Is Your Phone the Reason You Feel Broke?

For the past year, the political class has been wearing itself out over what sounds like a simple question: Why are Americans so down on the economy? One point of agreement is that core indicators seem to have diverged from how people report actually feeling about the economy or are insufficient to explain such things in the first place. This sentimental breakdown presents as either a tricky puzzle or a severe emergency, depending, for example, on whether or not you’re trying to remain president. I won’t argue that smartphones are significantly responsible for America’s sense of economic malaise. What they are is unusually helpful for understanding and interpreting this malaise in common terms. They’re a heightened, sped-up microcosm of the weird, sour vibrancy of the economic moment, little worlds in which participants are both increasingly active and increasingly worried. The new economy surrounding the smartphone tells a clear story. You’ve got adjacent services that were once free and which now cost money. There are the services you subscribed to, pay for, and use on your phone that keep increasing their prices. There are the “free” products that don’t really work unless you pay for upgrades. These payments, and their prices, are almost universally the sorts of things that, while certainly possible to explain or rationalize, and individually not terribly significant, add up in an unpleasant way. You’re getting charged a higher price for the privilege of doing or getting things that, at best, feel the same. All of this can make sense, if you need it too, while also feeling — and looking! — like a bait and switch, a series of small affronts that cost a little bit of money and a lot of goodwill, telling an incomplete but persuasive story of things moving in the wrong direction, forever — especially if you’re young. Smartphones aren’t taking all your money, or even much of it, in the grand scheme of things. But they’re taking more of it than before and rubbing it in your face.