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We often fret that we’re too attached to our smartphones or that we let them wield too much influence over our lives. But our reverence for technology is relative. In the remote Ambonwari society of Papua New Guinea, villagers believe that cell phones are extensions of their human owners and can be used to commune with the departed.

When their calls don’t go through, they don’t blame shoddy service or wrong numbers; they believe the spirits of the dead can interfere with their connections.

They haven’t had time to develop telephone etiquette have, either. Back in Slovenia, Telban’s phone rings nonstop. “They really love just to ring me,” he said. He never knows who’s calling, since villagers share the phones, and as soon as he answers, the other person hangs up: They don’t have enough credit for an actual conversation. But Telban doesn’t mind. “They are my friends,” he said. “They’re just saying hello.”

I have discussed what happened next, at least for Britain, in “How my generation let down our students [5]”. The watershed of the 1970s culminated in the neoliberal counter-revolution that saw Reagan and Thatcher come to power. Competitive pseudo-markets based academic assessment on so-called “objective” indicators, especially research publications. Bureaucracies became more interventionist along with the wholesale corporatization of university culture. What was left of academic community was destroyed by the growing gap between a few established professors who took leave often and a reserve army of precarious young teachers. The publishing oligopoly exhausted library budgets with their over-priced journals, while the academics competed for the status of getting published in them. Everyone agrees that the contents are worthless and are not read. Faced with the challenge of the internet, most academics did their utmost to maintain the system of feudal private property that has now overwhelmed the universities.