I really like this style of writing in short bursts, and I appreciate the author's tone and concerns.
I do wonder if the author is very young. As much as I enjoyed his small essay, a few things stuck right out at me:
>I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app.
This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
>And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
You can escape, but you'll never hear about it by either checking online, or by listening to very-online people. Go on a hike. It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just go do it. Maybe say hi to some people you meet while you're there. You probably won't develop a deep friendship with them, but you will have a real, face-to-face human interaction.
Living away from the internet can now only be done intentionally. It can be done, though, but it's not the automatic choice. It's not even difficult ... it's just "manual." You must always think about what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's a skill that will come back to you. Or, if the author never learned it, a skill he still has a chance to learn.
What we've lost is getting to feel like you're connected to a common culture. This is a big, big loss, but it is not everything. The tools you need to escape are all around you. Power off your devices. Get some books at your local library. Try leaving your devices off all weekend, even when you get anxious, and bored, and your brain cries out for the easy, automatic stimulation it's become so accustomed to. Lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until your brain creates interesting thoughts out of your boredom. It's possible.
Well, I guess our only choice is to own an expensive corporate surveillance device. There's no other option. The ancient polynesians managed to learn to navigate huge, open seas by memorizing the stars. The ancient Greeks managed to measure the size of the sun with trigonometry and grit alone. We've mapped the genome and soon we may even cure inherited illnesses, or bring extinct species back to live.
But I hear you. What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do? The only answer is a smart phone. There's no choice, and no escape.
> What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do?
Do you actually have a solution here or what?
Call the theater? Do you have their phone number memorized? Phone Books and Pay Phones basically don't exist anymore, remember.
Do you just drive to the theater after the meal and check in person? Who is going to agree to that anymore? People will just say "nah maybe next time" and go home
Like it or not, society has changed. Social expectations have changed.
I'm just so frustrated by how quickly and easily people give in to these things. People face relatively small inconveniences and quickly give away their rights. Smart phones and social media (in large part, enabled by always-on, always-present smart phones) have so, so many negatives effects and people won't even consider moving on. "It's hard to find parking" or "some restaurants are now inconvenient to eat at" are measured next to "the suicide rate of teen girls is spiking" and "we've enabled government tracking and surveillance on a scale never before thought possible." I don't know how else to be. People are so obsessed with immediate impulse satisfaction and immediate comfort that they'd give up anything. I think if you offered to remove someone's right to vote, but told them they would be able to gamble for free once a month you'd lose half the votes in the country.
That’s a good clarification, thanks for writing it. I think you and the uncle post by bluefirebrand are both right: the social expectations are different enough now that there really might not be a practical alternative for most people to the corporate surveillance pocket computer—and you’re not wrong that the shift in values and priorities that indicates is pretty scary and grim.
the problem is not the people who want impulse satisfaction, comfort, and convenience - these are all perfectly normal human desires. the problem is that we as a society have allowed predators to tie these needs to surveillance and addiction engineering. there is no intrinsic reason that couldn't have been regulated against - look at some of the absolutely idiotic things the government is willing to spend time and money in micromanaging.
Oh man, the past was fucking wild, because you would do this. You'd just show up to the theater and look at what was playing. Or, if you were close to a store, you'd go and buy a newspaper that had the movie listings for your local theaters.
I can relate. For a brief, shining month, I worked at Tower Records, and one of the duties when we closed was to get on the PA (through the phone system) and make the announcements about the store closing.
Now these announcements were supposed to be brief and structured, but when they permitted me to make them, I couldn't resist cracking up and laughing for some reason, in the middle of recitation, and so never mastered the art of making the announcements for the store. Pretty sad.
But I do recall those days, when movie theaters had all their showtimes on tape. I know that the movie theater is a place that we would never expect to reach a human on the phone. Because that announcement would play, for as long as it needed at a multiplex, and then repeat or cut off. And you were supposed to figure out the showtimes by picking through the linear verbal announcement and choosing your favorite film. I can only imagine the teenage staff who are mostly paid in concessions, how they would get to recording that stuff!
It can be it's own "adventure" just to go to the movies and pick something that's playing. You can end up seeing a movie you wouldn't have because you didn't spend 20 minutes reading the negative reviews of and it turns out to be fun.
I discovered a lot of new things by being forced to make choices from limited set of options.
So, I'm a college instructor, and sometimes I find myself reading a paper that I dislike -- and as I get into it I'm finding that I'm mentally arguing with the content and the actual argument(s) (as opposed to "quality of writing") and that's when I realize this person should get a good grade.
This is like that for me; he sounds kind of annoying, but as they say, points were made.
Ah, sorry, I wasn't familiar with him. Looks like he was born in 1989, and so is not so young. I'm a bit baffled to hear that he doesn't think he can escape his smartphone given that he was resourceful enough to jailbreak an iPhone 4 back in the day. I understand he's speaking poetically and emotionally. Maybe he just means he has the knowledge but not the means.
I am a similar age to Geohot and I have tried to escape smartphones to a dumb phone. It didn’t work. So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
• Surface parking in my city is all by QR code. Where there are machines, they are broken because no one cares.
• Social groups are on iMessage or RCS. RCS is not nearly as backwards compatible with MMS as it seems and you WILL get dropped silently, eventually.
• Some restaurants literally don’t have print menus (they’re expensive! QR codes are cheap!).
• Rideshare, bike rentals, etc. are all dependent on apps. Taxis are not reliable or available.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. When you have a smartphone you don’t realize the affordances that made it possible to be without them are disappearing.
I’m sure you can do it in a smaller place but you have to be dedicated and willing to suffer in a city.
Similar age as well, and damn, if I could actually convince my bank to let me approve transactions with a dumbphone... The reality is just that a significant part of the modern world is contingent on carrying around a brand-name smartphone
Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost. Or if they're homeless, in which case the likelihood of their possesions getting damaged is probably much higher.
It's weird that people are sleepwalking into this single point-of-failure dystopia instead of regulating it out existence and only realize it when their phone gets damaged or lost or is glitching in some deal-breaking way.
Here's a tip, if you want people to help you out don't start with, "I don't have an smartphone..."
Instead, say a variation of "Hey, my camera's broken/the app keeps crashing on my phone. Can you help me out?" People tend to be a lot more sympathetic.
I've never had issues with the restaurant QR thing.
me:"Hey, my camera doesn't work can you help me out?"
waiter: "Sure you can take a look on my phone/use this tablet."
Like, I have to fix my phone's camera before I can park in your city? are you kidding me?
For a long time, but not anymore, Consumer Cellular had this fantastic “Lyft Concierge” service, where you could call a human who could 100% arrange a Lyft ride for you, even with a feature phone.
Of course it was designed for the elderly and disabled, but I loved it. There may still be third parties offering this type of service.
>So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
Have you considered using a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone)? There is no dependence on a megacorp and QR codes work fine. Some services might redirect you to a web app if you show them such phone.
I've previously tried living out of a PinePhone Pro, and if those web apps require much JS at all they're going to be in for a bad time. By benchmarks and your previous accounts, it sounds like the Librem 5 is only going to be worse from there.
But you nod towards a useful point there at the end. I've found I don't need to present ancient hardware to get some entities to provide web apps or other means, I just say something handwavy about my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy, neglecting to mention that I'm my employer. Bigger orgs aren't worth bothering with, though. You could show an airline an employee a flip phone and they aren't going to have any flexibility on the matter.
Yes, JS-heavy websites are a nightmare for most non-recent hardware. Nobody promised you that you won't have to make any compromises to fight for your freedom though.
> my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy
This is basically lying, whereas I truly own a legitimate smartphone which they do not support - and they have to respond somehow.
My example was that specific user, if you didn't notice.
I send and receive iMessages perfectly fine on my non-iOS devices. It's doable, much more so than running ancient hardware is, but there are reasons I don't bring it up with people who haven't asked.
The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable. Maybe that's improved since then, but it was a horrendous experience.
I set the IT policy for my devices. I sleep fine saying I can't install crapware on it. It's my primary business device and that comes with sensible restrictions.
Neither of those are dumbphones and neither resolve 90% of the problems I mentioned. I wasn't trying to get away from walled gardens or chase additional privacy, I was trying to get away from the most distracting devices ever created and to intentionally not have 24/7 access to a web browser.
My path was iOS -> LightPhone 3 -> GrapheneOS -> iOS.
The LightPhone was the right level of capability for the distraction free goal I had but it wasn't capable enough to resolve all of the things I mentioned.
The phone with GrapheneOS was an attempt at compromise. The idea was something I had enough control over that I could (in code) limit my usage on. In reality it didn't limit my usage and had issues with things like banking apps and RCS, so I was basically using a more irritating iPhone again. I went back to iOS.
What's your opinion on the Commodore phone? It runs a smartphone OS but web browsers (and social media apps) are intentionally banned for distraction reasons.
No RCS and iMessage via bridge (which effectively means no iMessage via phone number and a number of privacy concerns) makes the communication part an issue, but the rest looks nice. Preordered to see how it goes.
I do wonder if the author is very young. As much as I enjoyed his small essay, a few things stuck right out at me:
>I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app.
This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
>And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
You can escape, but you'll never hear about it by either checking online, or by listening to very-online people. Go on a hike. It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just go do it. Maybe say hi to some people you meet while you're there. You probably won't develop a deep friendship with them, but you will have a real, face-to-face human interaction.
Living away from the internet can now only be done intentionally. It can be done, though, but it's not the automatic choice. It's not even difficult ... it's just "manual." You must always think about what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's a skill that will come back to you. Or, if the author never learned it, a skill he still has a chance to learn.
What we've lost is getting to feel like you're connected to a common culture. This is a big, big loss, but it is not everything. The tools you need to escape are all around you. Power off your devices. Get some books at your local library. Try leaving your devices off all weekend, even when you get anxious, and bored, and your brain cries out for the easy, automatic stimulation it's become so accustomed to. Lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until your brain creates interesting thoughts out of your boredom. It's possible.