Just today, I endured a typical 2015 phone call. My caller’s voice was a warbling digital mess that cut in and out. Latency had us constantly talking over one another. After a few minutes of this, we switched to IM.
At Boing Boing, we have a weekly online meeting with several editors on the line. Most of these meetings are spent asking one another if we can hear one another, or telling one another that they’re cutting out, or otherwise being confused and frustrated by the irremediable awfulness of VoIP.
How timely, then, that The Altantic’s Ian Bogost reports on the stunning decline of the general experience of telephony in the age of pocket computers, where the worst phone apps connect to worser infrastructure operated by the worst telcos in the developed world.