The future of mobile is stupid, futile — and irresistible

It’s early in the week, a time of head-shaking, brain-clearing, coffee-mainlining ultraserious industriousness, so I want to put aside minor issues like NSA backdoor techno-fascism, Microsoft’s executive chess game, Net neutrality, or the vast stores of money Mark Zuckerberg will dump into his Scrooge McDuck pool-vault this year. Instead, I want to concentrate on something really important: useless mobile technology.

You laugh, but I’m sitting in my favorite diner waiting for my rubberized eggs and surveying a roomful of patrons who refuse to look at anything but their phones. I think the guy next at the counter is ordering his food from the diner’s website while the waitress is staring at her PC waiting. Neither knows the other exists.

It’s stunning, like standing on a street corner and seeing an infant wandering down the sidewalk munching on a cheeseburger. Future historians digging our brittle, centuries-old thumb drives from wasteland sands will condemn us for our mindless and obsessive drive to purchase the latest mobile doodad. This ingrained dodo-esque pattern will eventually give the machines the advantage they’ll need to usurp society and turn us into warehoused bio-batteries.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

Mobile phone manufacturers are sitting in giant conference rooms right now, their mirrored glass views from their 75th-floor palaces obscured by sweaty steam, pizza boxes and beer cans strewn about, and a bunch of disheveled people in yesterday’s clothes throwing darts at hundreds of sticky notes on the wall, each carrying one zany idea for the next mobile feature to feed the ravenous masses. They’re desperate, their innovation blocked, but knowing they better come up with something sexy or we’ll storm the building and gnaw on their bleached skulls.

Know it or not, you’ve already seen examples of our mobility-enhanced mental weakness. There’s a Samsung commercial from a while back that gave me retching migraines where a young lady at a rooftop rock concert is taking snaps of the band and sending them to her friends who group together around the recipient’s phone and stare with zombie smiles at her slideshow even though they’re at the rock concert too! Or the wingnut bragging to his cube neighbor that he’ll get his Excel assignment done faster on the larger screen of his new phone, scrolling through a tiny spreadsheet ringed with endless scroll bars when there’s a two-display workstation directly behind him.

This kind of stuff makes my confidence in our future as a species bleed out of my eyes. It also freaks out Pammy when I get that way.

The latest useless mobile phone features to grab headlines include innovations from Apple, LG, and possibly worst of all, Scentee. Apple turned its latest iPhone 5c enhancement into an Easter egg for the first unlucky customer that stumbled across it. It turns out a 14-year-old in Maine apparently tried to lie to her teacher, whereupon Apple’s new iPhone lie-detector told Siri to light her pants on fire. The kid has only third-degree burns and will probably recover, but her parents are insensitively gleeful that they’ll never hear the “We were at the library studying, Mom, honest” excuse.

LG was all over CES with its new curved phone this year, and we lapped it up like spring breakers doing belly shots off strippers’ navels. Only with supreme effort can we stop and consider: Who the hell needs a 6-inch curved phone that’s almost bigger than Conan O’Brien’s head? I suppose you could stick it down the front of your pants in some lame attempt to impress the ladies — which will work right up until someone calls you and your crotch starts blaring your “We Are the Champions” ring tone. Or you can stick it in your hip pocket so that your butt can crush it the next time you sit down.

There’s little necessary about a curved phone, but for some reason we’re eagerly waiting to plunk down our hard-earned college fund dollars to get our grubbies on one. This thing made the top 10 at CES, for Pete’s sake.

The sweet smell of stupidity

Last, there’s the coup de grâce to consumer intelligence: Scentee. This is the latest why-the-hell-would-you-do-this technology to come from Japan. It’s a $35 plug-in compatible with flaming iPhones or curvy, hulking Androids that attaches via the headphone socket to provide a wide range of scents to replace audible ring tones. This stuff can drive a man to drink, and as usual I’m proof: My coffee is now from Ireland.

The range of smells that Scentee provides is surprisingly long, including the likes of cinnamon roll, coffee, lavender, and coconut, among many others. The weirdest one is corn soup, but I’m sure it won’t remain the weirdest one for long. There absolutely has to be a hacker in Nigeria working on a Fortune 500 commission coming up with a fart smell that ruthless executives can use to cripple each other’s careers in crowded conference rooms. New Jersey may be building one to try and mask the way Elizabeth smells near Exit 13 on I-95. Maybe Microsoft will get in the game and figure out a physical representation of for code smell.

There are more examples, like the ill-fated now-forgotten Nokia and HTC models that tried to convince us that a phone could produce Dolby Surround Sound. Or the new Samsung Gear almost-smart watch that adds innovative features like low battery life and the ability to read your email on an even smaller screen for only $300 extra. It goes on.

It’s a depressing trend, this must-have fever that obliterates all rational thought. What if some freak engineers really get mobility down to a minichip and start offering to implant them in our heads? How many of us will eagerly line up like sheep to take the first steps toward Cylonism at an Apple Store by a zit-faced high school kid working for minimum wage? It makes me forget nutrition and look at my breakfast menu for an item to wash down the alcohol.

When’s the iPhone 6 coming out?