[kevinsync]

I think a lot of the negative comments here just miss the spirit and point of the article, which for me is that, as the phone is now an omnipresent literal extension of your body, we collectively have chosen to relocate many human experiences from inside of our chests to the very ends of our arms. We don't look up and out anymore, we look down. Our senses and sensibilities are being processed and filtered by an external peripheral rather than by our natural hardware. We are effectively already transhumanists and biohackers, albeit crude ones that lack invasive implants, tuning and modulating our neural pathways in ways that have been heretofore unseen, frequently as simple-minded consumers of the modulation rather than conscious curators of our own metamorphosis.

Author is opining for the way things used to be, is expounding upon the real, significant consequences of this transformation, and just wondering in general what the hell happened and why we let it get to be like this lol

It's also worth noting that the author is a woman, so if you're a dude and feel attacked by the article somehow (or god forbid instinctively dismiss the whole thing because it's not from a male perspective), just take a deep breath and try to recognize that other people have valid, salient thoughts and opinions too. She's just suggesting we all 'touch grass' in a much more substantial way than a bite-sized meme phrase.

[yamazakiwi]

Nah they're just trying to police other people's behavior with nostalgia-bait. The fact that you think there is a group of people who are actually mad at reading this and are trying to minimize any criticism as gender bias is...something.

[kevinsync]

Honestly man I wrote that last part as more of a thought-out-loud rather than a straight-up accusation. I just felt like a lot of comments who (to me, just my opinion) really didn't understand the writing were probably guys, possibly young, definitely in a bubble (we're on Hacker News, like it or not it's a distinct male bubble with a specific world view), and I think it's worth establishing a bit of context so that somebody might find themselves able to interrogate their reactions to it, in the event that they had a reaction at all. Maybe I was reaching, whatever -- but even your comment ascribing intent to the author's post as "trying to police other people's behavior" illustrates that you read it as instruction rather than introspection.

It's just somebody's musings on a topic, nothing more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[yamazakiwi]

That's fair, reading it did not come off as introspection to me. I could probably have taken it less seriously. Opinion generally ties into attitude so I'm going to assume that persons musings will reflect in how they act.