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.

The first is the glaring hypocrisy. The most visible dumbphone activists are, paradoxically, extremely online. Many have sizeable followings, all publish and promote their work digitally, and some – like Lamm – have made their opposition to technology their brand. The contradiction is so blatant it verges on self-parody. Instead of posting about logging off, I’ve often thought, they could do us all a service and actually do it. I mean it. If they are serious about their technological scepticism they should retreat to a hut like the later Heidegger and stare at a well with anti-technological suspicion.

The gap between what dumbphone activists say (log off! get a dumbphone!) and what they do (post, post, post) is not just hypocritical, but could be seen as a symptom of an obsessive neurosis. Psychoanalytically speaking, obsession involves creating a desire that can never be fulfilled, which leads the subject to create ritualistic substitutes that eternally defer its satisfaction. The obsessive subject doesn’t actually want to achieve his stated goal, but rather to sustain the process of deferral itself. An example is furnished by Lamm’s pamphlet You Don’t Need a Smartphone, a Practical Guide to Downgrading and Reclaiming your Life (2024). In an extract posted on Twitter, she illustrates all the discrete gadgets a smartphone insidiously replaces – compass, camera, notebook, etc. – but conspicuously omits any tool that allows access to the internet. Yet she obviously needed one to post the drawing online. On the psychoanalytic view, such an omission is not an accident but a form of repression which sustains the illusion that rejecting the smartphone is equivalent to rejecting digital life altogether. In reality, the phone is merely swapped for another device, one through which the dumbphone activist continues to post incessantly.³

If we find a psychoanalytic reading too personal, we can swap out the terms for Marxist ones and see dumbphone activism as a form of ideology. Not only does it ultimately see salvation in terms of consumption (buy a dumbphone! buy my pamphlet!) but more importantly it avoids any analysis of the real material conditions of digital life in favour of promoting the fantasy of a wholesome, offline existence, replete with – in Lamm’s case – the nostalgic aesthetics of film cameras (whose pictures are, of course, digitised and uploaded online).

Like all ideology, dumbphone activism is ahistorical. Lamm can call herself an ‘anti-tech activist’ while using a dumbphone, a film camera and a laptop because to her, ‘tech’ is synonymous with ‘smartphone’. Forget Heidegger’s distrust of wells and consider instead that Socrates found the technology of writing suspicious and morally corrupting two-thousand years ago. ‘Technology’ isn’t just commodities and services sold by Silicon Valley, it’s something we’re utterly and constitutively enmeshed in.⁴ Even looking at very recent history should make someone sceptical of the claim that we can solve the problem of technology through improved consumption patterns. Indeed, I laughed out loud while reading Agamben’s essay ‘What is an apparatus’ (2006) where he writes

I live in Italy, a country where the gestures and behaviours of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the mobile telephone (which the Italians dub the telefonino). I have developed an implacable hatred for this apparatus, which has made the relationship between people all the more abstract. […] I found myself more than once wondering how to destroy or deactivate those telefonini, as well as how to eliminate or at least to punish and imprison those who do not stop using them.

For Agamben, the telefonino (the flip phone) was an object of moral hatred, a symbol of technological domination. But to Lamm and her followers, the same device is viewed as the solution to modern digital excess. We don’t even have to read philosophy from the flip-phone era to get a sense that many of the criticisms directed towards smartphones today were directed towards dumbphones twenty years ago. Watching Sex and the City reruns, it’s striking how disruptive and intrusive Nokias and flip phones were. Take the episode in the sixth season where Charlotte, converting to Judaism, struggles to silence her incessantly beeping phone during the lighting of the Shabbat candles – an emblem of hyperconnected modernity that she is being asked to renounce, at least for one day a week. Whatever ‘anti-tech activism’ is, its goalposts just keep changing.

Agamben recognised the futility of making a myopic and selective critique of technology. Assimilating the mobile phone to Foucault’s concept of ‘apparatus’ – a system of power that structures subjectivity through discourses, institutions, and material constraints – he writes:

Here lies the vanity of the well-meaning discourse on technology, which asserts that the problem with apparatuses can be reduced to the question of their correct use. Those who make such claims seem to ignore a simple fact: If a certain process of subjectification (or, in this case, desubjectification) corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.

In other words, you can’t escape an apparatus by using it correctly, whether through applying greyscale filters or using apps to control your screen time. Getting a dumbphone and posting from a laptop doesn’t extricate you from the logic of social media. And it’s this logic, if anything, rather than the smartphone device itself, which dumbphone activists find objectionable, often for good reason. But just like Mark Fischer wrote in Captialist Realism (2009) that it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism, so it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine life without posting, without participating in the attention economy. Even if Lamm found a way of supporting herself offline, say by taking up farm labour, it’s easy to imagine her posting, like so many others, from the field. The offline world is increasingly just more grist for the content mill.

Heidegger and his well

If we’re serious about freeing ourselves from certain negative constraints of technological apparatuses, the answer isn’t to retreat into nostalgia – to swap one device for another while maintaining the same compulsions. Instead, we should recognise that technology and apparatuses aren’t just hardware; they are networks of social relations, norms, and incentives. And if we are to counteract their particular hold, we must exploit opportunities to subvert them from within. This is another lesson from Foucault. Instead of waiting for a proletarian revolution or the eventual self-destruction of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions, Foucault saw opportunities and threats in each technologico-political formation, in each apparatus, some of which can be used to further our own ends, others which can be weaponised against us.

There are many threats posed by social media, algorithms, smartphones etc. But there are also opportunities, not just, as dumbphone activists seem to think, to make money. Lamm’s claim that real subcultures are offline makes no sense to me because there’s hardly any easy way to demarcate ‘online’ from ‘offline’ anymore. Even if we were to somehow avoid any direct interaction with the internet, we would have to contend with the possibility, as Justin Smith-Ruiu noted on deactivating his Twitter, that instead of participating and shaping the vanguard of discourse online, we’d be merely channeling it, unbeknownst to us, months later, like the normies in my office that suddenly started saying things like ‘vibe’ and ‘gang’.

Yesterday, I found myself in a heated argument in the comments section of my previous piece on essayism, debating whether Truth and Beauty are one or many. The experience reminded me of what it’s like to have fun online without the distractions and incentives of engagement metrics. It was just me and a stranger trying to get at the truth. Real liberation from digital spectacle doesn’t come from swapping devices, reading self-help books, or attending dumbphone workshops – it comes from finding spaces, whether online or offline, where discourse outruns the algorithm altogether.

1. There’s a type of tech-sceptic journalist who uses the tools and ethos of digital-detox to recreate the conditions of a one-to-many mass media online. They want to minimise the time they spend consuming content on social media, without reducing the time they spend producing and promoting content.

2. Price now writes a Substack called Screen/Life Balance.

3. Lamm comes close to recognising the obsessive-structure of her anti-tech stance in her account of the publishing of her pamphlet when she writes ‘I was panicking about peace, shouting about quiet, emailing about disconnection, working to end work, fighting screen time with more screen time’, but she sees this as a consequence of a pushy publisher rather than a futility inherent in her brand of anti-tech activism.

4. I suspect the close association between ‘tech’ and Silicon Valley in the popular imagination makes tech-products from other geographic regions, such as the Finnish Nokia, the Canadian Blackberry, or even China (eg Deepseek) seem free from the moral baggage of American tech.