drifted in and talked to whoever was there. The video has been viewed nine million times, and the comments keep asking one question. What happened to us? Many answer it themselves: “The internet and cell phones ruined us.”
You may suspect nostalgia, and you would be right to. Nostalgia flatters, and the camera was among friends. People in the store were smoking indoors, normal then and banned there now. Still, these people look unguarded in a public place at an odd hour, and one viewer noticed why the camera didn’t trouble them. They assumed nobody but the filmer and his friends would ever see the tape. Nobody in a public place can assume that now.
A word from the road
What changed has no name yet, but the nearest model comes from the road. In 2023 three British researchers, Ian Walker, Alan Tapp and Adrian Davis, named the habit of mind that hides what cars cost us. They called it motonormativity, and Wikipedia’s summary lists five assumptions about cars and their effects: that they are natural, universal, inevitable, neutral and non-negotiable. Their study ran when nearly all cars on British roads still burned fossil fuels. Three in four of 2,157 adults said people shouldn’t smoke where others breathe the fumes, and fewer than one in five said the same of driving.
We propose a companion word, mobilenormativity, for the same five assumptions about the phone. Test it on yourself. Would you mind a stranger in the park photographing your child with a film camera? With a phone? If a man at the next table raised a camera to take your picture, you would ask what he was doing. Raise a phone, and you might not notice. Nobody repealed the old expectation of not being photographed by strangers. People simply stopped holding it. A study built like Walker’s could show how far, or prove us wrong.
Names work in both directions. In the 1920s American auto interests pinned “jaywalker,” a slur for a country rube, on pedestrians who until then had the run of the street. In 2022 Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification,” and within two years it was a word of the year, because once the thing had a name, people saw it everywhere. Mobilenormativity is offered in that spirit.
How we got here
The iPhone arrived in 2007, push notifications and Facebook’s like button in 2009. In 2010 the iPhone’s front-facing camera and Instagram made a picture of yourself something you could send anywhere in seconds. By 2025 four in ten American adults said they were online almost constantly, nearly two in three of those under thirty. Phones had reached children of one or two.
No single step looked like much. If you are old enough, you have watched this happen more than once. Something normal is washed over by questionable progress while most of the public objects, and the push goes on, a little at a time. Usually a company is pushing. Sometimes it is a fashion, an employer, a school, or simply everyone else. Often it is all of them at once. Ten years later, doing anything else looks old-fashioned. Twenty years later, nobody remembers the argument.
We call the stages imposition, resignation, etiquette and forgetting: the change arrives, objection tires, dissent starts to look rude, and the argument fades. The last is the most dangerous. Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and here each repetition is worse. The car took the street, the phone took the room, and AI is reaching for the sentence.
Who benefits
Much of what runs on a phone, from search to social media to free apps, is paid for by advertising, and advertising sells changes in behavior. Norms are among the strongest levers on behavior. Even the phone’s makers live partly on advertising. In 2022 Google paid Apple $20 billion to be the default search engine in Safari. None of this needs a conspiracy. It follows from the business model. Social engineering is a fair name for what the model does.
The usual defense is that technology is neutral, the fourth of the five assumptions. In 1955 David Sarnoff, who ran the Radio Corporation of America and is often called the father of American television, made that argument while accepting an honorary degree at Notre Dame. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan quoted him and called it “the voice of the current somnambulism.” For McLuhan, what a technology does to us matters more than anything it carries. That is what he meant by “the medium is the message.” He later added that fish know nothing of water, because we cannot see what we live inside.
In 1967 his colleague John Culkin put it in one sentence, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” Neil Postman, the media critic who carried McLuhan’s work forward, later observed that technologies become “mythic,” part of the natural order and beyond question.
What it costs
Phones do much good, from maps and emergency calls to families kept in touch across oceans and an economy opened to billions. None of that required phones built to watch us and hold our attention. The costs fall, as with the car, on bystanders who never had a vote, on the person across the table who loses to the screen, the stranger who becomes footage, the child handed a phone before they can speak. Public space has become a studio. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic. How much of that is the phone’s doing is rightly debated. The steep fall in time spent with friends in person is not.
What was lost
The phone has also become the container of a life. Photos, contacts, money, identity and memory sit on one device its owner does not control, which is why people cry when they lose one. The owner plays the user, arranging icons and picking apps from a store, while the vendor decides what may be installed, inspected or repaired, and can change any of it overnight. The computer of thirty years earlier ran whatever its owner chose and opened with a screwdriver. Beside it, today’s user is a degenerate form of the role, and the control is largely an illusion. People accepted the trade and kept no way back. Everyone depends on others. The trouble starts with depending on someone you can neither check nor leave.
The next loss is arriving through the same device, and in many forms at once. In 2023 Snapchat, whose users include millions of teenagers, pinned an AI chatbot to the top of every user’s chat list, above their real friends, and at first the only way to remove it was to pay. Google’s Pixel 8 merged the best faces from a burst of group photos into one picture of a moment that never happened. In 2024 Apple’s notification summaries told iPhone owners, under the BBC’s name, that a murder suspect had shot himself. He had not. Apple paused the feature, then brought it back. And AI now offers to write our messages, reaching for the last thing we still author ourselves, the words we send to the people we love.
What reversal takes
Normalization has been reversed before, where people could govern the infrastructure themselves. Dutch cities turned to cycling because the cycling city became better, not because cars were merely restricted. Vinyl records, declared dead, grew for nineteen straight years and passed a billion dollars in American sales in 2025, because people wanted something they could own.
Neither reversal ran on shame. Shame rarely recruits anyone, but status does. In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, owning a real animal is a mark of virtue because tending one is costly and fakes are cheap. Owning your records, your machines and the defaults of your own life can carry the same prestige. It takes only a few people to make it look that way.
Thinking in generations
Forgetting is the stage our project was named against. What outlasts its makers can be handed on, and what is handed on is harder to forget, so we called it Generational Infrastructure, a promise about time rather than technology. The picture we had in mind was an old man pushing a child on a swing under a great tree at dawn. It is an odd promise to make about computers, and we know it. The test is short. If everyone who made a thing, and every server that launched it, vanished tomorrow, could its inheritors still run it, understand it and change it?
Our work aims at what was lost. Liquid computing, the direction we work toward, builds systems to an owner’s purpose and leaves them in the owner’s hands, so that the person at the keyboard is master and commander of the machine again.
The measuring stick
In 1968, the year Dick’s novel appeared, Robert F. Kennedy said that the gross national product measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.” By that measure, every step that brought us here looks like a success. In 2024 dollars, the median American household earned about $65,000 in 1987 and $84,000 in 2024. The number went up. Yet a young household needed two and a half years of income to buy a median home then, and three and a half in 2024.
The stick flatters us twice. It reports progress while the home a young family most needs moves further away, and it cannot see what the people in that 7-Eleven had more of than we do: each other’s attention. We cannot walk blindly into a future in which our measuring stick is strictly economic. McLuhan’s fish cannot see the water. The first task is to see it. That is what this word is for.