Your dumbphone won't save you

Don’t listen to August Lamm, listen to Giorgio Agamben

People are posting pictures of their dumbphones on the internet. Journalists are writing online articles about ditching their smartphone for a week. Twitter users are revealing which apps they use to minimise screen-time, or rather, maximise their screen-time-to-posting ratio.¹ Writers compose long social media posts about leaving social media. And some, like the writer and illustrator August Lamm, are even positioning themselves as anti-technology influencers.

None of this stuff is new. I recall being persuaded to put a greyscale filter on my iPhone 4s back in 2013 (it lasted a week tops). There’s a whole subgenre of self-help books on the topic, like Catherine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone (2018)² and pop-science-cum-memoirs like Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (2022). Over the past decade, The New York Times has churned out article after article on mobile phone addiction, digital detoxing, screen time, attention deficits, ‘dopamine hits,’ downgrading, and dumbphones. Some recent headlines: ‘A flip phone keeps me sane’; ‘A practical guide to quitting your smartphone’; ‘Is the Apple Watch LTE the dumb phone you’ve been waiting for?’ ‘Flip phone February’ has become the latest addition to the growing roster of month-long exercises in asceticism, alongside ‘dry January’ and ‘no nut November’. The New Yorker even declared last year that ‘the dumbphone boom is real’.

It’s enough to make you sick. But why? What makes the dumbphone, or ‘downgrading’, or ‘anti-tech’ movement so irritating? There are, I think, a few reasons.