When I was asked to participate in something on ‘platform urbanism’, my main reaction was to get out my mobile telephone, a now-antiquated non-smart phone, on which I can make and answer calls, receive text messages, and, if so inclined, play Snake – and nothing else. It’s the kind of phone that gets called a ‘burner’, an untraceable, discardable contract-free contraption of the sort allegedly favoured by terrorists and drug dealers. I am, therefore, quite possibly the least suitable person to take part in anything devoted to apps, smart cities or anything connected to them, because as much as is humanly possible, I do not use them. This is not because I’ve somehow managed to separate myself from the demands of social media, being constantly ‘on’ and at work, and the outrage cycles and wormholes of the internet – on the contrary, it’s because of the fact I am deeply addicted to all of these that I do not have a smartphone.

Although I am old enough to remember media before its emergence, the internet has been an enormous part of my life since my early twenties, and I owe it my career in writing, which began as a blogger, in what possiblyis now considered the golden era of blogging from 2005 to 2010. Since the late 2000s I have been a compulsive user of social media, especially Twitter, which is geared so much towards journalists and writers and those interested in journalism and writing talking to, or shouting at, each other. It’s also around this time – the time when smartphones emerged – that I started out as a topographical and architectural writer, and this is also part of the reason why I own a ‘burner’. I would spend my dayson the internet, alternating between whatever I was writing and whatever debate was going on the blogs or, later, on the social networks, and the evenings, the bath, the kitchen, were the places where I would unwind from these – moreover, public transport was an internet-free zone. If on a bus or a train on my way to see a building or to walk around a city, I would read a book, or more often, look out of the window. The idea of taking the internet, (with all its propensity to ruin attention, absorb time and distract from one’s surroundings) with me on these occasions filled me with horror, and still does – the notion of using a phone to get around a place is still faintly shameful to me, though when lost and in need of getting to a place at a certain time and in the company of people who do own smartphones, I have occasionally broken these rules.

I am thankful for the relative absence of smartphones in my life, and what equanimity I have today in my late thirties is substantially owed to it; I have often recommended burners to other writers, and I’ve never known anyone (who has tried them) to go back to carrying the internet around in their pocket twenty-four hours a day. But it does mean that for me, platformsand urbanismhave been two different things, seldom connected. Of course, there are many famous platforms that I do use on a desktop or browser – most obviously, social media, but also train timetables, online shops, prescription sites, among others – but I have used Airbnb precisely once, Uber maybe three times, and the manifold gadget-triggering buttons of smart cities and smart houses, never. The following pieces of writing will explore some of the things that I have used on my laptop but have refused to take with me onto the bus – blogs themselves, to which I owe everything, photography platforms, online auctions and television on demand, and so forth – and, given that I am in the government’s ‘extremely vulnerable’ category and hence have seldom been allowed out of my flat since March 2020, the urbanism may seem as distant as the platforms. But perhaps the result of this experiment will be a realisation that, however much I can personally switch it off, my life is as dictated by these processes as anyone else’s.