The Smartphone Society

As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, machines “express those social forms capable of producing them and making use of them.”59 Looking at the ways we interact with our smartphones reveals the social relationships and power structures that undergird modern society.

Yet, smartphones are much more than an accumulation of improvements in hardware and software into a pocket-sized device that we spend too much time looking at. They represent something entirely new. When we pick up our phones, our taps and swipes engage not only a system of hardware and software, but also something much bigger—a set of institutions