My first phone was a Nokia 5210, a toughened and waterproofed variant of the legendary Nokia 3310 (yes, that one). After 20 years, I still vividly recall how to disassemble it. Pinching the sides, you could separate the outer plastic shell into two sections, revealing the phone’s inner core, which contained the keypad, screen, antenna, and the rest of the electronics. This core could be further disassembled using a standard Phillips screwdriver, allowing individual components to be repaired or replaced. This was especially useful considering the keypad was incredibly shitty and was a stain on an otherwise brilliant phone.

This experience of taking a seemingly complex electronic device and breaking it down into smaller components taught me that the devices we own and use on a regular basis are always reducible to their constituent parts. This lesson would reiterate itself as I grew older, fixing TV power units after lightning strikes, helping my dad fix diesel engines, soldering a friend’s headphones, and disassembling things only to realize I can’t put them back together. Eventually, I finished an engineering degree, hoping to carry these lessons into my professional life, but by then, things had changed, especially in product design.

In 1929, Raymond Loewy modernized the Gestetner duplicating machine – an ancestor to the photocopier – by hiding its exposed mechanism behind a smooth shell. In the mid-20th century, Dieter Rams and the functionalist school of industrial design emphasized that a product’s form should focus on increasing usability, and that additional features were only a distraction. Broadly speaking, these ideas can be categorized as Minimalism, simplifying a product’s form in order to prioritize its function.

Apple adopted this minimalist design philosophy for the iPhone, released in 2007. In streamlining the phone’s form and developing an intuitive touchscreen UI, the iPhone became an innovative respite from the increasingly wacky or boring designs of the 2000’s. Over time, the iPhone was refined even further, leading to the standard smartphone blueprint we have now: a glass and aluminum touchscreen rectangle. Simultaneously, Apple was cultivating a walled garden strategy, creating greater interoperability between its devices, but limiting their use with 3rd party hardware or software.

Soon, other companies began converging towards the same ideas. Phone manufacturers adopted the iPhone’s minimalist design, cementing it as the default. Tesla started manufacturing cars that looked like Macs on wheels, along with the associated tech-oriented lifestyle indicators. Google has leaned heavily into the walled garden approach, consolidating all of its apps into a productivity ecosystem. In addition, there has been an avalanche of new minimalist designs for existing logos, signaling a desire to distill each company’s image into its least intrusive form.

I want to argue that there are some very serious downsides to this design trend. The combination of minimalism, proprietary hardware, closed-source software, walled-off ecosystems, and lack of 3rd party support creates a level of technological obfuscation that shields us from the complexities of our own devices, rendering us incapable of understanding the very objects that have come to shape our lives. This Trojan minimalism uses the design philosophies pioneered in the early and mid-20th century as a cover to sneak in anti-consumer practices. Objects that encouraged seamless use simultaneously discourage meaningful curiosity about the object itself. This might be acceptable for a mechanical photocopier, but it is untenable for products that have come to dominate our lives.

This ignorance towards our own devices means we have become dependent on the manufacturers themselves for maintenance and repair. Smartphones are glued shut or use proprietary screws, or both. Closed-off operating systems impose conformity on users and software developers alike. Components in phones and laptops are increasingly software-paired, meaning that only OEM components can be used for repairs. Planned obsolescence ensures devices fail or slow down after a certain period of time. Tesla’s vertical integration of its component supply chain makes independent repairs of its vehicles difficult or impossible.

The inability to understand and repair our devices has consequences extending beyond our phones. The effects of our devices on the environment become lost, with our conversations surrounding these issues becoming more abstract, no longer grounded in our daily experiences. How effective are conversations about lithium mining if most users have never even held or seen a lithium battery? What discussion can be had about rare-earth minerals if people have never seen the phone’s motherboard that requires them? What’s the use in talking about vehicle repairability if we pop the bonnet and only see an empty frunk? In the excessive streamlining of our devices, they have become extensions of our own bodies, separated from the rest of the world that created them.

In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, which describes the declining quality of online products and services over time. It’s a term that was originally used for platforms that act as intermediaries between users and services, such as Uber, Netflix, and social media. What we’re seeing now is a form of enshittification manifesting itself in the physical world, resulting in our devices being streamlined, mystified, and locked down. It is form as function, with the function being the alienation of ourselves from the very devices we claim to own.

The Overton window of technology has rapidly shrunk in the past few years. Users have become mere consumers of consumer electronics and passive recipients of whatever the tech giants decide is the future that month. I can’t claim to know what to do beyond what’s already been mentioned elsewhere. What I do know, though, is that we are raising an entire generation that will not experience the joy of breaking apart devices in order to fix them. They will never use the naked circuit board as an excuse to become engineers or tinkerers, but forever remain consumers of both content and services. I’m not sure what should be done, but maybe bringing back that shitty keypad could be a start.