Matthew Beaumont’s 2020 book The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City is a collection of essays on wandering in the works of 19th and 20th century authors. In the first instance, it’s literary criticism – he takes a book like Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and explores a theme in the text relating to walking (in this case, ‘Going Astray’). But it’s also published by Verso Books, which means it’s also pretty politically active – if you’re not familiar, Verso is a major left-wing publishing house created by the staff of New Left Review back in 1970. So it’s literary criticism, but it’s also got a lot to say about capitalism and modern society, political resistance and alienation. There’s also a bit in the introduction about smartphones.

The book revolves around the figure of the flaneur, which – if you’re familiar with that term, you can sort of see immediately where this is going. The flaneur is a key figure in certain parts of French literary theory – it’s sort of an upper or upper-middle class guy who just wanders around the streets having experiences. It’s going for a stroll instead of walking to work – it’s wandering, going aimlessly, observing the everyday life of the city and engaging with the random chance things that happen along the way. It’s very rich, very white-male sort of behaviour – you know, it’s all very well to romanticise wandering the streets, but some of us have jobs. It’s a very nineteenth century sort of concept. You usually see it cited in the context of Baudelaire’s poetry, or then Walter Benjamin in the 20th century, who treats the practice as a response to or form of resistance against the modern city, with all of its perils. From Beaumont’s introduction:

“Modernists of the street such as Benjamin and [Henry] Miller live capitalist modernity heroically by committing to walking or wandering the precincts of the city as if this activity were nothing less than a spiritual vocation. Each accident or incident, relevant or irrelevant, affirms the creativity and freedom of what might, in Baudelairean phrase, be characterised as the walker’s kaleidoscopic consciousness.”

It is, again, very much connected to Romanticism – to capital-R Romanticism: insofar as that movement was a response to the Industrial Revolution, to rapid urbanisation, the flaneur responds similarly to the modern city today. There’s a sense in which modern labour makes you mechanical: you go to work, produce value for your boss, and go home. Your job probably involves a bunch of repetitive actions, reminiscent of the Fordist assembly line – you stand in your spot and you do your one thing, attaching wing mirrors to cars or whatever. You do it over and over, mechanically, like a cog in a giant machine – and that repetition is efficient, sure, but it also makes you easy to replace. It makes you robotic, a labour-machine set to be supplanted by AI or actual robots or whatever other stupid thing they come up with next. Our travel through the city, in this framework, is part of our mechanisation. The tram runs every six minutes – like clockwork, on schedule, like a machine. People get on and they go their number of stops and they get off. Same time every day. It’s all just cogs clicking in and out of place. The flaneur does not go to work. He (and it’s always he) doesn’t walk with a purpose, with efficiency, with a goal. He wanders. He fucks about. It’s just Romanticism again – it’s beauty and spirituality, pursuing freedom and whimsy instead of the rigid schedule of the machine. It’s the Lyrical Ballads, but this time they’re in the city. You can see here as well why Beaumont mentions the accident – in a sense, it’s a primary form of resistance. It’s not rigorous or intended, it’s not efficient, it’s not planned and disciplined. You can’t optimise for it. The flaneur encounters by accident. He wanders, and he’s alive to the city, alive to its possibilities and contradictions, and stuff just happens.

By now you can start to sense where smartphones feature in all of this. In the conflict between spiritual whimsy and brutal machines, phones are on the dark side. They are machines designed to capture our attention. They collect our eyes and extract commercial value from our downtime: iterating on the model of television, they use entertainment as a vehicle to capture an audience for the purposes of corporate advertising. Time spent scrolling on Facebook increasingly resembles time spent at the office: in both instances our bodies, our selves, are remade into economic resources that can be exploited for profit. It’s all just selling our time. As Beaumont says:

“The spectacular virtual space of the smartphone screen, whether it functions as the domain of work or leisure, of production or consumption, or whether it deconstructs precisely this distinction, is structured by the profit motive. The ‘addiction to distraction’ to which the Frankfurt School think Siegfried Kracauer alludes in The Mass Ornament, which ‘fills [the working masses’] day fully without making it fulfilling,’ here reaches its apotheosis.”

There’s obviously a substantial argument here, and I’ve given it a fair bit of rope. These are all things we’ve talked about before, at length – with Niebuhr on labour and the middle class, with Sagebrush and Night Call, with Romano Guardini‘s comment that the modern techniques of labour “tend to treat people much as the machine treats the raw materials fed into it.” There are these more nuanced, thoughtful critiques of phones and social media that we need to take into account. But Beaumont probably also has a couple of clangers. He gets a bit preachy about how people don’t notice state surveillance because they spend too much time on their smartphones:

“Staring at a phone, people fail to notice the increasingly authoritarian mechanisms through which the state and various private interests police their activities as citizens and monitor and manipulate them as consumers.”

He declares that the pedestrian’s investment in their phone “desensitizes them to the latest modes of surveillance” and “prevents them from perceiving the insidious ways in which, physically, legally and symbolically, their cityscapes are currently being altered and appropriated by capital.” It’s probably a bit of a rhetorical overreach. Back in September of 2021, Melbourne had violent protests in response to lockdowns and vaccine mandates. We had maybe a week of rioters running around the CBD, with police trying to coordinate to run them all down. As part of that process, the police filed a restricted airspace order around the CBD, barring media helicopters from flying over and broadcasting live footage. It turned out that the protestors were watching that footage, figuring out where the cops were, and then moving in the other direction. Civil disobedience as facilitated by smartphone. Broadly I shouldn’t even have to make this case – the Arab Spring back in the early 2010s was known as the social media revolution, owing to the perceived role of social media in facilitating the uprisings. We can point similarly to the role of social media in the Hong Kong protests, or to the role of phone footage in recording and publicising the murder of George Floyd, or to movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, which were fuelled by and essentially started on social media.

Beaumont argues that “distracted walkers insulate themselves” from politics and economics. He pulls out a couple of stats around smartphones and car accidents, and kinda overengineers the significance of people looking at their phones instead of looking at the world around them. But it’s just not as simple as ‘phone bad’. You might as well apply the same argument to books. If you’re getting lost in a fictional world, you’re not necessarily focusing on the latest modes of surveillance. Staring at their filthy fairy smut, people fail to notice the increasingly authoritarian – what are we doing here, guys? Is this helpful? Yes, there’s an issue, and yes, there are some genuinely substantial critiques of smartphones and social media. But let’s just be careful with that one. I’m not sure the detour strengthens the argument.