Glad to see there's some traction on moving away from smartphones. While the devices themselves are ostensibly neutral, so many of their apps and features are designed to maximize engagement with myriad dark patterns.
Then again, maybe it's better if everyone spends 100% of their free time repeatedly checking for new Reels™ on Instagram. You never know, there might be a good one this time.
Shout out for "Apple Configurator" for Mac, if a dumb phone appeals to you but can't because there are some apps you really need, I hardly ever see it mentioned in articles like this. It's designed for IT departments to configure all their company phones, but you can also use it to dumb down any iPhone by whitelisting a specific set of apps, it's way better than the parental controls / screen time options.
> "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.
You need to be back at your Mac to install a new profile to circumvent the whitelist, you can't do it from inside your phone.
Yes the whole of Safari can be white/blacklisted, although the way I have it set up if you're in an app with a webview it's still using Safari under the hood, and if that web view lets you browse to an arbitrary site then it can be circumventable that way. You can presumably lock it down further to prevent this, e.g. force the phone to use a specific VPN that you can then control to whitelist certain domains.
I think it's more of an issue of availability. My smartphone is incredibly useful, but I spend too much time on it. Sometimes I just have to leave the phone at home, or put it on charger in a drawer somewhere and try to forget about it. Once I'm away from my phone for a little bit, my brain finds other things that are interesting.
Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content."
Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monkey brains can't deal with it, so let's just kill it off already. Ban the whole thing.
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. So you know what, let's just ban all of it and admit it was a mistake and keep the proven good part. 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.
> 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.
Bingo. For people like me my phone is indispensable, not as a source of endless distractions (though I dabble like anyone) but I put everything in my phone. It's literally an extension of my brain, because my brain is bad at remembering things, so every last thing goes in the phone. Plans with friends, important dates in relationships, birthdays, I have calendar reminders for practically everything going on in my life, and even a bunch strictly for work. My reminders app is packed to the gills with everything from random little to-dos to full-bore projects I'm working on, with notes and documentation in other apps to boot.
It's one of the reasons I'm still an ardent Apple user, the fluidity I have between my tablets, phone and Mac is essential for my workflows. I just couldn't use a PC full time, even if I wanted to.
Same here. After using even the original iPhone for a few months I started describing using it like being a cyborg. My pocket cybernetic tool let me actually (usefully) keep my calendar with me, gave me real access to my email, and let me look up random bits of data wherever I was (modulo Cingular/AT&T's shitty EDGE service). It's only gained more capabilities as time has gone on.
I have zero social media apps and disable pretty much all notifications. My phone is a digital brain extension and reading device. I'll take pictures of random crap or where I parked to augment memory.
Phones do not have to just be dopamine distribution devices.
I'm the same. I use my phone for tracking consulting activity, notetaking, banking, parking, PayPal monitoring blood glucose, navigation, instant messaging (three apps) authentication, whether hiking maps, town notifications for trash pickup, email, birding, astronomy, away from home charge point,
I also have a half-dozen apps I shouldn't have on my phone like YouTube, streaming services web toons, Craigslist, medium.
If I move the distraction apps off of top level visibility and access as well and mostly turn off all notifications, it becomes much more reasonable tool to have.
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.
This is correct. If imagine if all you had was a desktop which was shut down between sessions. Just needing to walk to a different room, boot up your desktop, and sign in -- a minor ~1 minute of inconvenience would prevent much of this compulsive using. When the barriers are low enough, people cannot help themselves.
Every so often, I end up selling my laptop to diminish the convenience of my computer usage. Usually, I end up eventually reneging and buying a new (used) one.
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.
At various times in computing history, but not infrequently, a device was shipped with a programming environment.
IMHO, we should mandate a return to that by law.
(1) Any interface-capable device must afford its owner an ability to create new programs on it. (E.g. laptop, pad, smartphone)
(2) Any device sold must allow its owner an ability to load programs of their choice onto it.
(3) Any device sold may include security or restriction features, but must include a jailbreak capability that removes all such restrictions, if the user so chooses.
Teaching an entire generation that a computing device is a thing to be used (and hoping someone else has created and gotten approval for a program to do what you want) is a bad evolutionary path.
The point isn't that everyone will use on-device creative capabilities -- it's that anyone can.
And that their efforts can then be shared with others.
> 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.
They’re portable dopamine hit machines. We normally take dopamine hits when we do something that we like but periods of low dopamine aka boredom are required for a healthy mind.
> 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.
The game as a vehicle for human connectivity, via trying to engineer multi-player features for altruistic-only interactions, was more fascinating than the game itself to me.
> "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.
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."
> 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.
For a few times until you figure out some patters, then you check your bank app once in a while knowing what to look for wasting the least amount of time.
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.
> 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
> "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.
> 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.
Wouldn´t that allow me to add some zeroes to my account balance?
Hacker news is my last smart phone "thing", Ive now been logging out after usage and waiting progressively longer to log back in... only time before I just dont... and then its done.
At this rate of headlines, The Grauniad will be shutting their app and web servers down shortly and moving back to movable type and newspaper boys covered in soot.
My phone helps gets me to places I can go and touch things. And take photos with it. It's just a tool. Encourage those uses. It's not the device, it's the users' choice in how they use it.
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.
> you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people.
I have never been described as a focused person but I have never lost an hour to Instagram because I do not use Instagram. Nor do I use Facebook or any other social media apps. Not a one is even installed on my phone.
If you lose an hour to Instagram that is entirely on you. Instagram has to ask you to turn on notifications. You choose to open it.
Turn off all your notifications and silence your ringer and your phone won't distract you with anything. Even better delete social media apps that demand your engagement to make them money. If you feel you must use some social media only do so through their web apps.
By allowing notifications you're participating in your own abuse.
I'm not going to take the blame game angle of personal accountability as another sub thread has gone, but! I'm here to help!
First things first, you can organise your apps so that the tools you want appear prominently. On iOS Focus modes can help you set pages of apps just to what you need in that focus - I have one for "Holiday" which I use when on a beach which has my airline/holiday company, bank (to check the spends), an e-Reader, and that's it. My work focus has apps I need for work - slack, email, calendar, internal apps for accessing shared docs and so on. There is one focus which has casual games and mind candy stuff - I switch to it consciously. I can't accidentally end up in there.
I'm also lucky in that I can separate out how my friends contact me (Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram) vs family (FB Messenger and text messages), vs work (Slack). If you can do that, do it, it really helps, honestly.
Next up, kill notifications with fire. Apps heavey on notifications are the crying babies of smartphones: they can ruin your sleep with their neediness, but you need to help them adapt into your routine, not the other way around.
On iOS you can have "scheduled summary notifications", and that's awesome, but I think the only stuff you need to get notified about generally is really important stuff. Only you can decide what that is, but it's probably not social media. Kill as much of it as possible.
Unread notification badges are evil. You can get rid of those. Even on email, do you really need to know how much "work" is needed inside that app? Probably not.
Plan your time, then plan your tech around that plan, and then stick with those plans (and at first it might require willpower until it becomes habit).
These changes mean I've not been a habitual user of social media in years (and I used to be on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook for 5+ hours a day), and I'm reading more books on my phone. Things that need my attention get it, but I am super careful about deciding what that "need" really is, and most things don't get it.
We all have different personalities. I'm one of those focused people who sometimes forgets to even bring my phone along with me when I leave the house. My gf seems to have some serious catching-up to do on her FB horse diva group any time she picks up her phone. She might benefit from some kind of barrier, and I could do a better job of keeping in touch with old friends. Let's not bury our heads in the sand.
> > The majority of us, through no fault of our own
> it is called "personal accountability", I know its very hated on in the modern world, but please...
Look, I get the point you're trying to make, but as stated, this is incredibly insensitive. There are plenty of scenarios where someone should be held personally accountable for getting distracted or losing time, but this is not one of them. It's entirely possible and quite common for certain kinds of content to trick and manipulate the brain. It's not their personal fault for falling victim, just as it's not someone's personal fault for getting robbed.
Plus, not everyone can focus or resist distractions the same. Not everyone can expect to even be able to. Many people who suffer from ADHD, for example, have a particularly hard time with this.
you are wrong, I am however one of those people who say that if you are allergic to peanuts, you do not get to scream "make peanuts illegal", but you instead accept that you have a task of making sure what you stuff your face with does not contain peanuts.
I think it's reasonable to disallow peanuts in shared public spaces that people with allergies cannot realistically avoid. Certain people can have life-threatening allergic reactions to even the scent of peanuts.
what if two people in the entire world was deadly allergic to apple or perhaps avocado?
It sucks, but if you are extraordinary, you have some precautions you have to take in your life. Additionally if you are THAT sensitive to something like peanuts, you would be totally crazy to simply trust that ink on a page would protect you. You would take precautions
> what if two people in the entire world was deadly allergic to apple or perhaps avocado?
That's the thing though. Peanut allergy is the second most common food allergy. Around 1 in 100 people have a peanut allergy. I can't seem to find data on what the average sensitivity to peanut is, but in a shared space such as a school, 1 in 100 is a real consideration.
> it is called "personal accountability", I know its very hated on in the modern world, but please...
It's hated because people almost exclusively invoke it as a thought-terminating cliche instead of actually discussing the practicalities of cultivating and relying on it at scale.
> 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.
App makers (and mobile phone companies) are competitive marketplaces with alternatives. They're trying to find viable business models to fund feature development and make a profit. Can't fault them for that: users can pick another option.
Who I can fault is mobile OS/platform owners.
It's a duopoly, and they've repeatedly and strategically made user-hostile decisions that strip choice away from mobile device owners.
All of the ills you mentioned wouldn't be ills if OS features enabled user control of them.
Google is obviously the more egregious (user freedom features and need to boost quarterly profits are inversely related), but I don't think Apple would be taking a pro-privacy stance if it conflicted with their business model and they didn't see it as a strategic differentiator.
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.
Dear SJWs, stop downvoting the parental post if you just don't know the mentioned substance is a really good local anesthetic with short but powerful effect and having close to zero post-effects after a singular use.
After what happened with Adobe, Microsoft and Sonos this past week, I have decided to try limit my use of American products. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA - I have tonnes of family there and I have met some super nice people on my months long holidays there too…
But.
There is just too much poison coming out of Silicon Valley in my view. Awful choices in pursuit of our personal information, ‘Recall’ demonstrates how Silicon Vally is sick in their pursuit of trying to get even more stinking rich.
So yeah, I decided to try to remove as many American products and services from my life. It’s going to be tough. I have invested 5 digits in Apple tech over the past couple of years. It’s all to be sold now.
Switched Microsoft for Linux and OpenBSD, and I have a lot more tech to get rid of.
I know this sounds extreme, but I don’t want to fund these companies. I am partly responsible for funding then as it is, and I am out now.
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.
I remember my Grandad ranting about the wonders of the 5600K modem back in the day. He introduced me to Doom back in ‘96, then showed me BASIC in ‘98. Without him, I’d have never have got into computing. So I bet he knows the 2400 baud modem well.
I used to be Google’s biggest fan boy once upon a time. I thought they were the bees knees, then 2006 came and they began using email content for targeted ads (this was when I used googlemail) and I knew they turned bad.
Every American tech company gets corrupted in the end eh.
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.
Healthcare should be run by the government, PE is about as far away from that ideal as possible. Profit motives should rarely (if ever) mix with healthcare
The major one in the west seems to be about the inability of young people to afford a home; which causes obvious issues in building up community when you're not permanently placed in any specific neighborhood (e.g. the real social net benefits for an individual of locally volunteering can take years to generate significant return)
Honestly, I don't get why this is a problem. The iPhone has these focus modes that switch automatically. And I disable notifications for everything irrelevant. I just get emails, messenger stuff, X, banking and podcasts notifications. I always have a focus turned on, I don't ever get a vibration or sounds off of any notification.
Then again, maybe it's better if everyone spends 100% of their free time repeatedly checking for new Reels™ on Instagram. You never know, there might be a good one this time.