Smart Phones Turn their Users into A#$holes, Researchers say

Dateline: BERKELEY– While many Americans are reeling from the news that the NSA is spying on their locations by tracking their mobile devices, social scientists are concerned about a more existential threat: those devices are turning people into a#$holes.

Ordinary users of smart phones, eReaders, and the like are noticing the change. Said one, “A decade ago, you used to be able to have a friendly chat with a stranger. But now everyone’s always wired in; they’re looking down at their mini computers, texting or tweeting someone, googling this or that, or playing a game app. You’ll be asking someone a question and he’ll be multitasking, giving you only half his attention while he’s checking his email.”

Social scientists at UC Berkeley have a theory to explain what’s happening. They call it a#$holization. It began long ago, they say, at the dawn of technology. Tools made us more efficient and powerful and that started turning our ancient ancestors into a#$holes.

“It’s largely just a matter of being corrupted by power,” says Dr. Stanley Pishposh, the lead researcher at Berkeley studying this phenomenon. “At one point, long, long ago, we must have been settling disputes with just our fists. Then we invented the ax and those earliest ax users were perhaps the first full-fledged a#$holes to walk the planet. They bullied those without axes, you see. Again, we used to have to run from here to there. Then we domesticated horses and you had the rise of the nobles who could afford them—again, big-time a#$holes, thanks to that advance in technology.

“Then the car replaced the horse and you saw this exponential increase in a#$holization. Now there’s road rage and street racing and running through stop signs and monster truck rallies. There are the drivers that cut you off and drive slowly in the passing lane and give you the finger and sell you a lemon of a used car and key your car doors and listen to a#$holian talk show hosts on the car radio. Cars have made us even bigger a#$holes.

“Finally, there’s computerization, which really tips the scales. Technologies like the internet and mobile devices make us incredibly more powerful than our ancestors, which naturally corrupts us all the more. You have anonymity on the internet which turns people into trolls terrorizing cyberspace. You’ve got curt emails, intelligence-draining tweets, and a#$holes showing their penises in video chat rooms. You’ve got computer viruses and spam and popup ads, all brought to you by monumental a#$holes.”

We used to have to rely on morality or the law to defend us when we couldn’t ensure our security because we had so few tools, but now we have an army of machines that makes us feel invincible. According to Dr. Pishposh, “nine times out of ten, a primate with nothing to fear acts like an a#$hole.”

The researchers hypothesize that we’re adapting to an environment that contains more and more machines, which makes us more robotic in our thinking and behaviour. “Computers don’t yet have much emotional capacity,” explains Dr. Pishposh. “There’s something about programming a computer with a lot of math and logic; you don’t get much intuition or feeling out of that machine.

“So a#$holization itself begins with the advent of technology. An ax is an a#$hole. Just try dropping one on your foot and you’ll see what I mean. The ax won’t get out of the way, let me tell you. And a car is a big, whopping a#$hole. Cars kill people all the time, the buggers. And computers, too—a#$holes, the lot of them. They cost an arm and a leg, they always crash on you, and you think your porn is well-hidden, but no it turns out you forgot to password-protect one of the directories and then your wife finds it. I hate it when that happens.

“Anyway, the a#$holeness of machines rubs off on their users. It’s like hanging around a pessimist all the time. Sooner or later, you’ll think less highly of things; you’ve got to blend into your surroundings, after all. Now our high tech world is chockfull of computerized bastards and sons of bitches. We’re standing neck-deep in them. Our work chains us to them. We carry them in our pockets and on our belts and soon we’ll be wearing them for glasses and we’ll bury them under our skin. We’ll have little a#$hole nanomachines swimming through our veins.

“What will become of our humanity then? What will be left of us when we’ve fully merged with our technology? No more manners, no more morality, no more emotions. Whatever happens, you can be sure we’ll have been so thoroughly a#$holized that we won’t be offended by anything. We’ll encourage the worst in us and that’s what we’ll get.”

Author: Benjamin Cain

Ben Cain is a misanthropic omega male who likes to think that the more you suffer, the funnier you can be, and the more of an alienated loser you are, the more you can withstand coming face to face with the horrors of reality. He dedicated himself to discovering whether suffering has a meaning and so he earned a meaningless Ph.D. in analytic philosophy. He shares his findings by writing philosophical rants on his blog, Rants within the Undead God, and he's published a novel, called God Decays, which is available on Amazon. Also, he's pretentiously written this bio in the third person even though he rarely partakes of such conventional trickery.

4 thoughts on “Smart Phones Turn their Users into A#$holes, Researchers say

  1. We could use a way of measuring the extent to which someone’s been a#$holized. We might predict that those who work with computers are bigger a#$holes than those surrounded only by low-tech instruments. But a#$holization is also a mental thing. We internalize a robotic way of thinking, as in politics and business, in which case we objectify each other. See, for example, the excellent House of Cards show.

    I’m sure powerful people have always dehumanized their victims, to be able to live with their ruthless mastery of vices, which they need to rise to power. But being around so many machines that literally only calculate without feeling anything has likely exacerbated these tendencies.

  2. I think you nailed it. Regression analysis show that A#$holization is directly correlated with technology advances. The Illuminati were right. Except nobody listened to them because they were A#$holes.

  3. Thanks. “A#$holization” should be the technical term in scientific studies of machine-induced rudeness. There’s no question our techno-environment has this negative impact on us. And I didn’t even mention the movie theater. That deserves a whole separate article, the rudeness that goes on there…

  4. Very good and probably very true.
    An expert analysis of our persistent a#$hole problem in this country that exists from the ghettos on up to the highest levels of govern….
    hold on, I’ve got a call coming in……

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