** Quick Heads Up! This week's installment features a detailed description of a baffling but upsetting targeted ad that I received. Anyone bothered by discussion of topics like complications with pregnancy may want to jump ahead a paragraph once I start describing an Instagram ad. **
I was a couple weeks into dumb phone ownership and things were going...okay! I'd taken a few early excursions out into the world with my Nokia and been pleasantly surprised at the results. I'd started just by taking it with me on walks around my neighborhood, a time when I'd often call a family member or friend to catch up. The call quality was clear and their was a very specific tactile appeal to talking into an actual cell phone for the first time in over a decade so with the phone having passed its initial test, I took it outside of the immediate vicinity. Some friends wanted to meet up at a nearby brewery and play a little Magic. I'd been to the spot about a dozen times before but thought it might be a good chance to walk there and take my new phone's turn by turn navigation for a spin. Sure enough, my new service plan held, the directions were accurate, and they adjusted easily if I strayed from the path it recommended. I made it to the bar and while showing up to meet my friends with a flip phone and a backpack full of Magic cards gave me a visceral flashback to 2007, I managed to walk it off before I could start humming "Hey There Delilah."
But when I tried jumping into the deep end and bringing the Nokia with me everywhere in the same way I'd bring my iPhone, cracks started to show. After spending an afternoon acquiring mp3 files for half of my workout playlist and putting them onto a microSD card, my phone refused to see or play them. That's no problem, I figured, I'll just pair my headphones and use the FM radio. But my bluetooth headphones remained invisible to my phone. I worked out in silence (AKA murderer style) yet again.
While I'd understood the "There's no such thing as a perfect smartphone" rule in the abstract, I'd had a hard time admitting that my Nokia had limitations. I'd yet to crack the code on its ability to serve as an mp3 player or tested out if calling a cab company could get me home as easily as a rideshare. I'd walked into a restaurant with QR code menus and collapsed to the ground in despair. I figured that turning back the clock wasn't something I could do selectively, if I was going to embrace the old way of doing things, I was going to have to embrace all of it. If I wanted convenience, I'd need to carry my smartphone. If I wanted peace, I'd take the dumb one.
So the iPhone started leaving the house with me again. I took it to the gym because I was sick of fiddling around with MicroSD cards. I took it to the bar because I didn't want to risk not having a safe ride home. I took it to the restaurant with the QR code menus because the menu is where they keep all the food. Eventually, I always had a reason. The iPhone had reclaimed my back right pocket as its own. Just in case. I still considered the dumbphone experiment ongoing, but its actual use had diminished to almost nothing.
A few days later I woke up and found myself idly swiping through Instagram stories and reels in bed. Barely awake. I was already overhand throwing my time into the trash. Then came a reminder in the form of another inscrutable targeted ad. This one wasn't so vague as the Secret Email Trick They Didn't Want Me To Know, this one seemed to know that my wife and I were expecting a child.
In the ad, a man with an unplaceable accent told his front facing camera that his wife went to the doctor "because her stomach was heavy" before showing an image of a doctor massaging the artificially grayed out stomach of a pregnant woman. "Unfortunately she did pass away" he said as the video changed to a video of a coffin being lowered into the earth. The voiceover continued, "But I got her this, to remember the angel" and the screen showed a plastic Funko Pop woman standing next to a small ultrasound photo on a plastic easel.
It was, to my understanding, some sort of figurine meant to commemorate...a miscarriage? A death during delivery? It was unclear. The video showed no name for the service or product. Perplexed and disturbed, I watched it through again, realizing that it wasn't an ad at all, just an AI generated video. This disturbing invocation of the loss of a pregnancy (clearly targeted at me because the algorithm has figured out that I'm expecting a kid) wasn't meant to sell me anything, it wasn't meant to spread the word about any cause or concept, it was just a video generated to elicit a reaction from those who watched it in hopes that they'd comment or share. It was slop, made from churning up the work of real human artists and regurgitating into the shape of a nightmare in hopes that it might upset someone in my position enough to get them to keep watching. And it had worked.
As I sat there, watching an uncanny AI approximation of every pregnant couple's worst case scenario, I knew that this experiment was about more than a simple swap of devices. I needed to change the way I thought about technology, social media, and the internet. Because it turns out that given the option between convenience and peace, most of us will choose convenience every time.
After a little mild annoyance, the desire to not have to think about the hard work of detoxing from the dopamine loop overtook my desire to make my life better. The smartphone is an expert at drawing attention away from itself, serving as a portal to the whole of modernity at once. It presents itself as a tool, and at one point it was, but now its primary purpose is to gently nudge you in whatever direction makes you a better consumer. It learns what sorts of shirts you like and tries to sell them to you and if it stopped there, it might even be useful. But it also learns what makes you sad, what makes you angry, and what makes you scared and it knows which of those emotions make you more likely to watch an ad or buy a product. It knows more about your reactions to these sorts of stimuli than you do.
In exchange for this unprecedented ceding of the self, we receive an increasingly frictionless world, a FaceTune of the human experience, but what we're unwilling to admit is that most of the time our phones save us is given right back to them. Our passwords, house keys, and work messages are all in one place but so are our friends, our lovers, and our vices. We don't even have to look up if we don't want to. The bones in our necks and hands change shape and we coin new terms for what's happening to our eyes. Somewhere miles away, a handful of perpetually damp men make more money and call the whole thing worth it.
So why chase after the frictionless life? That in the absence of all our tasks and chores and errands, there's nothing. The entire point of life is those moments you get where for some brief amount of time, you can free yourself from whatever stress and responsibility life has thrust on you. Dinner with friends, a day out with family, these are the entire point of being alive and they are defined by the drudgery that precedes them. You can try to find something bigger, something more fulfilling, but it isn't there. There's nothing better than these moments and now so many of us spend them fighting the urge to check our phones. The phones are the devil. They are hell, if hell cost a month's rent. Until you realize that, you'll never be free of them.
Remember that Apple ad that made everyone furious? The one where they take a bunch of tools, art supplies, and instruments, crush them in a hydraulic press, and pull an iPad out? Anyone attempting to get rid of their smartphone needs to understand that what they're doing is essentially that in reverse. Getting free of your phone means saying goodbye to do-it-all devices and embracing complexity and frustration. It means occasionally having to work out in silence or get a little lost on the way to a new place. It means letting life's wrinkles and flaws come back into view.
I bought an analog alarm clock so that my phone wouldn't "need" to be at my bedside. I found a $20 mp3 player that I could take to the gym with a bare bones workout playlist. I read a handful of different guides on my Nokia's microSD problem and watched video tutorials on how to fix it with a little reformatting, some tweezers, and patience. I cursed under my breath a dozen times troubleshooting the issue until eventually, it worked. It was annoying. It felt good.
We're supposed to do things. We're supposed to manipulate objects and learn skills, to have an effect on the world even if just amounts to poking around until something works the way it's supposed to.
I still have my iPhone. The problem of authenticator codes and QR scans isn't going anywhere, but it lives in a drawer in my kitchen now. I check it once a day and it doesn't enter my office or bedroom. Instead, if I need something, I find a way to do it with what I have available to me or I find a way to live without it. When it comes to smart tech, my new rule has been that if I cannot believably explain how it functions as a tool (rather than just as a thing to stare at), I try not to use it. We'll see if it lasts.
Last weekend, Julia and I got sandwiches in Pasadena and ate them in the park. While we were there, I saw a dad halfheartedly pushing his kid on the swings while looking at his phone. As he fixated on something, his son swung forward with an outstretched hand, hoping to make some sort of contact. It felt like the kid's hand hung there for an hour before physics pulled him backwards, his gaze not met, his hand still grasping in vain at his dad.
I don't want act like a singular moment could possibly be a reflection of someone's parenting skills, but it's a moment he missed, one that I remember better than he does. I looked over at Julia, just a few months from giving birth to our kid, and made note that this wasn't just for me. We finished our sandwiches and went to the gardens to see the roses in bloom. I took one shitty picture and it took me twenty minutes to figure out how to get it off my phone. I remember the day better than any other Saturday this year.
That's a wrap on Dumb Phone Diaries! That's not to say that I won't continue writing about my ongoing quest to minimize the influence of tech and social media in my life, but I plan to do so in standalone pieces from here on out (partially out of a desire to get back to talking about other topics and partially because y'all don't click on/read stuff that requires having read another installment. Shame on you!!)
I was going to write that Sinners piece but like most of my attempts at movie criticism a bunch of pros whose work I love said most of the things I'd have said. I'm finishing up the Route 66 book I've been working on right now so sometimes you've gotta let an idea go.
Next week's piece is a banger though, I'm really excited about this one. See you then.