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2024-04-14 21:08:57 UTC
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Permalinkneeds 100 different AI sources pushing their crap in your face every
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Will Stults spent too much time on his iPhone, doom-scrolling the site
formerly known as Twitter and tweeting angrily at Elon Musk as if the
billionaire would actually notice. Stultss partner, Daisy Krigbaum, was
addicted to Pinterest and YouTube, bingeing videos on her iPhone before
going to sleep. Two years ago, they both tried Apples Screen Time
restriction tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to
trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. Theyd heard about so-
called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and whistlesa high-
resolution screen, an app store, a video camerathat made smartphones so
addictive. But they found the process of acquiring one hard to navigate.
The information on it was kind of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of
people who know the most about dumbphones spend the least time online,
Krigbaum said. A certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be
less online required aggressive online digging.
The coupleStults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-fivesaw a
business opportunity. If somebody could condense it and simplify it to
the best options, maybe more people would make the switch, Krigbaum said.
In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce company, Dumbwireless, to sell
phones, data plans, and accessories for people who want to reduce time
spent on their screens. This wasnt Stultss first attempt at
entrepreneurship; his past efforts included a made-in-America clothing
brand in Colorado (That went under, he said) and a coffee shop in the
back of an ill-attended Hollywood comedy club (A doomed enterprise,
Krigbaum said). Dumbwireless, however, has been much more successful.
The couples home, in East Los Angeles, has turned into a kind of
dumbphone emporium, with five hundred boxed devices stacked up in what was
supposed to be a dining room. Stults takes business calls on his personal
cell, and on one recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead
on customer service, he has to use a smartphonego figure.) They pack each
order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They have not yet quit
their day jobs, which are in the service industry, but Dumbwireless sold
more than seventy thousand dollars worth of products last month, ten
times more than in March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an
acceleration in sales last October, which they speculate may have had
something to do with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of
their popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device
with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and the
Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like something designed
for Neo to carry in The Matrix (which, to be fair, is a movie of the
dumbphone era).
The growing dumbphone fervor may be motivated, in part, by the discourse
around child safety online. Parents are increasingly confronted with
evidence that sites like Instagram and TikTok intentionally try to hook
their children. Using those sites can increase teens anxiety and lower
their self-esteem, according to some studies, and smartphones make it so
that kids are logged on constantly. Why should this situation be any
healthier for adults? After almost two decades with iPhones, the public
seems to be experiencing a collective ennui with digital life. So many
hours of each day are lived through our portable, glowing screens, but the
Internet isnt even fun anymore. We lack the self-control to wean
ourselves off, so we crave devices that actively prevent us from getting
sucked into them. That means opting out of the prevailing technology and
into what Cal Newport, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, has
called a more considered digital minimalism.
The Light Phone débuted in 2017, before smartphone exhaustion became a
mainstream ailment. The companys co-founders, Kaiwei Tang and Joe
Hollier, have sold tens of thousands of phones. The Light Phone II,
released in 2019, features a monochrome touch screen that allows users to
make calls, send text messages, and use a few custom apps: an alarm and
timer, a calendar, directions, notes, music and podcast libraries. There
are no social-media apps or streaming apps. The point is to create useful
utility that does not have the attention economy built in, Tang said.
Like Dumbwireless, Light Phone has recently been experiencing a surge in
demand. From 2022 to 2023, its revenue doubled, and it is on track to
double again in 2024, the founders told me. Hollier pointed to Jonathan
Haidts new book, The Anxious Generation, about the adverse effects of
smartphones on adolescents. Light Phone is receiving increased inquiries
and bulk-order requests from churches, schools, and after-school programs.
In September, 2022, the company began a partnership with a private school
in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to provide Light Phones to the
institutions staff members and students; smartphones are now prohibited
on campus. According to the school, the experiment has had a salutary
effect both on student classroom productivity and on campus social life.
Tang told me, Were talking to twenty to twenty-five schools now.
To Tang and Holliers surprise, some of the most willing Light Phone
converts are Gen Z-ers. Some of them are younger than the iPhone. Digital
technology has been an inevitable feature of their lives, yet they are
also better equipped, or better motivated, than generations past to
confront its negative impacts. Apple recently allowed third-party
developers to write software that accesses the iPhones Screen Time
function, meaning that some new programs can now help users limit their
screen time by blocking apps. T. J. Driver and Zach Nasgowitz, two
engineers in their early twenties, took advantage of this change to create
an iPhone accessory called Brick, to fight their own excessive phone
usage. Brick, which launched in September of 2023, is a magnetized plastic
cube with a corresponding app that allows you to select which features you
want to block on your smartphone. Tapping the brick activates or lifts the
blockage. Driver and Nasgowitz started with one 3-D printer to produce the
accessories; now they have fifteen machines running around the clock and
are shipping a few hundred products a day.
There is no one dumbphone solution for everyone. Each digital addict is
addicted in her own way. Stults, of Dumbwireless, uses an app called
Unpluq, which works similarly to Brick, blocking specific apps from his
smartphone while allowing him to maintain the stores customer-service
channels, including e-mail and Shopify. Krigbaum has been a committed
Light Phone user for the past two years. She said that she doesnt miss
her smartphone, but that her new device can cause some awkwardness when
she meets other young people who ask how to keep in touch. They mean on
social media, of course; for the vast swath of Gen Z-ers who dont use
dumbphones, exchanging numbers to text message or, God forbid, call seems
archaic. Ive been saying, I guess Ill see you if I see you,
Krigbaum said.
When I want to escape from my iPhone, I pop the sim card out (which,
unfortunately, is not possible on some newer iPhones) and install it in a
red Nokia 2780 flip phonethe closing snap of which brings me back
instantly to my high-school days, when flip phones were cutting edge.
After the surprisingly easy switching process, I take the simple device
with me on my daily walks with my dog. If I had my smartphone in hand, Id
be refreshing Instagram or compulsively checking my e-mail while my hound
does her business or sniffs tree trunks. With the Nokia, Ive cut myself
off from such meaningless digital stimuli but preserved my ability to
answer texts or phone calls if necessary. (Im too much of a millennial to
actually leave the house without any phone.) I find myself looking more at
my surroundings, which are particularly enjoyable in springtime, and I am
more relaxed when I return from the excursions. When I switch the sim card
back into my iPhone, the device seems momentarily absurd: an enormous
screen filled with infinite entertainment and information that follows me
wherever I go. Then I open all my usual apps in quick successione-mail,
Instagram, Slackto see what Ive missed. ?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-dumbphone-boom-is-
real