16/09/2025
*Journal Entry: The Cult of the Useless Phone* By Richard DABLAH
Email: [email protected]
```15.09 2025```
Every so often, the internet revives the same thrift story: buy an iPhone or buy a cow — two years later, the cow has multiplied while the phone lies cracked and obsolete. The joke is tidy, feels moral, and flatters the impulse to measure value by immediate utility. Yet it mistakes a parable for an argument and reveals less about gadgets than about the imagination of the jester.
The fault is not the device but the hand that holds it. A cow left to neglect will fail to yield milk; a smartphone left to selfie culture will yield nothing but pixels and noise. Both are instruments of potential. Which of them produces value depends on the knowledge, habits, and intentions of the owner.
Consider what a modern smartphone actually contains: instant markets, payment rails, libraries, institutions, creative tools, production suites, and distribution channels. In one pocket, a person can manage inventory, issue invoices, study law, publish a film, teach a class, accept remittances, and open a shop to a global customer base. The technology compresses institutions into reachable services. Handled with thought and skill, it functions as capital — not merely a luxury but a multiplier.
Yet many cultures treat high-end phones as badges rather than levers. When a costly handset is displayed primarily to signal status, it becomes dead capital: an object whose only return is social recognition. That recognition buys esteem, perhaps access to networks, but seldom builds independent capacity. If the buyer confuses show for strategy, the phone performs no better than a gilded ornament.
There is also a political economy at work. Access to devices is necessary but not sufficient; education, broadband infrastructure, payment systems, and legal protections determine who converts digital access into income. A farmer with a smartphone but no marketplace, no transport, or no digital literacy still faces barriers. Blaming the gadget in these cases obscures structural deficits and comforts those who prefer moralizing thrift to confronting policy failure.
Still, individual agency matters. Tools do not redistribute skill. The same object will catalyze very different outcomes in different hands. A serious mind treats a phone as a node in a project: an input that, combined with effort and strategy, produces work, markets, and reputation. The rest treat it as an accessory, an uncomplicated sign that says, "I have arrived." One approach accumulates capability; the other accumulates vulnerability to obsolescence and theft.
Call this the cult of the useless phone: a ritual in which consumption stands in for production, where display substitutes for craft. The irony is that the critics of tech often rely on those very devices to amplify their message. They post memes about cows and iPhones on platforms they could have used to sell milk, source veterinary care, or publish a how-to guide that pays.
A hard truth follows: poverty of imagination matters. Wealth, understood narrowly as ownership of things, is fragile. Wealth that is exercised — knowledge earned, networks built, processes improved — compounds. A cow can be ploughed into a livelihood; so can a phone. Which path one takes depends on curiosity and discipline, on the willingness to treat tools as instruments for creating systems rather than as trophies.
If you have family resources to pad the losses, the gamble is a private folly. If you do not, buying a status device while neglecting skills and infrastructure is a choice that reproduces precarity. That choice is cultural and economic: sometimes a rational mimicry of local markers of success; other times, a short-sighted bet that image alone will open doors.
The future will not be decided by cow-versus-phone anecdotes. It will be shaped by those who turn instruments into engines — by farmers who open e-commerce shops, technicians who build local apps, teachers who scale lessons to thousands, and entrepreneurs who use a handset as a remote headquarters. The rest will keep trading proverbs while opportunity passes: posting memes on devices that might have been passports.
_Fortes fortuna adiuvat._
