There was once a time, not so very long ago, when an Australian could conduct an entirely respectable life without carrying a small electronic surveillance device in his pocket. He could work, pay taxes, maintain a bank account, communicate with government departments, attend university, travel on public transport and read whatever newspapers or books he pleased. If someone wished to telephone him, there was a landline in his house. If an institution required proof of identity, there were established documentary procedures. The world functioned reasonably well, and civilisation did not collapse because citizens were unable to scan QR codes.
Today, however, the smartphone has become something approaching a compulsory passport to ordinary social existence. Governments and corporations may not have formally legislated that every Australian must own one, but their administrative systems increasingly operate on precisely that assumption. The individual who declines to purchase a smartphone, whether for reasons of privacy, expense, personal preference or simple lack of interest, can find himself treated as an administrative anomaly. The question is no longer whether a particular technology is useful, but whether citizens are still permitted to live normally without it.
Consider the increasingly common requirement for online age verification. An Australian aged pensioner, perhaps approaching eighty, wishes to read an article on Substack. He has published books, written papers and accumulated decades of publicly documented adult life. Yet the platform may demand that he submit a facial image to an automated verification system. If his desktop computer lacks a suitable camera, the obvious solution is apparently to use a smartphone. What if he does not possess one? The bureaucratic imagination struggles with this possibility. Perhaps he can borrow his sons phone, thereby enlisting a family member to help establish that a man who has been alive for eight decades is not a child.
This is not merely an amusing technological inconvenience. It illustrates a much wider transformation in the relationship between individuals and institutions. The smartphone has become an unofficial prerequisite for accessing services that previously required no such equipment. Banks encourage customers to use mobile applications for authentication. Online services send one-time codes to mobile numbers. Government systems promote digital identification and app-based interactions. Public venues, transport services and commercial organisations increasingly use QR codes or mobile applications as their preferred means of communication. Each individual development can be defended as convenient, efficient or secure, but their cumulative effect is to make smartphone ownership progressively less optional.
The transition has occurred without anything resembling a serious democratic debate. No Australian parliament has openly declared that citizens must purchase a particular category of privately manufactured electronic device to participate fully in society. Yet the practical consequences of institutional digitisation can resemble such a requirement. A person may retain the theoretical right to use a service while finding that the ordinary means of exercising that right have been designed around equipment he does not own.
This is a form of technological coercion by administrative convenience. Nobody needs to threaten a citizen with imprisonment for refusing to purchase a smartphone. It is sufficient to make essential transactions increasingly difficult without one. The individual eventually confronts a choice between surrendering his preference for technological independence and accepting a growing collection of bureaucratic obstacles. The coercion is indirect, dispersed across numerous institutions and therefore more difficult to challenge than an explicit legal mandate.
Defenders of this transformation will point out, correctly, that smartphones provide enormous practical benefits. They offer rapid communication, navigation, access to information, banking facilities and emergency assistance. For many people, they are genuinely useful devices. But the usefulness of a technology does not establish that everyone should be required, even indirectly, to adopt it. Motor vehicles are useful, yet society does not ordinarily insist that every citizen possess a car before accessing public services. Credit cards are convenient, but their convenience does not justify abolishing every alternative means of payment. The same principle should apply to smartphones.
The problem is particularly serious for older Australians. Some pensioners are perfectly competent computer users who simply have no desire to own a mobile telephone. Others have limited incomes, physical disabilities or difficulties navigating unfamiliar applications. Some live in areas with unreliable mobile coverage. Still others have legitimate concerns about privacy, fraud or the security of devices that concentrate so much personal information in one place. These circumstances are not evidence of irresponsibility or technological backwardness. They are ordinary variations in the lives of citizens who should not be excluded from essential services.
There is also a financial dimension that receives remarkably little attention. Smartphone ownership involves more than the initial purchase price. Devices eventually require replacement, operating systems become outdated, applications cease supporting older hardware and mobile services involve continuing expenses. A person who needs a telephone only occasionally may reasonably conclude that these costs are unnecessary. Yet when institutions make smartphone access a practical requirement, they effectively transfer part of the cost of administering their services onto the individual.
A bank that replaces traditional authentication procedures with smartphone-based verification may reduce its own operating expenses, but the customer must provide the hardware, connectivity and technical competence necessary to participate. A government agency that shifts services towards mobile applications can celebrate administrative efficiency while citizens bear the costs of maintaining compatible equipment. What appears as technological progress from the perspective of the institution may be an uncompensated obligation imposed upon the public.
The security argument is equally complicated. Smartphone-based authentication can provide important protection against fraud, particularly when properly implemented. But concentrating financial, identification and communication functions within a single device also creates vulnerabilities. A lost, stolen, damaged or compromised phone may disrupt access to multiple services simultaneously. The individual who once possessed separate physical documents, a landline and conventional banking arrangements may now find that much of his administrative existence depends upon one fragile electronic object.
There is something particularly ironic about requiring citizens to use smartphones in the name of security while simultaneously warning them about scams, malicious applications, phishing attacks and identity theft. Older Australians are regularly advised to exercise caution when dealing with unfamiliar digital systems, yet they are increasingly pushed towards precisely such systems as a condition of accessing ordinary services. The resulting message is contradictory: beware of digital fraud, but also conduct more of your personal affairs through digital platforms.
Privacy raises another concern. Modern smartphones are sophisticated computing devices equipped with cameras, microphones, location services and numerous mechanisms for collecting information. This does not mean that every smartphone is constantly spying upon its owner or that every application is malicious. It does mean that these devices create technical opportunities for data collection and behavioural monitoring that did not exist in the traditional landline telephone. Citizens should be entitled to consider those implications without being penalised for deciding that they would prefer not to participate.
The old landline had considerable virtues that are now easily forgotten. It was relatively simple, durable and designed primarily for communication. It did not require constant software updates, demand access to one's photographs or insist upon knowing one's location. A person could answer a telephone without first agreeing to revised terms of service. The device did not suddenly announce that its operating system was no longer supported and that the owner should purchase a new model to continue receiving calls.
Of course, landlines had their limitations, and contemporary digital communication offers capabilities that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. The point is not that society should abandon modern technology and return to rotary telephones. It is that technological improvement should expand the range of choices available to individuals rather than eliminate alternatives. Genuine progress gives people additional capabilities. A system that makes yesterday's perfectly adequate arrangements unusable may represent progress for its administrators without necessarily representing progress for everyone else.
The cultural assumptions underlying smartphone dependence are also revealing. Technology companies tend to design services around the habits of their most commercially attractive users, while bureaucracies adopt systems that simplify administration at scale. The resulting interfaces presume that individuals possess modern devices, maintain active accounts, remember passwords, receive digital notifications and remain permanently connected. Those who do not fit the model become exceptions requiring special handling, even though their preferences may be entirely reasonable.
This reverses the proper relationship between institutions and the public. Government departments, banks and essential service providers exist to serve people, not to compel people to organise their lives around institutional convenience. A citizen should not have to justify his refusal to purchase a smartphone any more than he should have to explain why he does not own a television, subscribe to streaming services or maintain a social media account. These are consumer choices, not tests of civic competence.
The increasing reliance upon mobile devices also has implications for personal independence. A pensioner who has managed his own affairs for decades may suddenly require assistance from children or younger relatives because an institution has introduced a verification procedure that assumes smartphone ownership. What was once a straightforward transaction becomes a family project involving borrowed equipment, unfamiliar applications and technical instructions. The individual has not lost the intellectual capacity to manage his affairs. Rather, the institution has changed the rules in ways that unnecessarily undermine his independence.
This is especially objectionable when the underlying task is trivial. Reading a political article, confirming an appointment or accessing an ordinary account should not require elaborate technological arrangements. Yet modern systems can transform these activities into exercises in digital compliance. The customer is instructed to download an application, scan a code, enable permissions, verify a telephone number, submit a photograph and wait for an automated decision. At the end of the process, he may be granted permission to perform an activity that once required nothing more complicated than opening a newspaper.
There is an additional danger in the gradual disappearance of non-digital alternatives. When physical bank branches close, printed information disappears and telephone support becomes difficult to reach, citizens lose the ability to choose the form of interaction most appropriate to their circumstances. This is not merely an inconvenience for those who dislike technology. It reduces the resilience of society by making more activities dependent upon interconnected electronic systems.
Power failures, telecommunications outages, cyberattacks and software failures can all disrupt digital services. A society that retains practical alternatives is better equipped to withstand such disruptions than one that has made every important transaction dependent upon a functioning smartphone and network connection. The old-fashioned arrangements dismissed as inefficient may prove remarkably valuable when modern systems fail.
Australia should therefore adopt a simple principle: access to essential public services should not depend exclusively upon smartphone ownership. Government agencies should maintain practical alternatives, and regulated service providers should be expected to accommodate people who cannot or do not wish to use mobile applications. Where identity or age verification is genuinely necessary, accessible methods should exist that do not require citizens to purchase particular equipment or surrender unnecessary personal information.
This does not mean that every private website must provide every conceivable access method, or that institutions should be prevented from introducing useful technologies. It means recognising that convenience for the majority is not a sufficient justification for excluding a minority. Systems should be designed around the diversity of actual human circumstances rather than the preferences of software developers and administrative managers.
The deeper political issue is the gradual conversion of optional consumer technologies into instruments of social participation. The smartphone began as a product people could choose to purchase because they found it useful. It is increasingly becoming a device that people are expected to possess because institutions have organised their procedures around it. The distinction between voluntary adoption and practical compulsion is becoming blurred.
And so we return to the Australian aged pensioner attempting to read an article. He has survived wars, economic crises, changing governments and decades of technological innovation. He may have spent much of his life teaching, researching, writing and contributing to public debate. But now he must borrow his son's smartphone to convince an automated system that he is old enough to access written material.
Perhaps the next stage of progress will require Australians to verify their eligibility to purchase a smartphone by using a smartphone. Anyone unable to comply can contact customer support, naturally through an application available only on the device they do not possess.
The modern world has become extraordinarily clever at solving problems that did not previously exist. It has also become remarkably proficient at creating new ones in the name of convenience.
The smartphone may be one of the most useful inventions of the modern age. But usefulness is not the same as necessity, and technological progress should not require citizens to surrender their freedom to live without it.
A society that cannot accommodate an adult who chooses not to own a mobile telephone has not necessarily become more advanced. It may simply have become less tolerant of individual independence.