My Month Without a Smartphone

I believe most articles about smartphone addiction are missing the more important half of the issue: the addictive substance is the internet, rather than the enabling device. Certainly the phone allows more opportunities, but the actual substance is the internet. Most people will do fine for a month with a dumbphone and an internet connected laptop. Now try to live a month with any fancy phone and laptop, but without any internet connection whatsoever. The smartphone without internet is barely more addictive as a dumbphone.

I think most of us have gone through this rollercoaster. The iPhone was my first smartphone and I was like a kid in a toy store. I simply couldn't get enough of discovering new apps in new categories and the instant access to all the news, posts, etc. that I wanted.

Luckily for me, I was never hooked on the social media apps. In fact, I deleted my Facebook account when it was at its peak.

My crack/dopamine/heroin has been news and related apps. At one point, I was consuming content from 15-20 news sites on a daily basis. Likewise, I was heavily browsing Hacker News and LinkedIn.

However, as I turned 50, I took stock of my habits and how they are impacting my health, especially eyesight and sleep. I decided something needs to change.

So, I have uninstalled all my time-wasting apps and have installed the mLauncher from F-Droid. Also, I now read books mostly on my Kobo.

These are small changes and I still go back to my old ways, once in a while. But, I'm determined to kick this addiction.

I spent 10+ years without a smartphone, from early 2010s to early 2020s. Nowadays I can barely book a train ticket without one, and so many little things require a whatsapp number or some app that I bought one refurbished. Also it's hard to find a decent brick phone that can store enough SMS, one that I bought with an additional SD card will not store SMS on the SD card, so I'm stuck with a massive SD card and a 300 SMS storage limit.

Now I have to turn it off outside of job breaks to avoid looking at it every 5 minutes. I also have people getting angry at me because I do not answer their messages within a few minutes. Helps me select toxic people I guess. Some just get crazy with this thing.

The endless content available on the internet is a time sink on a regular desktop computer, more so on a laptop – but paired with a smartphone, this time sink is suddenly available all the time! There is no friction. It quickly becomes a habit.

And now we are all addicted, which most of us still refuse to admit, because we don't see the negative impact it has on our lives and our loved ones – like with any addictive behavior.

I've done something similar recently. Purged quite a lot of apps on my phone when I decided to be more minimalistic about it. I wanted to improve device performance (and thus reduce the desire for an upgrade) as well as decentralise some of my reliance on apps.

The stair stepping in this is from already having removed social media (and Youtube) from my phone. For me, if I got sucked into a feed, I'd be in it for hours and feel awful. There's no such thing as moderate usage for some.

It almost became a fun game to see how many apps I could get rid of! The biggest holdouts I haven't been able to get rid of have been around banking and insurance. Too many new age fintechs, even in South Africa, are convinced that actively ditching web is the best way to grow.

Saying Zuck et al knew what they were doing is misleading, and gives them too much credit. They are no experts in how dopamine works.

Tech makes it easy to build things quick. Some things gets popular more by accident than design. Zuck didn't build insta, or whatsapp or tiktok. The reasons for popularity and what is working is generally discovered post facto.

Popularity attracted funding. Things scale up (scale is the only thing tech brings to the table). That attracts financial engineers of Wall St. They take over and control how firms are managed. Cuz most creatives, engineers and scientists have no training in finance or business. And that sets up where the story goes.

The financial engineers aren't programmed to design goods or improve quality of life. They are programmed to capture market, as quickly as possible and collect rent from as much of the market as possible, getting the cheapest rates on interest/labor/forex/tax etc.

Market capture tactics increasing rely not on product, or quality of product, but on arbitrage capability, taking out competition AND outspending the competition in Marketing/Advertising/PR (ie Demand Engineering). Demand engineering works cause people have finite Attention bandwidth. As long you get your signalling and messaging into that finite bandwidth you win over the people who cant.

The technologist, the financial engineer, the demand engineer are all furiously optimizing what they are individually good at.

When they come together we end up with a very efficient corporate machine. When a whole herd of these machines, all copying each others behavior, run around the individual human being has less and less control over their own environment.

The machine herd will capture your kids in some other way if you get them off smartphones and social media. The only solution is to change the behavior of the machine and the herd.

I have two kids, with the elder one approaching the age where smartphones are starting to appear in their peer group (~10-11 yrs). Does anyone have a recommendation for a flip phone with coolness factor? Maybe ruggedized, with a compass built-in (non-GPS), something with “tool” aesthetics. The hard part is denying your kid something that the other kids are using to actively communicate amongst each other (peer pressure).

Most posts of this kind are completely void of thoughts on how society - including public institutions - require you have a smart phone nowadays.

I don't use my smart phone that much (probably more than I think, though). It's practical as a portable music/podcast player, a camera that's always with me etc. Occasionally I read a programming book, or blog post. I would love a good feature phone, with fantastic battery life.

But what I absolutely need a smart phone (and their secure enclaves) for are all the connected systems my country implements without hesitation: electronic authentication (most public services, such as healthcare, bank, taxes etc), public transport (they had seconds thoughts, though, and a plastic card is available). It's frankly dumb, and nonchalant to build societies like this. I can go into a train tunnel a lose coverage. Rural areas are not always covered, yet we (at least here) build systems depending on internet as if we all lived in the densest part of a large city.

That's primarily why I can't (currently) use a feature phone, not because I lack in self control.

He covers the personal bit but the difficult question for me would be the practical bit. I wouldn’t be able to pay for a lot of things (apps only), would be really hard to know when the train comes (time tables aren’t on posters any more). I couldn’t park my car (meters are app only). I couldn’t pay my bills etc. The list goes on and on. Being bored is the known factor. That would be hard. But the practical bit would perhaps make it impossible.

I wish I could buy a dumb phone which would nonetheless have a great camera. No browser, no email, no apps, god forbid. Maybe also support for Signal instead of SMS. I know it’s not going to happen, but one can dream.