Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

How hard/easy is it to circumvent the whitelist? Moreover, do you whitelist the whole browser?

> "Apple Configurator" for Mac ... way better than the parental controls / screen time options

Ok, so this sounds very interesting & useful. I'll be reading up on this, but if you have time to pass along any pointers or tips around using this for personal/household use it'd be much appreciated.

> It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content."

I don't think that's true, at best it's both. It's the phone that enables a more frictionless access to the content. Having a speed bump to access the same content would make a large difference which is why the alternatives in the article are proving effective, the act of accessing something is less mindless, and more deliberate.

I think the point they're making is that not everyone has the discipline or motive to evaluate and remove things.

What do you mean, I can definitely doom scroll my banking app!

> Many companies, especially those supported by ads, apparently can't help themselves, they will exploit any weakness in human psychology to make a quick buck of our attention.

The world has a rich history of regulating advertising. Maybe it's time to dig out the old stuff again - treat hyper-personalized ads or services entirely financed by ads like we do with gambling, alcohol or tobacco.

The problem with 'the content' on 'the phone' specifically is that you always have it with you so (a) it's always there for a dopamine hit at a moment's notice whenever you're bored and (b) creates the societal expectation that you're always online. You don't take TV with you when you leave the house.

> It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content.

That was mentioned in Death Stranding. Quite a funny game which is, among other things, about connecting people and technology’s role and limits. It also attempts to do exactly that: connect people through technology, in its own odd way.

There's a grain of truth to this, but it's all mired together. The medium (the phone) is the message (content).

The form factor (in-pocket), connectivity (streaming content), and economic drivers (attention economy), all fundamentally bias smartphones toward the kind of poisonous content our brains can't deal with.

I'm more addicted to Hacker News than anything else.

I make online games. Yeah, some people have problems with them, but for me it's the ultimate form of creativity and creation. I am crafting synthetic social experiences limited only by the power of my mind's creative and technical abilities.

> It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content.

There is such a thing as a teabag. Despite of a good tea has a perfect ability to be fit into these ones, there is a reason why nobody sells a really good tea in the teabags.

> "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content."

I take strong issue with this position.

(Disclaimer: I make professional broadcast and media-related devices and have an opinion, decades in the making, on what has been done with mobile phones vis a vis, making other devices redundant.)

It is the phone itself.

The phone itself has usurped the user of all agency, and responsibility, for their content.

>Ad companies

There is one entity responsible for this mess, and one entity only: the OS vendor.

If the OS vendor had not become "ad companies" and were still responsibly stewarding the operating system in proper directions, we wouldn't have the issue of ad agencies with their doom scrolling statistics.

>ban attention stealing algorithms

Its not the algorithm - its the raw, fundamental means by which the user has control over the device, and the media it produces. Nobody knows what a file system is, or why to organize it, or how to standardly distinguish between shared and private media - because the OS is no longer the primary interface to doing these things.

The 'ad agency' is, or rather the web interface it has built, to usurp the device, and give it a different 'application' than one intended to promulgate user agency.

The phone, in operation, is the problem. When we decided to replace a filesystem with a live stream of uploaded content, in a fashion which immediately removes the locality of the media from control by the user, we opened up the door to todays hellish landscape.

We should revisit the issue of what "is" an operating system vendor, and why they need to be woken up from their slumber to take over the application blackhole that is sucking life from our users.

>doom scrolling your banking app

I shouldn't be using a banking app. An app is only necessary because the bank uses a completely different operating system than I do.

Imagine your data stays where you need it to stay - on your device - and the bank has access to it when it needs to service you, the customer - as opposed to the current scenario, where the customer data is owned entirely by the bank and you need permission to access it.

The distinction between these two bases of operation are made by the operating system vendors. It has been 'easier' to API-all-the-things than make smarter interfaces, imho. That laziness has given us the monster.

I've been daydreaming about a new Android launcher to make doom scrolling less immediate and attractive. It'll give quick and immediate access to "tool" apps. Maps, calculator, bank, etc, and access to direct messaging(for me, chatting with people isn't a negative like other social media). But then it'll have a "I need to distraction" button or something. This will first suggest working on a task from a to-do list. Then it can offer some educational tidbit/language practice/etc to be your distraction. If you absolutely must access the doom scrolling apps, it'll put it behind a 30 second timer and be configurable to limit total time and such.

"...we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information."

- Solzhenitsyn

My main problem is that smartphones are geared way too much towards consuming content and not enough towards producing content (except for pictures and videos and short twitter-like comments, i.e. easily consumable crap).

For coding, 3d modeling, writing books, composing music, etc, it's really not that great.

When I was in junior high I got one of those TI-Calculators, like 10 years before the iPhone first came out. Yes I had games installed on it, but it also had a programming environment (TI-BASIC) that let me make games directly on the device. And so I did, at any opportunity, even in the middle of classes where it didn't make sense to have a calculator out. I made action games, RPG games, text-based fighting games, etc.

So by the time I got to college, I already well understood the basics of programming and could make fairly complicated programs.

Same with the computers we had, I learned Q-Basic on them and HTML and was making games and webpages on there as well.

But these phones and tablets try really hard to make it so we just consume content all day long instead of producing content. I tried coding and writing stories on these devices (even with a keyboard attachment) and the experience just isn't that great, I just end up back on the desktop/laptop.

But a lot of kids don't spend hardly any time on computers anymore, just phone and tablets, so they're stuck with these devices they can't really learn and master too well, where everything they might want to make has to be done with a supplemental computer they might not even own, so instead they mostly just mindlessly consume garbage content.

I understand I was an outlier as a kid and most other kids weren't making games on their calculators, but if we thought of these devices more as "how can we facilitate people making their own tools on here" I still think there would be enough kids that would be naturally curious enough to learn how to do that and help create the next generation of builders.

And I don't mean just software developers making tools for this (there are already a bunch of attempts at this), Apple needs to think like this and build their devices with this in mind or else it will just have too many restrictions.

And we wouldn't have to be so obsessed with limiting children's access to these devices, since they could be spending that time making really cool things on it.

> "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content."

I agree, but unfortunately, phones are by default set up to contain the bad kind of content.

In theory, it should be possible to set up the phones for my kids so that they only contain useful applications, without ads and in-app purchases. Also, either to remove the web browser, or to limit it to a selection of useful websites, which in turn do not contain ads. In practice, that would require a lot of work, and I do not have much free time.

It would be nice to have a website that would teach parents (including the ones who are not very tech-savvy) how to configure the kids' phones like that. Even better, to sell phones that are already configured like that.

> You're not going to be doom scrolling your banking app, your TOTP app or your home automation. Keep those apps and just ban attention stealing algorithms, apps and websites so that we can move on.

Decades ago Joel Spolsky wrote about software bloat and light versions of Word Processors (quoted below) and today 23 years later you can watch the MKBHD team on YouTube "switch to dumbphones so you don't have to" (quotes below) with exactly the same results - they're great, except for the features they don't have which I want. concluding with "If we merged these dumbphones into one and make a mega-dumbphone...". Just ban the bad bits ... doesn't really work. Attention stealing algorithms are algorithms which surface things I want to see, they're not the wrong algorithms, they're turned to surfacing the wrong things.

Joel Spolsky: "Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy." - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

MKBHD Team: quotes include: "Palmphone - it was your second phone, you had to figure out when to bring it with you vs. when to bring your other phone; you have to specifically figure out what limiting features you want to have". She says: "my problem with it is I can install anything, I wanted to use apps less but I can install all the exact same apps on this". The Blank app for iPhone which makes a large black and white launcher screen: "it's no fun; easy to bypass". Generally: "My biggest problem with this experiment was all my accounts need MFA apps". LitePhone II: "We've tried to make a video about switching to the LitePhone II for serveral days for years. It's really frustrating. It's almost unusable for music, running playlists, 1GB isn't enough storage". "The lack of camera. Can't deal with QR codes, e.g. menus". "Navigation worked by once and failed once, eInk refresh too slow". "No USB C". "Typing too hard". Bookx Palma a b/w eInk Android non-phone:"you need three or four days to get it working, you need to be incredibly patient. There are just better things on my phone". - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMyurkqaddc&t=47s

Cocaine is a tool too.

Technology enters because it's useful. Stays because it's addictive.

You can praise all good usages of technology. Then you make a pie chart of real usages and the biggest piece of the cake will be porn, violent content, etc.

If you've never picked up your phone to do one thing and half an hour later found yourself trawling through Instagram, having forgotten what you originally meant to do with your "just a tool", you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people.

The majority of us, through no fault of our own, find these 'tools' regularly sucking us into a vortex of distractions and time-wasting. The struggle against cheap dopamine hits is real.

Not acknowledging the dark patterns and the addictive economics of free apps and the advertisement economy is disingenuous.

I'm glad your iron will isn't affected but pretending like there isn't a huge societal problem because it doesn't affect you is just arrogant.

> It's not the device, it's the users' choice in how they use it.

This right here. But I take it in a different way. That tool is mine. I get to chose how it is used. Advertisers seem to think they own some of my time to get 'free things'. Application makers seem to think they own some of my time to try to get more money out of me thru the use of dark patterns. The phone companies seem to think they own some of my time and sell my data because I pay them. Other people seem to think they own my time because I have the thing and should be on call 24/7 whenever they want to get ahold of me.

When they first came up with the idea of the current smart phone. It was really cool. Then I have realized that everyone is using it to grab my time from me. All of them seem to get mad when I set the thing down on a table somewhere and ignore it and enjoy the things I want to do.

The article have an ad for a cooking app, by The Guardian it think. Seems a little out of place on an article like this.

It's called late stage capitalism and the scary thing is I think we still have a way to go. Check out the explosion of PE into our healthcare system recently if you really want to feel some goosebumps.

Real. I am a long term Linux user (first downloaded Slackware over a 2400 baud modem - you can ask your grandparents what that is) and in principle I would like to do what you have done, basically do a “100% Richard Stallman” but my productivity is higher when using specific tools on macOS/iPadOS/iOS.

I fight back a bit by leaving my iPhone at home unless I want to take pictures. Instead my Apple Watch is my main driver when I am out in the world. It is fairly unobtrusive, in spite of the mountain of distributed tech behind it.

BTW, I don’t think you sound extreme at all. After reading good books like Privacy is Power and The Surveillance Capitalism, you approach sounds real to me.