It's really crazy how people expect all sorts of newfangled technologies in their everyday lives right now. People expect running water and refrigerators and stoves in their homes! You used to have to work years to afford those! And washing machines! The lazy bums don't know how to wash their own clothes anymore! And they refuse to consider an outhouse adequate toilet facilites! Ridiculous!
/sarcasm
Or, you know, we could acknowledge that technology evolves over time and becomes endemic in society. Every comfort of modern life was at some point an unthinkable luxury. But we no longer question that people want glass windows and electricity in their house.
This is fine in theory, but we have to realize that technology is a double edged sword as well. Our normalized expectations are creating more and more ways for us to spend money and thereby less and less ability to adequately save.
Plus (and I question your comparison of a toilet technology to a smartphone), a toilet is bought once and can last decades, but an expensive smartphone is a monthly expense that never ends. As we all know on here, those kill your budget.
I don't have a smartphone not because I'm a Luddite (what you implied was someone's reasoning above); I don't have a smartphone because I don't want one. Full stop. If you want one, that's awesome. But how much do you make a year? If a smartphone costs only a small fraction of your monthly budget and you're not in debt, I'm not sure it matters that much. But the reality is that the device is so normalized now that even people who earn much less (say $20,000 a year) feel like a smartphone is a technology that they can't live without.
And as an exercise, I would argue that it is in all of our interests to contemplate at least how the things that have become endemic in our lives are nonetheless luxuries. And that in many respects, it might be a good exercise to extricate ourselves from our convenience and "suffer" a bit. Isn't that one of the core tenets of Mustachianism? Perhaps smartphones are unfairly targeted on this forum, but in large part it is because it is a new, ubiquitous, and fairly expensive technology.
If I implied that no smartphone = technology hating, it was completely accidental and I really don't think that. Not having, or not feeling like you need, a smartphone or any other technology or item is a personal choice. Personally, I find tablets damn-near useless. They're shiny, cool, convenient, and fun toys, but I have zero desire to actually get one. I can certainly believe people feel that way about other items as well.
I also wasn't actually comparing cell phones specifically to toilets or any other technology. I was just trying to position them in the greater flow of technologies, and the response to the introduction of new ones. After thinking about it, I have to disagree that they are the symptom of a "more and more" mentality. A smartphone can replace not only many gadgets (camera, music player, etc I already kind of mentioned them), and also newspapers/subscriptions, books, magazines, coupons... It's a symptom of people wanting less complication in their lives. It's one do-it-all gadget, that contrary to most do-it-all gadgets...really works quite well.
A few more words on technology as a whole...as much as I like the thought experiment of going back to simpler times or even the practical experiment of going camping/backpacking, it's important to remember not to idolize this lifestyle or feel that we can return to it as a society (note: not a judgement on individual choices). I'm thinking of a sort of Amish-level farming community here, which might be more simple than you intended. But when you say "technology just gives us more stuff to buy" then I have to wonder, which point would you go back to? Will that society work with 7 billion people instead of however many existed then?
I don't think going backwards is the answer. I don't think there was an idyllic time when people had enough...that's how we got here. But we're not done yet, and we have a number of problems to solve. I, for one, don't believe we're in a worse place than we've been before, socially or technologically. I don't think blind consumerism is the way, howevermuch that can drive the economy, but we do need to create some consumer demand to push technology forward and I don't believe that's a terrible thing, if done consciously. And consciously, I think a computer more powerful than a room-size mainframe in the palm of my hand is pretty awesome, useful, and has a lot of potential for further growth.