I recently decided to purchase a phone that had more of what I wanted (battery life!) and less of what I didn’t (news alerts, social media notifications, emails). I used to have a device exactly like this—a flip phone that could last a week on a single charge, and that didn’t act like a supercomputer that trained all its gigaflops on distracting me. Q So I marched into my carrier’s storefront and was disappointed to learn that I had exactly one option. It wasn’t that cheap. It included a clunky browser and was cluttered with all sorts of other apps I didn’t want. It also had terrible reviews; people said it broke down quickly and often. Not that any of that mattered, because I had no choice. I bought it—and it broke within months. I marched back and asked if they had acquired any other models. Dejected, I bought the same phone again. Q I promise, it’s not that I like to overpay for crappy products. I just think that there’s a good case to be made that it’s in our best interest to move away from ever-more-powerful computing machines and toward, well, decent one-trick ponies. That’s because the multipurpose computer—your smartphone, with endless ​tiled apps, or your laptop, with another tab always ready to open—makes it harder for you to align your own incentives with what your device is capable of doing.
This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.