Mar 29, 2023

Why You Should Destroy Your Smart Phone Now

Simon Elmer

So-called ‘smart phones’ — far more accurately described as ‘dumb phones’ — combine a mobile phone with a watch, with a road map, with a tourist atlas of the world, with a digital camera, with a personal stereo system, with a music collection, with a video recorder, with a diary, with a calculator, with a credit card, with a travelcard, with an office key, with a torch, with a newspaper, with a television, with something to read on the train, and probably a lot more.

I don’t know, because I don’t own one.

‘But it’s so convenient!’ cry those who stare unbelieving at my twenty-year-old Nokia.

To which I reply: ‘Convenience breeds compliance.’ But to what?

Since they were first introduced into our lives in 2008, smartphones have become our outsourced memory and brain, replacing both with the convenience of not having to remember anything or think for ourselves. If you don’t believe me, then answer me this without looking at your smart phone. What is 9 x 13? What was the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia? In what month of which year did the UK invade Iraq at the tail-end of the US-led coalition? Before smart phones, every child in the UK knew the answers to these questions. Now, no adult does.

But they are now even more than this. Smartphones, under the two years of lockdown, were the instrument onto which the COVID-faithful downloaded the software applications (or app) that connected them to the Test and Trace tracking programme that identified and recorded their location, movements, associations and personal contacts.

In the imminent future, smartphones are the instrument onto which, in the guise of the digital verification of our identity — the Government’s ‘consultation’ on which closed this month — the compliant will upload their biometric data (fingerprints, photograph and DNA swab) to a centralised database to which the 32 public authorities presiding over the UK biosecurity state will have access.

Under the Digital Economy Act 2017, these public authorities include the Cabinet Office; the Home Office; the Department for Defence; HM Treasury; the Ministry of Justice; the Department for Education; the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; the Department for Work and Pensions; the Department for Communities and Local Government; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Department for Transport; the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs; Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs; all county, district and London councils; the Greater London Authority; the Council of the City of London; all fire and rescue authorities; all police authorities; all education authorities; all gas and electricity authorities; HM Land Registry; and, under Section 35, any other public authority, or private agent providing a service for a public authority, designated for a specific purpose justifying access to that data.

Smartphones are the instrument that will monitor whether their owners are up-to-date with what the UK biosecurity state decides is fully ‘vaccinated’ with whatever our Government and its partners in the pharmaceutical industry decide we must inject into our bodies as a condition of access to the rights of citizenship.

Smartphones are the instrument that will monitor and record how many times we leave or enter our 15-minute grazing range currently being implemented by our public authorities to restrict and limit our freedom of movement on the justification of ‘saving the planet’.

Smart phones are the instrument that will track our carbon footprint in order to monitor and control the quantity of meat, dairy products, energy, oil, petrol and other products to which the UK biosecurity state — under the terms of the agreements of Agenda 2030 signed by the UK Government in 2015 — will progressively cut off our access between now and 2030.

Smartphones are the means by which our compliance with lockdowns, masking mandates and programmes of gene therapy dictated by the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty and enforced by the UK biosecurity state will be monitored, recorded and enforced by, among other recourses, cutting off our access to the electronic and digital grid.

And, within the next few years, smartphones will become the digital wallet through which the Bank of England will have complete control over how much, on what and where we spend its Central Bank Digital Currency.

Smartphones are the first generation of the biotechnology that is already being implanted into our bodies in the form of ingested medicines carrying microchips that record compliance; quantum dot dyes in gene therapies injected as vaccines against the latest civilisation-threatening pandemic declared by the WHO; and microprocessors implanted under our skin for the ease and convenience of contactless payments. Smart phones are the precursor of what Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, accurately and prophetically boasted will be ‘the fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities’ in the rapidly approaching future he has planned for us.

Smartphones, therefore, are the technology of our enslavement, and the fact that, knowing all this as more and more of us do, we still — still — won’t discard them, shows how addicted we are to this technology, how deep it has penetrated into our psychology, and in effect into our biology. Like the prisoners forced to construct the camp in which they are imprisoned, we continue to pay increasing sums for our smartphones, upgrade our prison whenever we’re invited to, and demand that its facilities are regularly increased in efficiency with the latest technology.

The truth is, we don’t programme smartphones and we don’t use them. They programme us, they change how we use them. They use us. With the rise of the car as a widely-available convenience between the 1950s and 60s, someone observed that, if aliens visited earth, they would think cars were the dominant life-form, and that we were merely the energy source that, upon entering them, allows them to move about — a little like food is for us. Seventy years and two industrial revolutions later, we’re now the organic component that operates smartphones, and in doing so allows them to replicate in number and increase in power — above all over us. That, at its most basic, is the function of the human being in the Global Biosecurity State. And if we keep thinking that we use our smartphones — as they have programmed us to think — those who programme them will have complete control over us.

So, let’s say just for a moment — symbolically at least, or better yet in anticipation of a future and definitive parting — throw your smartphone away now, as you’re reading this article. Get up, and throw it in the bin. And if you can’t do even that — and I imagine few if any of you reading this will — I invite you to reflect on this addiction to the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

A smartphone is not a tool. It is not a ‘convenience’. It is biotechnology, and the fact that it isn’t yet implanted into our bodies doesn’t mean it hasn’t already become a part of us — and a part of us you have just demonstrated you are ready to sacrifice your freedom to rather than discard. Indeed, what the past three years of cowardice and obedience have demonstrated is that, as obedient subjects of capitalism, we will defend our slavery with far more vehemence that we will defend our freedoms.

In 1944, as the Second World War drew to its end, the Surrealist poet, André Breton, declared: ‘Freedom colour of man!’ No longer. Freedom, as George Orwell predicted five years later, is now slavery. Because slavery is safe. Slavery is convenient. Slavery is the common good. Slavery is now the highest civic virtue. Slavery is our duty. Slavery is our fate — so don’t bother fighting it. Instead, embrace your slavery. Upgrade your smart phone to a new model.

Queue outside the Apple or Google shops for hours. Wrap your chains in a nice leather wallet. Download the newest app of your enslavement. Show it off to your friends and boast about its new and improved speeds. Never, ever, let it leave your side. Place it under your pillow before you go to sleep, so it can tell you how well you slept. Look into its screen the moment you wake up. For it is your best friend, your big brother, the lover who will never betray you and who you always wished you had. It is your single source of truth — just as Jacinda Ardern told us. Trust no other!

André Breton also said that we will never have a political revolution until we have a revolution of the mind. Or as Parliament Funk paraphrased him years later: ‘Free your mind and your arse will follow’. As the last three years of servitude and compliance have shown, our minds are already in prison. And until we free them, talk of resisting, let alone overthrowing, the Global Biosecurity State is — if you’ll pardon my French — merde.

It is an unfortunately purely hypothetical truth that, if a sufficient proportion of the 93 per cent of UK citizens who own a smart phone (51.7% Apple, 47.78% Google and 0.57% Samsung) threw them away, the threats to our freedom we face today would be over. At least for now. Until they invent new chains with which to bind us.

If you are still in doubt, this week the UK Government announced a system of ‘Emergency Alerts’ that will be sent to your smart phone whenever they announce an emergency. They didn’t say what constitutes an emergency requiring such an alert, but based on the past few years of hysteria, they might include hot or cold weather; pollution levels; wild-fires; flooding; a busy beach; demands on the energy grid; food shortages; a cyber-attack; a new virus, social unrest; political demonstrations; the threat of nuclear war; the enforcement of martial law. Any of these ‘emergencies’ and more in the future might activate the alarm on your smart phone; but the response will be the same.

‘When you get an alert’, the Government has instructed us in no uncertain terms, ‘stop what you’re doing and follow the instructions.’ But that’s just a gesture to the illusion that we are still free to choose. Once your smart phone is uploaded with the Government’s Digital Verification app and linked to the system of digital surveillance and control being imposed in the UK in the guise of ‘15-minute cities’, these instructions will be enforced without the need for our willing compliance. Your electric car will be turned off; your allocation of petrol or food or energy will be frozen; your Digital Pound wallet will be locked shut.

Feel like getting rid of your smart phone yet? ‘But what’s the point, when nobody else will get rid of theirs?’ Individual non-compliance is almost always enacted in public, in a social setting, in the presence of other people, who may or may not be complying themselves — usually the former. At the very least, it draws attention to the technologies and regulations enforcing compliance, and with which we are becoming habituated to the point where they have become transparent, invisible. Indeed, the dominance of an ideology can be measured by its transparency. Not using a smart phone makes what is now transparent visible again.

Compliance with the UK programme of gene therapy was not — as was claimed by those who willingly complied — a personal and individual choice to be ‘vaccinated’ against a deadly virus, and therefore none of the business of those who opposed the national programme. It was, and is, an act of collective obedience that created the consensus with which the non-compliant were and are socially ostracised, demonised in the media as murderers, fired from our jobs and treated under newly-made laws as citizens without rights and freedoms, prisoners in our own country and homes.

In the same way, using a smart phone is not an individual choice — whether chosen freely or out of habit or addiction; it is a collective act of compliance that is creating the digital camp in which all of us will one day be imprisoned. Only when millions of us stop using the instruments of our enslavement will we escape this camp — as we must and only can — together; but that individual choice cannot be avoided.

Individual non-compliance is always a demonstration of non-compliance. In Parliament Square in London, opposite the Houses of Parliament, there is a statue of the suffragette, Millicent Fawcett. I’d have preferred one of Sylvia Pankhurst; but she holds a small banner saying: ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere.’ In the West, and in particular in the UK, we’ve been cowards for a long time, and we need to find our courage. That comes from individuals standing up and saying: ‘No, I will not comply.’

I repeat: the digital camp in which they wish to imprison us is — literally — in our hands. Get rid of them. Smash them! We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world of freedom to win.