I recently moved from having a smartphone to a flip phone and I have found it to be very freeing not having the internet available to me at all times. I have not banished the internet from my life, but rather put it back into a place that is not all-consuming. I still use the internet at home (obviously I’m commenting here), but when I am out, I no longer have the nagging feeling like there’s something I should do or see on my phone. Some moments I’ve enjoyed since having a flip phone:
- I got lost! (Not in a 127 hours type of way, but walking from the subway to a friends house and not fully remembering the way. I found it eventually, but being unsure if I was going the right way was an experience I haven’t had in so long!)
- Needing to talk to people to find out answers to questions (I was at a bar and a bunch of people came in for a show. There weren’t any signs saying who was playing, so I asked a girl at the bar. If I had my smart phone, I would have just looked it up, instead of having a nice interaction with a real live human being!)
- Leaving notes for my partner when I’m going out, instead of just texting. (This one is my favorite because I am a lover of ephemera. But a little handwritten note beats a text every time. )
I thought you brought up some great points, and in large part I agree. Right now I am using a dumb phone temporarily for the month of February & I recently traded in my laptop for a desktop computer. In a sense it is saving me -- I am never going to be totally offline in some fantasy utopian way, but I want the internet to be a place I go, not something that I am consumed by.
I have a true addiction to endless feeds/scrolling/social media/whatever you want to call it & am trying to build new pathways in my brain outside of the ones that have been there for the past 15+ years in which my only 'hobby' was scrolling. This addiction has been the main struggle of my life. It might be better described as chronic disassociation to the point where I was regularly spending 8-10 hours/day on screens -- not talking to anyone or posting, just consuming (in addition to 8 hrs of work on a screen). I am only making progress because I have a therapist that has taken me seriously and is also treating this like the addiction it is.
And from what I have read of Lamm's work, it seems like she struggles with something very similar. For some folks that struggle with this addiction, putting extreme parameters around their internet use is the definition of their sobriety. And just personally I find it interesting to see the lengths to which people can go without tech these days.
You can say it's hypocritical to continue posting, then, but Lamm posts sporadically & frankly having a voice here on the internet from someone who is so offline has had a hugely positive impact on me. I am experiencing so much less shame just knowing that there are other folks out there that struggle with this too.
You’ll find, if you haven’t already, that calling people phone pharisees won’t generate nearly as much “engagement” or interest as denouncing social media while using various platforms to sculpt your self-image as a critic of technology.
You maybe be interested in the note I made recently, in response to a massively popular August Lamm announcement:
It may very well be possible to find a home, community and love without the internet, but it’s for damn sure impossible to write about this quaintcore experiment for an internet audience without the internet.
Much as silence is a symbol, a product of language, a fantasy enjoyed always in relation to what it apparently negates, so the current withdrawal or escape to an analogue existence, a minimally digital life, reproduces and epitomizes the progressive technological dream in its latest social media inflected form: that of perfect curation, idealized lifestyle performance for a projected audience, including oneself. Unmediated enjoyment, simple, direct contact with life: these are media dreams, for the most part passively entertained, and sometimes acted out, for the sake of those consuming.
Moving to Paris, the most artistically and romantically overplayed/over represented city of all time, and the tightly crafted detail drop announcement, press release style, indicate not alienation from or indifference to the spectacle, but instead an overpowering identification or fascination with it.
You could never see a screen for the rest of your life, and still you’d be putting on a show for the big other, who, despite it all, doesn’t exist.
There’s another class of person with purely local ties and no social media presence who occasionally uses library computers for recreation and essentials. We call them homeless. Here the opposites coincide, with digital scarceness as signs of extreme poverty and helplessness as well as the cutting edge of free choice of those with what I have to assume are some material means. Akin to the anarcho primitivists, who by varying degrees approximate an artificial nature, driven by a highly civilized disgust with civilization
Thanks for sharing this Caleb. Your note is even more damning than my essay! Love the terms ‘phone pharisee’ and ‘quaintcore’. Quantitative metrics aside, it's annoying that this stuff is taken seriously by people who should know better – it's so stupid!
Indeed. It seems you can’t expect too much of people, even here, where the level of intelligence, taste, culture, is thought to higher than average, though the bar is still extremely low
This was a good read. I think you're right on the money, especially when it comes to how easily the dumbphone conversation gets assimilated into the influencerverse. Ultimately, for most ordinary people with modern jobs, eliminating your smartphone is more of a luxury than a lifestyle choice.
But regardless of the hypocrisy of the most vocal contingent, I think lot of people, myself included, have seen real benefits from a variety of "unplugging" resolutions. Allowing inconvenience and friction into your life again can be pretty exciting/freeing, especially for the most chronically online among us. The way this message is getting metabolized by the media ecosystem does kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth (those headlines are pretty cringe...) but I'm glad the message is at least getting out there. I'm glad you wrote this piece, too.
Not gunna lie I was really resisting this essay at first, but I found myself agreeing and realizing I had been thinking about some of these ideas as well. I’ve been straddling the fence between “logging off” or “staying online”, getting a dumb phone or balancing my time on my smart phone. As always, I have skepticism about both alternatives. While I think it is important to work on your attention outside of your smartphone (I.e. reading books, making art), I still find myself realizing that my identity, my relationships, the way I talk and behave will always be inextricably linked to the online world, regardless of how I engage with it. It’s just how it is to live in this time.
It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out in the coming months, years. It seems people are going in different directions in regard to social media, and I’m wondering how these ideas will converge/diverge.
Thanks for reading David! It's fun as a comparison to think about the worries people had in the 19th century about people, especially young women, reading novels too much and not living in the ‘real world’ as a result (in essence, having their attention stolen by a new technology). I suspect there's an untenable distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ lurking behind much tech-scepticism – I say untenable, because every ‘nature’ is actually the result of a process of naturalisation. So novels, dumbphones, even things like the countryside with its man-made fields, its centuries of deforestation and cultivation, seem ‘natural’, harmonious with our natural beings, while more recent inventions are seen as artificial and alien, stealing our attention. And the tech-sceptical position breaks down when you instead ask the question: what's worthy of our attention? Any good answer to this question will NOT fall along an ‘online’/‘offline’ distinction, or a dumbphone/smartphone one etc. There are valuable and worthless things on both sides.
Excellent question: "what's worthy of our attention?" I think smartphones and TVs are more comfortable than other technologies. It allows our bodies to relax, and we let our guard down. We are less likely to put it down when it no longer serves us because we are so comfortable. Then when you add in the algorithms designed to keep us scrolling, it's even harder to put them down. You can't discount these factors when talking about harms.
It is harmful to spend all day consuming and not doing or thinking. It is harmful to not have space for the mind to wander. Maybe we don't need dumb phones, but it is good to talk about the reality of these harms and solutions for them.
We as a society figured out how to use Do Not Disturb mode so our smart phones are maybe less intrusive than the SITC episode. But we have a world of content in our pockets that makes it too easy to escape boredom and mind-wandering. We didn't realize how important boredom and mind wandering are until they were taken away from us.
Remember watching the rain drops slide down the window from the backseat of your parent's car? The pleasure of idleness.
It is probably not good to read novels all day long, to the exclusion of all else. It is not good to scroll and be connected all day long either. But currently, it is socially acceptable to do so. And even worse, teams of highly paid engineers are attempting to tether us, against our good will. So it will take a bit more intentionality to resist than to put down the Jane Austen.
I often think to myself (I’m aware this is smug becuase this is what I do:) getting on social media and posting links to eg great poems is a more effective form of resistance to the dumbing down of culture via the shattering of our attention spans than posts complaining about same.
I loved this article. I find your acceptance of the modern age--with all its pitfalls and opportunities--totally refreshing. I think it's safe to say that whenever we buy a gadget (i.e. the dumb phone) to cope with our addiction to another gadget (re: the smartphone), we miss why we got so stuck in the first place. Yes these things are addicting as hell. But the soul can become addicted to anything if it's lonely and malnourished enough to do so, smartphone or not. Thanks for this reminder.
This was a great read. I’m foolishly and repeatedly drawn to the kinds of pieces you criticize here because I get carried away with the idea of optimizing my life in the most impractical ways — much like the obsessive behavior circuit you describe. It’s impossible to extricate ourselves from the internet at this point, and I wouldn’t want to even if I could because it’s this platform that allows me to share my writing on an unprecedented scale.
That said, I do know that my writing and focus have suffered thanks to the culture’s widespread acceptance of hyperconnectivity. And that has always struck me as the most dangerous and mind-numbing part of the technological age we happen to find ourselves in. Though this thought will quickly seem antiquated as new tech passes us by, I’m sure.
Just now learning that August Lamm is making a shit ton of money memeing an antimeme, and i'm upset that i didn't start doing this sooner. been using a flip phone for 2 years and been so normal + sexy with it that several of my friends also switched over. But you wouldn't know any of that unless i fw u irl...
anything that serves ads is more interested in sacrificing you to moloch than improving your life but the internet rocks otherwise.
Also a flip phone is a badge of fallibility and it sometimes feels embarrassing to be toting it about in front of people who are apparently able to have a smartphone without getting clawed to death by the algorithm. Seems like some of the people you're annoyed by have done the first 3 steps to recovery, but are yet to take a fearless inventory and realize what's necessary to recover! (also step 12 of recovery is helping others - Lammposting is kinda like getting an AA lectures when you show up to the bar, but there isn't offline infrastructure with the intention to help internet addicts that i know of. what's the alternative?)
It’s impossible to exist offline these days (UK especially, on a governmental/banking level one is on the fringe of society without being online).
The sort of third-spaces we used to rely on for subculture interactions are mostly gone, or access is very limited/restricted (which full-time working adult has the time and will to take advantage of the library only open on Saturday morning, while it’s besieged by screaming children?).
If not online, where do I get to see access and interact with thought and opinion unfiltered through the lense of corporate agenda?
Not in the newspapers and magazines available to me in print.
I will be keeping my smartphone for a while still, if only to make sure I can pay my bills, listen to library audiobooks and leave comments on Substack. 😇
You so perfectly put into words my exact feelings regarding this topic. I have a lot of arguments (especially with folks from older generations) about the internet and the impact it has had on younger generations and I always tell them to consider the public uproar that MTV caused back in the 80s, or Elvis in the 60s. Generational scapegoats have always been around, the internet is just more pervasive than any other before, which I think makes it feel like more of a threat to those who think we should "resist" it. I loved this essay, thank you for writing it.
Kudos to you for being open. I have found anecdotally that the “just silence notifications bro” contingent of anti-anti-smartphone advocates often have their own habit. I didn’t expect you to actually post it in response to my flip remark, which I made mainly because I felt like the first half of your piece was mainly a “you criticize society yet you participate in it” type of rhetoric.
You correctly intuit later that what irks people like Lamm is not the device as such but the fact it links you to the attention economy everyone seems to hate. I do think Lamm’s disambiguating the different parts of the phone is an important exercise in understanding how we were able to function before the advent of these devices. The excuses proffered by those who wish to keep their smartphones rarely have anything to do with social media; it is always some essential convenience (a different device maybe before the phone, such as a camera) they can’t afford to lose. But of course having all these necessities on the smartphone funnels us back toward the overly online world.
There is a nostalgia here, and it is not for dumb phones but a pre-web 2.0 internet before everything was optimized for maximum engagement, ad revenue and algorithmic velocity—the world of web forums, chat rooms and informative web pages like Wikipedia. That seems to be what you are gesturing towards in your final remark. But I don’t think it’s coming back, and the likelihood diminishes as we recede further from that time and plunge ever deeper into the brainrot era of the internet.
Without going on too much longer I will say switching to a dumb phone has improved life for me personally, even if I understand that it cannot destroy the attention economy. I’m not an influencer though.
> And if we are to counteract their particular hold, we must exploit opportunities to subvert them from within
Lamm is criticizing the smartphone attention economy from within the smartphone attention economy. Isn't that subversion from within?
I recently started collecting vinyl. I still have spotify, but I like the challenge of finding really listenable albums. I like that I have physical objects that show my taste in music. When I play a record for guests, I'm sharing something more meaningful than an endless, algorithmically generated playlist. However, because I still have spotify, I don't need to go all-in on vinyl. I think I'll top out at 50 records.
I think a successful tech-skeptical movement will follow this pattern: not abandoning the technology of the present for the technology of the past, but reintroducing the technology of the past alongside the technology of the present.
Technology has steadily reduced the cost of communication with a commensurate decrease in the quality of communication. The goal of the tech-skeptical movement should be to reincorporate costlier forms of communication for when we want to communicate something of value.
You like to name-drop philosophers, so I'll drop the name of a philosopher I've never read and say that tech skepticism should take the form of an Hegelian dialectic. Given the choice between old and new, we move forward by incorporating both.
I don't buy your claim that the value of a message is proportional to the costliness of its transmission. I get the laziest, most clichéd messages in handwritten cards. There are single tweets more valuable than whole books. Inefficiency doesn't create value! I don't think that using a film camera and going through the expense and delay of developing the pictures makes them more ’valuable’, more ‘meaningful’. And I like your vinyl example, because I don't think it supports your theory. Vinyl is good, not because it's costlier, but because it offers a different, in some cases superior, mechanism of discovery and curation, not to mention tracks and albums unavailable on streaming services. This would be true even if vinyl was cheaper than streaming. And about Lamm, I don't think she holds your view of value either, because what ultimately matters to her, despite the offline aesthetics, is online engagement. Far from subversion, dumbphone activism represents an extreme form of algorithmic realism where even an ‘offline’ life is performed as a spectacle for online consumption.
What you call inefficiency I call effort, and I think effort clearly makes communication more valuable.
I, and many people I know, have handwritten cards on their fridge. Of course some cards are lazy, but some are not, and the ones that are not lazy are more valuable than digital communications. Can you imagine someone saving and displaying an email the way people display cards?
I have a friend who takes photos with a point-and-shoot camera, sends the film away to be developed, and then shares digitized versions (photos of photos). The effort he puts in absolutely does make them more valuable than smartphone photos. People increasingly put photos like this on their dating app profiles. Pictures like this say "my friends and I put effort into hanging out and creating memories."
> [vinyl] offers a different, in some cases superior, mechanism of discovery and curation, not to mention tracks and albums unavailable on streaming services.
I don't think many people care about albums unavailable on streaming services, I certainly don't. The truth is that it takes effort to select, buy, display, and play records, and that's what makes records worthwhile in a world where we all have spotify.
But please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying old is good, new is bad. In another reply you wrote:
> what's worthy of our attention? Any good answer to this question will NOT fall along an ‘online’/‘offline’ distinction, or a dumbphone/smartphone one etc. There are valuable and worthless things on both sides.
I agree with this. The line between old and new is blurry and always changing, and new and old technologies can be mixed with interesting results.
However, then you say:
> And about Lamm, I don't think she holds your view of value either, because what ultimately matters to her, despite the offline aesthetics, is online engagement. Far from subversion, dumbphone activism represents an extreme form of algorithmic realism where even an ‘offline’ life is performed as a spectacle for online consumption.
So after criticizing an online/offline dichotomy before, now you are using an online/offline dichotomy to criticize August Lamm. I'm not saying I agree with Lamm's ideas or that she agrees with mine, but I think the way she is mixing online and offline is interesting, and it certainly struck a chord with people. If she sticks to uploading her writing once a week, that would be a pretty radical departure from the kind of live-tweeting that people expect.
My hope is that tech-skepticism will create room for people to mix and match, to use both efficient and inefficient technologies, to create more flexibility, to have more choice.
I recently moved from having a smartphone to a flip phone and I have found it to be very freeing not having the internet available to me at all times. I have not banished the internet from my life, but rather put it back into a place that is not all-consuming. I still use the internet at home (obviously I’m commenting here), but when I am out, I no longer have the nagging feeling like there’s something I should do or see on my phone. Some moments I’ve enjoyed since having a flip phone:
- I got lost! (Not in a 127 hours type of way, but walking from the subway to a friends house and not fully remembering the way. I found it eventually, but being unsure if I was going the right way was an experience I haven’t had in so long!)
- Needing to talk to people to find out answers to questions (I was at a bar and a bunch of people came in for a show. There weren’t any signs saying who was playing, so I asked a girl at the bar. If I had my smart phone, I would have just looked it up, instead of having a nice interaction with a real live human being!)
- Leaving notes for my partner when I’m going out, instead of just texting. (This one is my favorite because I am a lover of ephemera. But a little handwritten note beats a text every time. )
This sounds wholesome kooks! A more extreme variant would be to just leave your phone at home, as I do sometimes.
I thought you brought up some great points, and in large part I agree. Right now I am using a dumb phone temporarily for the month of February & I recently traded in my laptop for a desktop computer. In a sense it is saving me -- I am never going to be totally offline in some fantasy utopian way, but I want the internet to be a place I go, not something that I am consumed by.
I have a true addiction to endless feeds/scrolling/social media/whatever you want to call it & am trying to build new pathways in my brain outside of the ones that have been there for the past 15+ years in which my only 'hobby' was scrolling. This addiction has been the main struggle of my life. It might be better described as chronic disassociation to the point where I was regularly spending 8-10 hours/day on screens -- not talking to anyone or posting, just consuming (in addition to 8 hrs of work on a screen). I am only making progress because I have a therapist that has taken me seriously and is also treating this like the addiction it is.
And from what I have read of Lamm's work, it seems like she struggles with something very similar. For some folks that struggle with this addiction, putting extreme parameters around their internet use is the definition of their sobriety. And just personally I find it interesting to see the lengths to which people can go without tech these days.
You can say it's hypocritical to continue posting, then, but Lamm posts sporadically & frankly having a voice here on the internet from someone who is so offline has had a hugely positive impact on me. I am experiencing so much less shame just knowing that there are other folks out there that struggle with this too.
You’ll find, if you haven’t already, that calling people phone pharisees won’t generate nearly as much “engagement” or interest as denouncing social media while using various platforms to sculpt your self-image as a critic of technology.
You maybe be interested in the note I made recently, in response to a massively popular August Lamm announcement:
It may very well be possible to find a home, community and love without the internet, but it’s for damn sure impossible to write about this quaintcore experiment for an internet audience without the internet.
Much as silence is a symbol, a product of language, a fantasy enjoyed always in relation to what it apparently negates, so the current withdrawal or escape to an analogue existence, a minimally digital life, reproduces and epitomizes the progressive technological dream in its latest social media inflected form: that of perfect curation, idealized lifestyle performance for a projected audience, including oneself. Unmediated enjoyment, simple, direct contact with life: these are media dreams, for the most part passively entertained, and sometimes acted out, for the sake of those consuming.
Moving to Paris, the most artistically and romantically overplayed/over represented city of all time, and the tightly crafted detail drop announcement, press release style, indicate not alienation from or indifference to the spectacle, but instead an overpowering identification or fascination with it.
You could never see a screen for the rest of your life, and still you’d be putting on a show for the big other, who, despite it all, doesn’t exist.
There’s another class of person with purely local ties and no social media presence who occasionally uses library computers for recreation and essentials. We call them homeless. Here the opposites coincide, with digital scarceness as signs of extreme poverty and helplessness as well as the cutting edge of free choice of those with what I have to assume are some material means. Akin to the anarcho primitivists, who by varying degrees approximate an artificial nature, driven by a highly civilized disgust with civilization
Thanks for sharing this Caleb. Your note is even more damning than my essay! Love the terms ‘phone pharisee’ and ‘quaintcore’. Quantitative metrics aside, it's annoying that this stuff is taken seriously by people who should know better – it's so stupid!
Indeed. It seems you can’t expect too much of people, even here, where the level of intelligence, taste, culture, is thought to higher than average, though the bar is still extremely low
This was a good read. I think you're right on the money, especially when it comes to how easily the dumbphone conversation gets assimilated into the influencerverse. Ultimately, for most ordinary people with modern jobs, eliminating your smartphone is more of a luxury than a lifestyle choice.
But regardless of the hypocrisy of the most vocal contingent, I think lot of people, myself included, have seen real benefits from a variety of "unplugging" resolutions. Allowing inconvenience and friction into your life again can be pretty exciting/freeing, especially for the most chronically online among us. The way this message is getting metabolized by the media ecosystem does kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth (those headlines are pretty cringe...) but I'm glad the message is at least getting out there. I'm glad you wrote this piece, too.
Not gunna lie I was really resisting this essay at first, but I found myself agreeing and realizing I had been thinking about some of these ideas as well. I’ve been straddling the fence between “logging off” or “staying online”, getting a dumb phone or balancing my time on my smart phone. As always, I have skepticism about both alternatives. While I think it is important to work on your attention outside of your smartphone (I.e. reading books, making art), I still find myself realizing that my identity, my relationships, the way I talk and behave will always be inextricably linked to the online world, regardless of how I engage with it. It’s just how it is to live in this time.
It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out in the coming months, years. It seems people are going in different directions in regard to social media, and I’m wondering how these ideas will converge/diverge.
Thanks for this thought provoking piece!
Thanks for reading David! It's fun as a comparison to think about the worries people had in the 19th century about people, especially young women, reading novels too much and not living in the ‘real world’ as a result (in essence, having their attention stolen by a new technology). I suspect there's an untenable distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ lurking behind much tech-scepticism – I say untenable, because every ‘nature’ is actually the result of a process of naturalisation. So novels, dumbphones, even things like the countryside with its man-made fields, its centuries of deforestation and cultivation, seem ‘natural’, harmonious with our natural beings, while more recent inventions are seen as artificial and alien, stealing our attention. And the tech-sceptical position breaks down when you instead ask the question: what's worthy of our attention? Any good answer to this question will NOT fall along an ‘online’/‘offline’ distinction, or a dumbphone/smartphone one etc. There are valuable and worthless things on both sides.
Excellent question: "what's worthy of our attention?" I think smartphones and TVs are more comfortable than other technologies. It allows our bodies to relax, and we let our guard down. We are less likely to put it down when it no longer serves us because we are so comfortable. Then when you add in the algorithms designed to keep us scrolling, it's even harder to put them down. You can't discount these factors when talking about harms.
It is harmful to spend all day consuming and not doing or thinking. It is harmful to not have space for the mind to wander. Maybe we don't need dumb phones, but it is good to talk about the reality of these harms and solutions for them.
We as a society figured out how to use Do Not Disturb mode so our smart phones are maybe less intrusive than the SITC episode. But we have a world of content in our pockets that makes it too easy to escape boredom and mind-wandering. We didn't realize how important boredom and mind wandering are until they were taken away from us.
Remember watching the rain drops slide down the window from the backseat of your parent's car? The pleasure of idleness.
It is probably not good to read novels all day long, to the exclusion of all else. It is not good to scroll and be connected all day long either. But currently, it is socially acceptable to do so. And even worse, teams of highly paid engineers are attempting to tether us, against our good will. So it will take a bit more intentionality to resist than to put down the Jane Austen.
I often think to myself (I’m aware this is smug becuase this is what I do:) getting on social media and posting links to eg great poems is a more effective form of resistance to the dumbing down of culture via the shattering of our attention spans than posts complaining about same.
I loved this article. I find your acceptance of the modern age--with all its pitfalls and opportunities--totally refreshing. I think it's safe to say that whenever we buy a gadget (i.e. the dumb phone) to cope with our addiction to another gadget (re: the smartphone), we miss why we got so stuck in the first place. Yes these things are addicting as hell. But the soul can become addicted to anything if it's lonely and malnourished enough to do so, smartphone or not. Thanks for this reminder.
“The soul can become addicted to anything if it’s lonely and malnourished enough to do so.”
Yes.
We need our souls nourished.
This is stupid
This was a great read. I’m foolishly and repeatedly drawn to the kinds of pieces you criticize here because I get carried away with the idea of optimizing my life in the most impractical ways — much like the obsessive behavior circuit you describe. It’s impossible to extricate ourselves from the internet at this point, and I wouldn’t want to even if I could because it’s this platform that allows me to share my writing on an unprecedented scale.
That said, I do know that my writing and focus have suffered thanks to the culture’s widespread acceptance of hyperconnectivity. And that has always struck me as the most dangerous and mind-numbing part of the technological age we happen to find ourselves in. Though this thought will quickly seem antiquated as new tech passes us by, I’m sure.
Just now learning that August Lamm is making a shit ton of money memeing an antimeme, and i'm upset that i didn't start doing this sooner. been using a flip phone for 2 years and been so normal + sexy with it that several of my friends also switched over. But you wouldn't know any of that unless i fw u irl...
anything that serves ads is more interested in sacrificing you to moloch than improving your life but the internet rocks otherwise.
Also a flip phone is a badge of fallibility and it sometimes feels embarrassing to be toting it about in front of people who are apparently able to have a smartphone without getting clawed to death by the algorithm. Seems like some of the people you're annoyed by have done the first 3 steps to recovery, but are yet to take a fearless inventory and realize what's necessary to recover! (also step 12 of recovery is helping others - Lammposting is kinda like getting an AA lectures when you show up to the bar, but there isn't offline infrastructure with the intention to help internet addicts that i know of. what's the alternative?)
also i 100% want to become an influencer. ... sorry but i want to be zoomer simon sarris
Great exploration, thanks for this.
It’s impossible to exist offline these days (UK especially, on a governmental/banking level one is on the fringe of society without being online).
The sort of third-spaces we used to rely on for subculture interactions are mostly gone, or access is very limited/restricted (which full-time working adult has the time and will to take advantage of the library only open on Saturday morning, while it’s besieged by screaming children?).
If not online, where do I get to see access and interact with thought and opinion unfiltered through the lense of corporate agenda?
Not in the newspapers and magazines available to me in print.
I will be keeping my smartphone for a while still, if only to make sure I can pay my bills, listen to library audiobooks and leave comments on Substack. 😇
The feedback Lamm received for that one "moving to Paris" post was baffling to me, glad I'm not the only one.
Nice Double Dragon reference!
You so perfectly put into words my exact feelings regarding this topic. I have a lot of arguments (especially with folks from older generations) about the internet and the impact it has had on younger generations and I always tell them to consider the public uproar that MTV caused back in the 80s, or Elvis in the 60s. Generational scapegoats have always been around, the internet is just more pervasive than any other before, which I think makes it feel like more of a threat to those who think we should "resist" it. I loved this essay, thank you for writing it.
Post your screen time
https://substack.com/@luxarbo/note/c-92455906
Kudos to you for being open. I have found anecdotally that the “just silence notifications bro” contingent of anti-anti-smartphone advocates often have their own habit. I didn’t expect you to actually post it in response to my flip remark, which I made mainly because I felt like the first half of your piece was mainly a “you criticize society yet you participate in it” type of rhetoric.
You correctly intuit later that what irks people like Lamm is not the device as such but the fact it links you to the attention economy everyone seems to hate. I do think Lamm’s disambiguating the different parts of the phone is an important exercise in understanding how we were able to function before the advent of these devices. The excuses proffered by those who wish to keep their smartphones rarely have anything to do with social media; it is always some essential convenience (a different device maybe before the phone, such as a camera) they can’t afford to lose. But of course having all these necessities on the smartphone funnels us back toward the overly online world.
There is a nostalgia here, and it is not for dumb phones but a pre-web 2.0 internet before everything was optimized for maximum engagement, ad revenue and algorithmic velocity—the world of web forums, chat rooms and informative web pages like Wikipedia. That seems to be what you are gesturing towards in your final remark. But I don’t think it’s coming back, and the likelihood diminishes as we recede further from that time and plunge ever deeper into the brainrot era of the internet.
Without going on too much longer I will say switching to a dumb phone has improved life for me personally, even if I understand that it cannot destroy the attention economy. I’m not an influencer though.
> And if we are to counteract their particular hold, we must exploit opportunities to subvert them from within
Lamm is criticizing the smartphone attention economy from within the smartphone attention economy. Isn't that subversion from within?
I recently started collecting vinyl. I still have spotify, but I like the challenge of finding really listenable albums. I like that I have physical objects that show my taste in music. When I play a record for guests, I'm sharing something more meaningful than an endless, algorithmically generated playlist. However, because I still have spotify, I don't need to go all-in on vinyl. I think I'll top out at 50 records.
I think a successful tech-skeptical movement will follow this pattern: not abandoning the technology of the present for the technology of the past, but reintroducing the technology of the past alongside the technology of the present.
Technology has steadily reduced the cost of communication with a commensurate decrease in the quality of communication. The goal of the tech-skeptical movement should be to reincorporate costlier forms of communication for when we want to communicate something of value.
You like to name-drop philosophers, so I'll drop the name of a philosopher I've never read and say that tech skepticism should take the form of an Hegelian dialectic. Given the choice between old and new, we move forward by incorporating both.
I don't buy your claim that the value of a message is proportional to the costliness of its transmission. I get the laziest, most clichéd messages in handwritten cards. There are single tweets more valuable than whole books. Inefficiency doesn't create value! I don't think that using a film camera and going through the expense and delay of developing the pictures makes them more ’valuable’, more ‘meaningful’. And I like your vinyl example, because I don't think it supports your theory. Vinyl is good, not because it's costlier, but because it offers a different, in some cases superior, mechanism of discovery and curation, not to mention tracks and albums unavailable on streaming services. This would be true even if vinyl was cheaper than streaming. And about Lamm, I don't think she holds your view of value either, because what ultimately matters to her, despite the offline aesthetics, is online engagement. Far from subversion, dumbphone activism represents an extreme form of algorithmic realism where even an ‘offline’ life is performed as a spectacle for online consumption.
> Inefficiency doesn't create value!
What you call inefficiency I call effort, and I think effort clearly makes communication more valuable.
I, and many people I know, have handwritten cards on their fridge. Of course some cards are lazy, but some are not, and the ones that are not lazy are more valuable than digital communications. Can you imagine someone saving and displaying an email the way people display cards?
I have a friend who takes photos with a point-and-shoot camera, sends the film away to be developed, and then shares digitized versions (photos of photos). The effort he puts in absolutely does make them more valuable than smartphone photos. People increasingly put photos like this on their dating app profiles. Pictures like this say "my friends and I put effort into hanging out and creating memories."
> [vinyl] offers a different, in some cases superior, mechanism of discovery and curation, not to mention tracks and albums unavailable on streaming services.
I don't think many people care about albums unavailable on streaming services, I certainly don't. The truth is that it takes effort to select, buy, display, and play records, and that's what makes records worthwhile in a world where we all have spotify.
But please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying old is good, new is bad. In another reply you wrote:
> what's worthy of our attention? Any good answer to this question will NOT fall along an ‘online’/‘offline’ distinction, or a dumbphone/smartphone one etc. There are valuable and worthless things on both sides.
I agree with this. The line between old and new is blurry and always changing, and new and old technologies can be mixed with interesting results.
However, then you say:
> And about Lamm, I don't think she holds your view of value either, because what ultimately matters to her, despite the offline aesthetics, is online engagement. Far from subversion, dumbphone activism represents an extreme form of algorithmic realism where even an ‘offline’ life is performed as a spectacle for online consumption.
So after criticizing an online/offline dichotomy before, now you are using an online/offline dichotomy to criticize August Lamm. I'm not saying I agree with Lamm's ideas or that she agrees with mine, but I think the way she is mixing online and offline is interesting, and it certainly struck a chord with people. If she sticks to uploading her writing once a week, that would be a pretty radical departure from the kind of live-tweeting that people expect.
My hope is that tech-skepticism will create room for people to mix and match, to use both efficient and inefficient technologies, to create more flexibility, to have more choice.
What a ridiculous take
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