image shamelessly stolen from r/dumbphones and mostly unrelated

I feel like we could almost use a comm for this specifically but c/technology will do

Anyone else here have luck with cutting back on smartphone/technology use in general, or feel like they need to try a change in that department? Or even just social media? Chime in below I’d love to chat about it.

I’m avoiding work rn and thinking about smartphone use. I had an android phone for many years and I think it was a really negative force in my life. Sure there’s lots of times it’s useful as a one-off but overall I don’t think it was actually good to have on me all the time. I think the overarching issue with a lot of modern tech is that it reduces or tries to eliminate intentionality on the part of the user, and make the user experience completely frictionless. But some of that “friction” is important, intentionality is important, without it we are just mindless consumers at the beck and call of marketers and big tech companies. Music apps don’t need to decide what you listen to and in what order, being able to get a mix based on a song or artist is one thing, but the tiktok-ified endless autoplay of songs with no user input is… not good. especially when you grow up with that you lose so much.

Or social media I think we all know is a toxic time suck and honestly just a mindless addiction for many, even this place can take on that role, I know it does sometimes for me, it’s easier to scroll than face whatever stressful thought or situation is at hand… and fine, maybe that urge to distraction isn’t going away, but on reflection I find scrolling to be the least-soothing way of scratching that itch… So it would be better if it wasn’t quite so frictionless, to help break the feedback loop.

Push notifications (for things other than messaging) are another insidious way that such behavioral patterns are fostered. For the computer nerds, I think of it as like an interrupt for my attention, it breaks the flow of what I’m doing and demands I look at it, and frankly 80% of push notifications just don’t deserve that level of priority. But because exerting any control or intentionality over those notifications is made to be extra effort in the name of UX streamlining, most people just have these annoying interrupts conditioning their brain at the whims of whoever controls the apps.

In such a tech dependent world, user control over software is way more critical than it’s ever been, and for all their annoyingness and often mediocre or bad takes on other topics, free software people have been hammering on that for years and building alternatives. All that to say: I’ve been using a linux phone (pinephone pro) as my only phone for the better part of 6 months now and it’s been a breath of fresh air. I’m reading again for the first time in years, I’m building a music collection that I actually own, I’m starting to cut the tether to big tech spyware platforms, but I’m not disconnected from the world.

The point is: it’s not a dumbphone, it just has some extra friction in places, and that has enabled me to be a lot more intentional about my use. It’s slower, and the battery life is worse, and lots of other tradeoffs, but in practical terms mostly what that has led to is me being more intentional about my consumption. I can always just go on a computer and browse to my heart’s content, or put videos on the TV all night, but the device that’s with me all the time is optimized for the things I care about, not for spying on me and robbing me of my attention and sanity.

(and fwiw linux phones aren’t really non-nerd ready yet unless your requirements are pretty basic, but I could see the next gen of them being much closer to linux-on-the-PC levels of easy. It’s getting better every month)

But the lower tech alternative is what you are seeing more and more on places like r/dumbphones (and I have adopted pieces of this as well): purpose built devices. Instead of one device that does everything (including a bunch of stuff you don’t even want it to and don’t get any agency over as an end user), people are rediscovering the utility of having different tools for different tasks:

  • A small notebook replaces a huge power-hungry phone screen+stylus for taking notes
  • A digital camera replaces the AI-mangled modern smartphone camera for high fidelity photos.
  • A little game system replaces the microtransaction and predatory-mechanic laden cornucopia that is mobile games.
  • A book or ereader replaces the eyestrain-inducing, sleep-ruining experience of reading long-form text on a bright little phone screen.
  • A watch keeps the time, even when your phone would have long since run out of battery, and serves as a superior alarm clock for many circumstances, etc.
  • A wallet holds cash (okay and cards… and I guess most people haven’t abandoned these yet) that can be used to pay for goods and services, without the limitations of battery, internet connection, spying, etc. of mobile payment schemes. venmo/paypal/whatever are good to have in your back pocket, but IMO are really only like, revolutionary, if you’re comparing them to credit cards and bank transfers, especially in the US where there’s no other good system for easily transferring money digitally.
  • wired headphones/earbuds can be much more durable alternatives to made-for-disposal hermetically sealed bluetooth pods, they are cheaper, they can sound better, they are available in a plethora of options and repairable when they break. Not that bluetooth is verboten, many bt devices are better, but the airpods and those modeled after it are pretty trash.
  • if you are picky about such things, a dedicated audio player can play music, audiobooks, podcasts, for longer, in better quality, with less interruptions, than a smartphone. I’m less certain about this one personally, as even dumphones can usually have headphones and play music for you (some even support FM which is cool and saves battery over streaming), but it all depends on your preferences!
  • And the titular dumbphones hold the potential to be much longer-lasting, more reliable makers of calls and texts, by virtue of being simpler. having a phone’s primary purpose return to being communication makes it better at that role…

Now none of this is to say you should carry all this stuff and more all the time. But it’s something you can be intentional about and tailor to your needs!

Maybe you’re a theory-head without a rigid schedule: skip the games, camera, watch, headphones, etc and just carry an ereader, a notebook and a dumbphone

Or you’re more of a direct action andy, you can leave the dumbphone (the only one that can be used to track you still) at home, or skip it entirely, or get a device with killswitches! Much harder to do if you limit yourself to the Apple/Android dichotomy

So yeah, point is you can pick what things you actually care about and bring those, when appropriate, and use them when you want to rather than doing, like, everything everywhere all at once with your smartphone. Yes you can tweak your smartphone to avoid many of these issues, and maybe that’s good enough for you, (I encourage it, just give it serious thought, be intentional about what you really want to allow), but some are just unavoidable, and much like you are not immune to propaganda, none of us are immune to the baked in effects of marketers, big tech addiction-mongers. The simplest way to step away from the all-encompassing absorption machines in our pockets is to not have one, and to consider their replacements carefully, even if other paths are workable.

I’m pretty sure matt-jokerfied originally got me thinking about “friction” in this context, and this has all been marinating and steering my choices ever since, culminating with this linux phone that I can customize to my heart’s content and does not have any of the built in addictive/harmful/spying apps that all my android phones always did. Oh and I can repair it rather than it becoming useless, physically and software-wise, in just a few short years.

I’m still a tech dweeb, I just want it to enhance people’s lives and liberate them not make them worse and more dependent.

  • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    I think friction/deliberate device use is a nice way to think about it. Helps you figure out how to use stuff, what you don’t need.

    Yes! Some places you want added friction some you don’t, you want to structure things in such a way that you are like, making it easier to achieve what you want to achieve, fostering the habits you want to have and breaking the feedback loops that encourage those you don’t.

    I see your point about wildlife twitter, or any other number of innocuous social media spheres, to some extent that’s true, but it’s just the thin end of the wedge, the beginning of the cycle of enshittification, if you will: the quality content that keeps us all coming back. Problem is, the structural elements of the platform don’t change just because you’re in a kinder social space. I’m sure there’s mind-meltingly stupid slapfights still on wildlife photography twitter sometimes, even if it is way less than say, politics twitter. I don’t use much social media besides this very site, and I wouldn’t say it’s even necessarily an addiction, its just one of many coping mechanisms for my underlying poor mental health, but yeah, I know not everyone follows the same negative usage patterns and won’t have the same priorities I do.

    But I do think those patterns are often fostered intentionally, and that growing up with this stuff is not good for kids. I got my first smartphone as an adolescent and while it was far from the only factor it definitely helped tank my educational prospects and melt my brain in other ways. I was an incredibly avid reader until that point in my life, but after getting a phone it trailed off hard, and while lots of slop gets published, nothing can convince me that reading YA fiction or scifi or biographies of nikola tesla is in any universe on the same level as reading 4chan on my phone all day during class lol (yes I was that kid. I never got into pol stuff thank god but I still had that edgy 4chan phase). It isn’t great for your brain, you aren’t learning much besides how to be racist at the phd level, and it’s just so much more engaging than a book, and easier to conceal in a school that yells at you for reading books unrelated to the class you’re in.

    I also have some affinity for paper, for certain things. journaling (or my version of it, it’s pretty sporadic and non-narrative) is like a nice balance between recording my unbroken stream-of-consciousness and slowing me down and forcing me to think things through as I phrase them, because I think faster than I write. I also just like that you don’t have to do anything with it after, it’s just there on the page, you don’t have to edit it or format it or save it or categorize it, and it doesn’t encourage you to, your words are just there on the page and you don’t have to devote any more thought to it. I can do e-readers, but I’ve found lugging around a paper book acts as a nice physical reminder to read for me, so I do prefer that for easily acquired books.

    I’ve also gained a major appreciation for radio. If I don’t want to curate my own listening, I’d rather hear a human on the air than a streaming algorithm’s mix. There’s just so much more depth, added context, and a little human connection that goes a long way. I am lucky to have two decent commercial free stations that play music I like though, if it was all commercial FM I wouldn’t feel the same way. they both can be streamed as well online too, best of both worlds.

    I could also extend this line of thinking to transportation but urbanism is a whole other can of worms/novel length post

    oh and just to really take it off the rails, I think this even applies to toasters (hear me out). There was a pinnacle of toaster design, making excellent toast, reliably, automatically, in a servicable package that can last basically forever. Soviet levels of reliability in shiny american packaging. But when the pure intention to make good toast was muddied up with cutting costs, sharing parts across model lines, planned obsolescence, and other such concerns, the result was worse technology that didn’t do the job as well and didn’t make people’s lives better. Now I get that there was never a time where that intention was actually pure, capitalism was never good, etc etc. but it has undeniably all gotten worse since then not better.