Welcome, User!
This piece is written as if it were a 1999 news dispatch announcing the coming smartphone. It leans into the device’s original promise—a pocket library, a global phone, a thinking aid—and gently pushes back on the idea that distraction and misinformation are intrinsic to the technology itself. Instead, it asks what happens if we choose to use this little slab of glass with purpose, curiosity, and care.
Filed for December 1999 from the not-too-distant future
Imagine a device about the size of a deck of cards.
It fits in your pocket.
It weighs less than a paperback.
Its front is almost entirely made of glass.
Tap that glass, and you can:
This device is real. It is coming. And very soon, almost everyone you know will carry one.
We will call it the smartphone.
To understand what the smartphone represents, start with the most familiar tool of the serious mind: the library.
Today, in 1999, reaching serious knowledge requires movement. You go to the stacks. You search a card catalog (or, if you’re lucky, a web terminal on a shared computer). You wait for interlibrary loans. Information lives in buildings, on shelves, in limited copies.
The smartphone dissolves that geography.
Inside this small object is a permanent, portable ticket into something larger than any single library: a networked collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, lecture notes, research summaries, and how-to guides on almost any topic that human beings have bothered to write about.
You want the history of a civil war in a country you’ve never seen on a postcard? You can have it in seconds.
You want a step-by-step explanation of how an engine works, how bread rises, or why the night sky looks the way it does in winter? You can have that, too.
Not someday. Not “once the book comes in.”
Now.
The old dream of universal education has always run into the same wall: schools and libraries are physical; lives are complicated; time and money are limited. The smartphone cracks that wall. It does not replace teachers, classrooms, or deep study, but it quietly removes one of the oldest frictions: access.
For a curious 10-year-old, a bored commuter, a working parent studying at midnight, the smartphone can be exactly what the public library once promised to be and rarely could in practice: open, reachable, and stocked, everywhere, all the time.
The telephone already shrank distance.
The internet, in its young, dial-up form, is already starting to rearrange it.
The smartphone finishes the job.
Take a typical family spread across countries. In 1999, a long-distance call is an event. You check the rates. You watch the clock. Every minute has a price.
On the smartphone, voice and video are just another stream of data. Once you’re connected, the cost of calling your cousin in another hemisphere is effectively the same as calling your neighbor across town: close to zero.
Add text messages, group chats, shared photos, and later, live video, and you get something qualitatively different: ongoing presence.
Instead of “catching up” every few months, conversations become continuous. A quick note here, a picture there, a small comment on someone’s day. Geography still exists, of course. But emotionally, the smartphone makes it harder for distance to win.
The same applies to work. Teams that would once require a single office can coordinate across cities and time zones. A student can participate in a study group with classmates scattered across countries. Friendships that would have died after a move can continue as if nothing changed.
There is something quietly radical in that. For most of human history, communication has been constrained by where you happen to be. The smartphone loosens that constraint so thoroughly that, for many people, where they are will matter less than who they are connected to.
If you want to feel the smartphone’s magic in its simplest form, look at music.
Right now, in 1999, music means physical objects: cassettes, CDs, shelves, stacks. Your collection is bounded by your budget, your space, and your willingness to carry a small clattering tower of jewel cases on every trip.
The smartphone takes that collection and dematerializes it.
With a few taps, you can:
You do not have to own the plastic to experience the sound.
The result is subtle but real: people are less locked into the musical tastes they happened to be born into. A teenager in one country can fall in love with a band from another in an afternoon. A musician can release a song and see it travel worldwide in days instead of years.
For the working brain, music is not just entertainment. It is a companion to concentration, a way to shape mood, a backdrop to reading, coding, studying, and thinking. The smartphone makes that companion portable, customizable, and immediate.
We rarely notice how many small tasks quietly wear down our attention.
Finding an address.
Remembering an appointment.
Checking a bus schedule.
Fumbling for a flashlight when the power goes out.
Keeping track of expenses.
Jotting down an idea before it evaporates.
The smartphone is a machine for sanding down those little snags.
It can:
Most importantly, it can serve as a single place where you put things you don’t want to waste mental energy remembering: lists, notes, ideas, measurements, reference photos.
None of this is dramatic on its own. But together, it clears mental space. It lets the mind spend less time juggling logistics and more time on what it actually cares about: the book, the project, the conversation, the creative idea that needed just a bit more room to breathe.
In its later evolution, the smartphone gains something stranger and more powerful still: access to software that can respond to you in ordinary language.
You ask a question in plain English.
You describe a problem.
You sketch out an idea you’re not sure how to structure.
And on the screen, you get a reply that is not just a list of links, but a coherent answer, a draft, an explanation, a worked example. It is not perfect. It will make mistakes. But it will also serve as a tireless assistant: suggesting, clarifying, rephrasing, proposing.
For the student, that means having a patient explainer on hand.
For the writer, a brainstorming partner.
For the traveler, a translator.
For the overwhelmed, a gentle organizer.
The smartphone, in that stage, is no longer just a window onto the world’s information. It is a tool for shaping thoughts: refining them, testing them, turning vague intentions into concrete steps.
What started as a phone becomes, in effect, a pocket companion for the mind.
Strip away the jargon and the circuitry, and the smartphone is still something that feels, in the best sense, like magic.
It captures light and sound and freezes them.
It sends those captured moments around the globe at the speed of signals.
It remembers dates, places, names, and faces when we do not.
It can wake us, guide us, warn us, and reassure us.
It can show us our past and help us sketch our future.
Most pieces of technology in history have been built for a narrow purpose: plow the field, light the room, move the car. This one is different. It is general-purpose. It can become a notebook, a sketchbook, a camera, a card catalog, a ticket, a jukebox, a mailbox, a classroom.
Like any powerful tool, the smartphone can be misused. It can distract as well as enrich; numb as well as awaken. But those are questions of habit and culture, not of inherent design. At its core, what we are being handed is extraordinarily generous:
The dream of the late 20th century was that technology might finally live up to its rhetoric: that it would not just impress us, but quietly help us live better, more connected, more thoughtful lives.
The smartphone is that dream, rendered in glass and light.
The question, as we stand here in 1999 looking toward the coming decade, is not whether this device will arrive. It will. The question is whether we will remember what it can be at its best:
Not a toy, not a tether, but a pocket cosmos—
a small, glowing space where the mind can reach a little farther than it could yesterday.
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