How to Survive the Cyberpunk Dystopia 101 - Chapter 3: Full Connection, Full Time
“(…) what is free often proves most costly.”
- Goro Takemura, Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)
This chapter will be focused on smartphones and social media use. I’ll start off with some theoreticals, and then move on to practices that you can opt to take or not, that can help with this.
This chapter was written with the help of high relevance figures, such as YouTubers randy moon and Christian Simpson, AKA, Perifractic @ Retro Recipes.
3.1. The Pocket Computer’s Killshot
I would be lying if I didn’t say the smartphone is one of the biggest feats of engineering we’ve made thus far in our civilization. Jobs describes it as “[a music player], a phone and an internet communicator”. Since then, smartphones have become more advanced, as their hardware and operating systems have increased in complexity: if we’re talking Android, if you know what you’re doing, a smartphone is simply a pocket computer, all of them more advanced than the super computers that put man on the moon.
However, as the years have passed, smartphones have crossed a technological, ethical and philosophical threshold that made them what they are today: locked down, media consumption machines, tools for the manufacturing of behavior prediction products for corpos, and phones with so many features amalgamated to them that you completely forget they’re supposed to be phones.
And I don’t think this was done by accident. It is clear that smartphones, and the apps that are served on them nowadays, are engineered to grab your attention and consume as much of our time as possible, and this has terrible effects on our mental health. “(…) their omnipresence can lead to compulsive use and a sense of dependency” and “The constant stream of notifications and updates can create a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out, leading to increased anxiety and stress. Furthermore, the excessive use of smartphones can interfere with sleep, which is crucial for mental health.” (Source: Department of Psychiatry of the University of Columbia)
And this isn’t a very recent effect. It has been happening for at least ten years. A study was published in 2020 on the National Library of Medicine called “Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health” that studied the effects of smartphones and social media on children and young teens in North America and found that, in Canada, the percentage of teenagers reporting on “moderate to serious” mental distress at hospitals had increased at a steady rate between 2013 and 2017, and that inpatient hospital admissions for other so called “average” medical conditions had decreased somewhat, with a substantial increase in admissions for teenagers reporting these mental distress cases, and an alarming increase of 110% for self-harm and suicide attempt admissions between 2009 and 2014, with a prevalence of these effects being noticed on young women. To avoid the possibility of it being an isolated incident, investigators studied the possibility of these occurrences in the United States and the same trends were observed there.
The investigators link this with an increase in smartphone and social media prevalence in the lives of these children. In the United States, 89% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 have a smartphone, 70% use social media multiple times per day. In Canada, the number of teenagers who claim to use social media for more than 5 hours per day has also been on a steady increase, having reached 20% of youth body by 2017.
But it’s not just intense use of Smartphones and social media that causes these problems. The lack of it nowadays seems to also have negative effects on mental health. A study released in 2022 on the Journal of Psychiatric Research on “Associations between smartphone use, mental health and well-being among young Swiss men” found that, while intense users report to having problems related to depression, social anxiety, ADHD and lower levels of life satisfaction, people who don’t use smartphones at all - a minority in the study population, less than 5% of the people studied - “reported worse mental health and well-being than smartphone users on all outcomes”, concluding that “although society and mental health professionals are deeply concerned about the potentially negative consequences of the ever-increasing use of smartphones, the present study suggested that not using a smartphone may also indicate problems.”
As I mentioned in the last chapter about that Protomen song, when it comes to using smartphones, you’re fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t. But these are easy questions to make. What I wanted to find out was, not if, but why smartphones cause these issues on our mental health.
3.1.1. Why does the thing do the thing we hate?
Two articles would lead me to the answer: “Humans’ attachment to their mobile phones and its relationship with interpersonal attachment style” published in 2016 on “Computers in Human Behavior” which addresses why people are becoming more attached and dependent on their smartphones, and “Understanding the impact of smartphones on mental health” published by the Singapore Management University in 2023, which explains how this attachment can affect our mental health.
Let’s start with the first one. The 2016 paper elaborated by researchers in the Eötvös Loránd University’s Department of Ethology explains that while smartphone usage has become akin to an addiction, with everything from abusive use - registering that “in the USA people use their smartphones 3.3 h a day in average, and in young adults aged between 18 and 24 this number is 5.2 h a day.” - and withdrawal symptoms, where “two thirds of mobile users report distress on being separated from the phone”, it is still not registered in the DSM-5 as such, with smartphone dependence being registered only as some sort of behavioral problem and its withdrawal symptoms having been considered some sort of unrelated “phenomena”. They call it “nomophobia” - a term coined in 2008 by the UK Post Office -, describing it as a “fear of, or anxiety caused by, not having a working mobile phone” (Source: Wikipedia).
Many other researchers are cited, stating that “The phone can be considered as a store of memories and social connections (in the forms of phone numbers, photos, messages, etc.). Thus, the phone does not simply enhance our social life but also embodies it”, stating that the smartphone “gives users the impression that they are constantly connected to the world and therefore feel less alone”. But this is exactly how phones catch us make us their prisoners because, as they become the embodiment of our “self” and give us the illusion of endless connection, as we become dependent of those components, their absence can feel like a rug pulled from underneath our feet.
The second article, published in 2023 by Andree Hartanto of the SMU, found that “smartphone separation causes a higher level of anxiety than when compared to separation from an equally valuable possession”. Remember that nomophobia I was talking about? These are those “withdrawal symptoms” I was mentioning. Hartanto explains:
“We carry it around all day due to its portability and multifunctionality. There is no other device that is as unique as a smartphone in this regard. Over time, we may develop dependency and attachment toward our smartphone, and it may trigger separation anxiety when we are separated from it (…) our dependency on smartphones to meet our need for relatedness may exacerbate our fear of missing out when we are unable to use our phone, leading to an aversive emotional response such as anxiety.”
So not only do we get separation anxiety from smartphones due to us being so overly dependent on them, we’re also hit with FOMO Syndrome, FOMO meaning “fear-of-missing-out”. It’s an apprehensive feeling of not being in the loop, of missing out on information, events, experiences or life decisions that could be crucial to our every day lives. (Source: Wikipedia)
But again, remember. It’s not just separation from it, it’s also compulsive use - especially if FOMO affects you severely. Social media can also inflict FOMO Syndrome on its users, but other components of these platforms also negatively impact the mind.
Research by Doctor Dawn Bounds at UC Davis in California (Source) mentions some of these, like photo and video face filters - which can affect our self-image by increasing self-consciousness and disgust with ourselves after constant exposure to altered imagery -, heightened life dissatisfaction due to what is known as the “highlight reel” - the constant publishing on social media of only the “highlights” of our life, which can cause others to see their own lives as inadequate because they’re not perfect like other people’s lives -, and the increase of cyberbullying and generally hostile and inflammatory dialogue in these platforms.
They also mention dopamine but this is where I say that I do not agree with this one point and the part where I give you a small little biology lesson on dopamine.
3.1.2. Everything you know (about dopamine) is wrong
Recent literature, be it scientific academia or just straight up pop-science publishing, seems to have settled on dopamine being the “feel good drug”. It’s described as the chemical that “gives us a pleasurable sensation”, akin to how we feel when we have sex or food we like. I wouldn’t blame people for coming up with this absurd conclusion because it’s even what fucking WebMD describes it as (Source).
However, this notion is fucking wrong, and I’ll explain to you what dopamine actually does, backed by people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Dopamine has been recently linked to the so called “dopamine detoxes”, due to the misconception of “feel good drug” and that, since it’s a sort of drug, you can be addicted to it! Right? No.
I’m sorry, but it’s not the dopamine you’re addicted to, it’s whatever gave you that potential feeling of pleasure. Dopamine isn’t directly related to pleasure, it’s related to your brain’s reward center, and it is used to register sensations and cues in your environment to hardwire behaviors for expected rewards.
What does cause feelings of pleasure are other chemicals that our brain produces like serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin. Dopamine is a motivational neurotransmitter. It is what I would call the “drive” chemical. If your brain doesn’t have dopamine, you can still find pleasure in the things you find pleasurable, you just won’t want to do them. That’s because dopamine is used to register behaviors in our brains that we want to do, because we are expecting a reward from that behavior. (Sources: Atomic Habits, Dopamine and Addiction, Mental Health America, The New York Times)
This is the part where I can finally explain then, that dopamine is not used against us by these platforms in the sense of making us feel good by using them. We’ve already established that intense use of social media actually makes is feel fucking awful. So, why do we keep coming back to this fucking place?
3.1.3. The TikTok/Reels/Shorts Slot Machine
There is one behavior that is more addicting than sex and drug abuse: gambling. However, it’s not usually seen as a very negative thing. People tend to overlook the negative consequences of gambling addiction due to its connotation with being a leisure activity, whereas drug abuse is usually seen as a representation of “lack of morality” and lack of “willpower”.
What’s worse is that “individuals suffering from gambling disorders often face stigmatization and are perceived through negative stereotypes, leading to a tendency to hide their addiction and potentially avoid seeking treatment. This stigma can act as a barrier to treatment, as individuals may fear judgment and rejection from society.” (Source: Atlantic Behavior Health)
Gambling is a sector that has many points of entry: you can gamble in poker, you can gamble on the roulette, you can gamble on a fucking lottery ticket. But the easiest gambling game, with practically no bar for entry other than the money you’ll be gambling away is, without a doubt, the slot machine.
The slot machine isn’t just a gambling device. It is the representation of dopamine manipulation for creating addictive behavior, perfected. You pull the lever and, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a reward. If not, you gotta keep paying, and you gotta keep pulling the lever.
Noticed how I worded that? Let me switch up some words so you finally understand where I’m going with this.
“TikTok isn’t just a social media platform. It is the representation of dopamine manipulation for creating addictive behavior, perfected. You scroll the feed down and, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll watch a post you really like. If not, you gotta keep sacrificing your time and attention, and you gotta keep scrolling.”
Most people will come to these platforms talking about the “algorithm”, spouting nonsense about how it values short form content or long form content or this topic or that topic. I’ll tell you what it values. Every person has their own tweaked “algorithm” made just for them. When you enter a platform, the more you watch, the more the algorithm learns about what you like and don’t like, and that’s how the algorithm shows you what you want to see or not.
Some people nowadays would now reply to me saying “but sometimes, my feed is full of stuff that I don’t like!” And that is true, but that’s exactly the point! All of these algorithms are then amalgamated into what I call a “master slot machine algorithm”.
Your personal algorithm takes your behavior as input and the output is a data set on what kind of content you like. Then, the master slot machine algorithm takes this data set and crafts a feed of videos on your TikTok, or Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts or whatever the fuck, that simulates the exact gameplay of a slot machine. It places videos that you are guaranteed to like interspersed with videos that you may not like as much or that you are completely uninterested in. The more they can keep you scrolling, the more they reinforce this behavior in you, the more time you spend scrolling, and the more money they make.
This is due to a neat trick about dopamine. Remember how I explained that dopamine is used to register behavior so you’ll remember to do it again for a reward? Well, it’s released normally the first times you perform a pleasurable behavior to register the cues surrounding it, and whenever you are put in the same situation, dopamine is released again as your brain signals you that it is antecipating a reward and that you should perform the registered behavior to get access to that reward. Again, it is now released before you even get the reward.
Well, when you perform the behavior and get the reward, you get no dopamine spike. You may get some serotonin or oxytocin, but your brain antecipated the reward, so no more reinforcement takes place.
Well, what if the reward doesn’t come immediately? In that case, you actually get a dopamine dip! This can lead to lower motivation, but the craving is still there, so you keep going. “I’ve already gone so far, one more time can’t hurt.” Sounds familiar? Then, if you end up actually getting the reward you initially expected, you get a second dopamine spike, and the brain reinforces that behavior even further. This is the trick behind these feeds, that none of these companies want you to know.
3.1.4. Trapped in DOOM
I’m sure you’ve heard and are keenly aware of the phenomenon that has been cutesly named “DOOM scrolling”. It’s kind of related to the previous topics we’ve talked about but is related mostly to when your feed decides itself to be filled with news related topics. Investigators at the Yildiz Technical University of Istanbul define DOOM scrolling as “a habit of scrolling through social media and news feeds where users obsessively seek for depressing and negative information” (Source: Doomscrolling Scale: its Association with Personality Traits, Psychological Distress, Social Media Use, and Wellbeing)
But it’s important to state that this isn’t a habit that people choose to follow. As the paper I cited describes, DOOM scrolling is more of a “vicious cycle in which users find themselves stuck in a pattern of seeking negative information no matter how bad the news is”. This is one of the key factors in the link between social media and the rise in depression and anxiety among its users, and it has, as many negative things in our society today, gained rise and prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all stuck indoors, with not much to do except scroll on our phones.
I wanted to get a bit of a closer look on how this affects people, so I decided, as a completely normal person (really, I am 🙃) to contact a YouTuber that I respect deeply to get some insights on this, which I really didn’t expect to answer my email, but to my shock, not only replied but gave me some insights on this topic.
In June 2024, YouTuber randy_moon published the video “Whatever Happened to Profile Customization?” which I think is a topic I may cover in the future too, but if you want a bit of a history lesson on it, I’d recommend just watching her video on it. However, it was watching this video in particular that inspired me to email Randy and get her insights on the topic of smartphone usage, smartphone addiction and social media addiction.
Here are some of the questions I asked her and the answers she gave.
S (Shodan): Do you think your mental health and the way you engage with others in real life has been affected by technology, specifically social media? R (Randy): At times, I have felt that my mental health has been negatively impacted by social media. I am definitely susceptible to “doom scrolling,” particularly on Twitter, and after reading post upon post about tragic world events and the worst takes imaginable, I often find myself in a more pessimistic mindset. I have had to take breaks from the app for the sake of my mental health a couple times and touch grass to remind myself that not everything is doom and gloom. On the flip side, social media has also positively affected my mental health in some ways by allowing me to find communities of like-minded people that I never would have discovered otherwise, particularly on Tumblr. I am not the most social person IRL, so this has helped me to feel less isolated and alone.
S: Do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with your smartphone (if you use one)? Do you feel like you spend too much time on social media? R: I am admittedly a little more addicted to my phone and to social media than I would like to be. I find myself checking Twitter or Instagram whenever I have a spare moment and losing track of time scrolling. I wish I could become more comfortable with boredom than feeling I need to have some sort of visual stimulation at all times. I do think my attention span has suffered as a result of this. Unfortunately, it’s a tough habit to break.
DOOM scrolling can have a crushing effect on the human mind. According to a study published in 2023 to the NHM by investigators in the University of Vermont, research showed that doomscrolling seemed to generally affect people negatively, resulting in increases in psychopathology, with intensity increasing for people who are already afflicted with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. (Source: Doomscrolling during COVID-19: The negative association between daily social and traditional media consumption and mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic)
Psychology professor Bethany Teachman of the University of Virginia explains the effects more deeply:
“(…) when a person gets caught in hours and hours of reading negative stories, it can give an exaggerated sense of threat and increase the feelings of danger and vulnerability. We know, for instance, from past times of trauma and crises that individuals who engage in extended media consumption tied to the trauma are more likely to develop later mental health problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depressive disorders, compared to individuals who place limits on their negative media consumption.”
She does however state that current research is producing results that suggest that certain personalities are more predisposed to DOOM scroll and to be affected by its negative consequences:
“(…) we can infer from other research that people who are vulnerable to anxiety are going to be especially likely to fall into this cycle. This is because anxiety is associated with a bias to pay extra attention to negative information. Anxious individuals quickly orient to negative cues, so threatening headlines capture attention rapidly, and they find it hard to disengage once they are reading negative information. This pattern can reinforce anxious individuals’ sense that the world is a dangerous place and they must be extra vigilant for signs of danger, which of course can lead to more doomscrolling in an endless cycle of monitoring for threat and trying to find answers to questions when those answers don’t really exist.”
(Source: What Is ‘Doomscrolling?’ Why Do We Do It, and How Can We Stop?)
3.2. The Human Killshot
So the smartphone is actually not just a pocket computer for media consumption and communication, but it’s also a FOMO machine, an object we have now depend too much of, an object from which we get separation anxiety, an open window to distorted versions of reality and the perfect slot machine algorithm: all things corpos love to use to make you their perfect money printing device thanks to advertisement revenue and engagement time.
Great. Now what? Where do we go from here? Shoshana Zuboff says in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that “we hunt the puppet master, not the puppet”. We have to recognise that we some times confuse corpos and corpo philosophy with the technologies they employ to bring it to life. Smartphones aren’t inherently evil, but the way they have changed into what they are and the people that have made it so are. However, you can’t really fight Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerburg, these multi millionaires with teams in laboratories who are working against the clock formulating new ways of keeping you engaging.
There’s one question I asked Randy that I didn’t put before, because I wanted to add it here.
S: Do you think there is still hope for the next generations, if not this one, to overturn the status quo of what the internet is today, and make it better in the future? R: I’d like to believe that there is still hope. I’ve definitely noticed a lot more pushback against the current state of the internet in the last few years. Some of the big social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr have become less popular in recent years due to controversial policy changes or concerns about privacy. I think we could see a social media collapse at some point. I would love to see the internet become less centralized like it was in the old days, but it’s really hard to say what will happen.
This pushback Randy is mentioning is what I want to talk about next. We’ve talked about theoreticals a lot, but theory without practice means nothing. There are many ways to avoid getting ultra tracked by your phone and by social media, and I’ll begin by telling you a bit about MY experience with those.
3.2.1. My story with smartphones
I received my first smartphone when I was around 13. It was an LG from the time, but not anything top of the line. It was small and clunky but I really liked it. I had flipped between different so called “normal” cell phones at the time, where I started with a Nokia N95 which lasted up until I used Alcatel and Motorola imitations of the Blackberry.
After I got that LG, I went down a rabbit hole that went with the LG in 2013, a chinese weird phone in 2015, then a Samsung Galaxy J5 in 2017, a Xiaomi Redmi 9 in 2020, a Nothing Phone (1) in 2022 and an iPhone 13 mini in 2024. I am what you can call a “phone consumer”.
I didn’t realise it at the time but I was starting to become very dependent on my phone. It was what I spent most of my time on. Most of this was because I really liked tweaking my phone to make it do some “unorthodox” things, but the time I was spending on it was increasing and I wasn’t noticing it.
I began using social media when I was, like, 10. I lied on the internet about my birth date and made a profile on Facebook. Then Twitter. Then Tumblr. I didn’t know exactly how to use these sites, but I can definitely say I was exposed to some shit during these formative years of my life, and I can say with high confidence that my experience in the internet on these early days shaped the way I am right now.
I began working my cybersecurity job in 2023 and at the beginning, I was entirely focused on it. As the years passed, I became more affected by distractions and the phone, which had now included a Microsoft Teams client and my work email jumbled into one, was constantly spamming me with notifications, endlessly jabbing me to pull my attention away for a second.
It was around this time too when my girlfriend also started noticing I spent a lot of time on the phone (even if she usually does too, which was kind of hypocritical). I didn’t really consider it until she told me. So I went and looked at the numbers, particularly at the “Digital Wellbeing” app that Android started coming bundled with and what I saw shocked me.
Out of the around 16 hours I was awake, around 6-7 were spent on my phone. 6 to 7 hours. Let’s consider that I take around an hour and a half to get up from bed and getting my stuff done and I also take two hours for commuting to and from work. Let’s also say I’m always on the phone during the commute to get my mind off work, and let’s say that I get distracted by the phone for half the time of my mourning routine. Of around 13 productive hours in the day, 4 of them, I was on my phone. That was almost a third of my day. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I couldn’t believe that some of the first things I would do during the day were open my smartphone and check social media. Checking youtube or reddit when I was supposed to be working. Not giving the proper time to be with my girlfriend so I could be on the phone.
This was around the time when I fell into the r/dumbphones subreddit. The community is run by Jose Briones, author of “Low Tech Life”, a book about digital minimalism, which I haven’t read yet because digital minimalism never was my thing. Maybe it already is and I don’t notice it, but I digress.
I started noticing a large amount of people that were exchanging the conveniences of a smartphone for a flip phone or a “normal” cell phone, and I was kind of shocked I hadn’t come across it before. As I read more and more, I deciced to take a first step and start cutting back on some of the stuff I was doing already.
Step 1: Stop using social media
One of the first things I stopped doing was using social media. It was honestly bogging me down. I used it mainly because my girlfriend loved sending me cat videos through it but sometimes, I’d put the messages aside and got lost in a feed of videos.
The same thing happened to me on YouTube. I couldn’t stop scrolling the shorts for hours at a time.
It also didn’t help that I was constantly getting notifications about whenever someone posted the next big thing about their lives on these platforms. I grew tired of it and the first thing I did was stop using social media. I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, and I use YouTube very lightly.
I think a lot of people are starting to notice that social media is starting to degrade the way we see reality and interact with each other. One of these is Gracie Kate, an influencer that started posting on Instagram when she was only ten years old to limited reception, only for her exposure and fame to skyrocket in 2018 with ASMR videos.
In March of 2024, however, she made a sudden change to the kind of content she made, this change being marked by a video called “Deleting Social Media as an Influencer”. It is more of an announcement of a change in the kind of content she let out to her followers, but I think there’s more to it.
“(…) I too often vegetate in front of my phone for an amount of time I’m way too embarrassed to admit, but, recently, I’m starting to feel like it’s just a waste. I feel so low and antsy anytime I check my phone. I believe that social media has its pros and can be used for good, but for me and where I’m at in my life, I want to see what it’s like to be free from social media.”
This apparently was an idea that had grown to her before as well, but she felt trapped in her situation due to her job as an influencer both on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc., being her main source of income.
“I quickly realized how tied my daily life was to my image on the internet: I felt obligated to post my life – I mean, I’ve been posting every week for the past 5 years.”
It’s a big thing when it’s not just normal people taking the option to reject social media, but also influencers who have everything to lose by letting go of these streams, but it happened with Grace and with many others.
In 2017, Selena Gomez, in an interview with The New York Times openly admitted that she deletes Instagram once a week to stop herself from consulting comments on her posts, confessing that the barrage of commentary she received about herself was soul crushing, despite running one of the most followed accounts on the platform.
“When I was on Wizards of Waverly Place, we didn’t have social media really. Twitter had just begun. Every Friday, I’d get to do a live taping in front of all these little kids and make their life. That’s when I was the happiest. Then, as I got older, I watched it go from zero to a hundred.”
In 2022, Tom Holland followed suit and published a video on his social media announcing he too was stepping away from using it in order to keep his mental health in check.
“I have taken a break from social media for my mental health because I find Instagram and Twitter to be overstimulating, to be overwhelming - I get caught up and I spiral when I read things about me online - and ultimately, it’s very detrimental to my mental state, so I decided to take a step back and delete the [apps].”
A year later, in a podcast with Jay Shetty, he would elaborate more on this:
“(…) I was so addicted to this kind of false version of my life that it was just taking over. I would be on set working, I’d come and sit on my chair and just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and it was – it was becoming… a problem. (…)”
The story he tells about this on the podcast is interesting because it also paints a picture of how the media is also running with stories about celebrities leaving social media as some sort of negative, rather than letting their influence reach other people. He says that the press ran with the announcement he made in 2022 and painted it in a negative light, claiming that it “painted people looking for help in the wrong light”.
This is a frequent narrative that the status quo will try to impose on anyone who goes against the current. It’s a trend we’ll see pop up many more times as our current reality merges more and more with the cyberpunk dystopias imagined by writers like Gibson and Pondsmith.
However, there IS an alternative to this!
Step 1.5: Use social networking sites instead!
People tend to think that “social media” and “social networks” are analogous terms that refer to the same kind of website, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It seems to be confusing to try to explain this very deeply, so I’ll draw the distinction here:
- Social media websites encompass various platforms for sharing information and emphasize content sharing and interaction, with a little sprinkling of persuasion and manipulation, which is why they’re the beasts we villify today.
- Social networking sites can be social media websites, but they differ in their emphasis on relationships and information dissemination, by focusing on communication and interaction with users to develop social bonds.
For this end, there are a few projects online right now and a few more underway:
- SpaceHey is a revival of MySpace that allows you to customize your profile using HTML and CSS and is primarily focused on user-to-user interaction. It is currently being habitated by a very young populace generating a revival in the emo scene. It also has mobile apps for both Android and iOS, so maybe give it a shot.
- off—line is a remake of the older version of Facebook that attempts to emulate the feel and function of Facebook back in 2009.
Keep in mind both of these websites are currently in active development, and SpaceHey is run by a small startup off of Germany without a lot of possessions, so website stability is shoddy and it goes down quite often. But hey, I personally use SpaceHey, so why not join us and send me an add? :)
Step 2: Blocking unnecessary notifications
Another thing I did around this time was also delete unnecessary notifications I got on my phone. A lot of notifications from applications I still wanted to keep close to me like Uber and Uber Eats, Discord, Signal - fuck, even the Starbucks app was giving me unnecessary fucking notifications, it was starting to drive me crazy.
Thankfully nowadays, if you’re using an Android phone, going to your phone settings and selecting what kind of notifications should go through per application is an option now. If you only want to receive ride notifications on Uber or delivery notifications on Uber Eats, or direct message notifications on Discord, that’s an option for you!
If you’re on iPhone like I was when this all began for me though, this gets a bit worse. There’s only the option to completely deactivate notifications for the app or open the flood gates in. There is no inbetween with iOS like there is with Android which infuriated me to no end. However, there was a final solution - the “nuclear button”, so to speak.
Step 3: 2004 called, they want your phone back
Yeah, why did you think I referenced r/dumbphones? Get a dumbphone. It’s the best thing you can do for your brain right now.
It’s not for everyone, in fact I’d say it’s not for most people, but if you’re not using your phone for anything too complicated and can live with compromising and leaving homebanking and other “convenient apps” at more than an arm’s length, this might be the solution for you.
A lot of people have chosen this route, including Gracie! Remember Gracie?
This is her with her Kyocera DuraXV! She made this switch almost a month after quitting social media, but she does reminisce that maybe it wasn’t the only move she needed to make:
“(…) I still managed to be addicted to my phone. The time spent on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, whatever, got replaced with apps like Gmail, Photos and the Weather forecast. I realized that it didn’t matter what the app was, my brain was just craving the sensation of careless scrolling.”
- Gracie Kate, Changing to a Flip Phone changed my Life
Other people from different walks of life have talked about making this change, like Chris Tofu, a recent UCLA graduate that made the switch in the beginning of 2023.
“(…) ever since I’ve become a young adult, I’ve lived in a world dominated by the smartphone.”
Watching this video surprised me quite a bit because, as Chris explained why he was switching to a dumbphone, I could hear him almost describe… me.
“This thing [my smartphone]? It was killing my soul. It was the first thing I’d look at when I woke up, and the last thing I’d look at before I went to bed. It filled the boring moments and even the exciting ones, sometimes.”
And it seems that the effects of the switch are almost always - as long as the positives of using a dumbphone outweigh the negatives of not using a smartpone - positive. Christian Simpson, one of the founders of the Commander X16 project before he left, and one of the two main hosts of the Retro Recipes channel talks about this in his Ultimate Dumbphone video, where he explains some of the theoreticals and technicalities behind it, and how he uses an Ericsson R520m 2G phone for this.
“I’m no longer reachable by 20 apps at any time. I don’t find myself reaching for my phone every spare minute, (…) because, like many people, I’ve realized we just don’t need any of it. (…) When I first started this project, it was a bit of a joke, and I was just interested in if I could get the phone to, maybe, make one call, but it actually ended up becoming my everyday phone with calls, SMS, voicemail, email, Apple iMessage and even text based web browsing. (…) It’s genuinely brought a nostalgic, neo zen to my family life, and it’s why I’m so excited to share it with you too.”
For my case, I made the switch around March of 2024, when I began using a Kyocera Digno 3 902KC. It comes from a large lineage of flip phones from Japan called “Keitai” (ケータイ), which directly translates to “something you take with you”, which honestly aligns with my goals for this switch, since I’m trying to establish that I’m the one using the phone, not the other way around.
The way I schematized the usage of this phone was by having two separate phone numbers. I signed up for relatively cheap phone service for my flip phone and I set my iPhone to redirect my calls to it. I also have it as a “companion” WhatsApp device.
Yes, the 902KC runs Android, but it’s a very old one, 8.1.0, so a lot of apps won’t work on it anymore. A lot of them would never work because this phone doesn’t come with Google Play Services, and at the time, there really isn’t a way to install them on it.
I have a couple of apps installed on it. WhatsApp for one is THE thing here in Europe. Since not everyone is rocking iPhones like in the US, WhatsApp has a larger market here. For Multi-Factor Authentication, I use an open source app called 2FAS, which was compatible with my phone and the apps that use MFA.
I also run a really locked down Discord and a QR Alarm app. If you want more details and findings on this, I have a couple of resources I’d like to link:
- Me of course! I have a reddit post detailing findings I made after using this phone for about 4 months, and I keep updating it to this day, so if you’re interested in this phone give it a shot.
- Alex S., also known as HogwashDrinker on Reddit has also made a guide about the 902KC so it’s also a worthwhile article to read if you’re interested.
- If you think a Keitai could be for you, but not specifically a 902KC, there are others out there, and for this, I’d recommend reading u/killmonger’s consolidated-ish guide to owning a keitai There are other devices out there like Nokia flip phones, the CAT S22 Flip, the TCL Flip 2 and a plethora of other ancient devices as well as new dumb phones being projected by people, so you should also research them if this step interests you. Again, a good resource for this is Jose Briones and the r/dumbphones subreddit.
Step 4: Include Companion Devices in your Setup
I’m going to use the term “Companion Device” using the definition used by u/Specialist_Royal_449 in r/dumbphones, where he claims that it is “a device to use to bridge the gap between a dumbphone and a smartphone”. The usage of companion devices may end up being a necessity to some since you’re removing the “all-in-one” philosophy that smartphones embody. Maybe your dumbphone doesn’t have GPS for navigation, or Spotify to listen to music. However there are still devices you can use separately.
For navigation, paper maps are still a thing, but they’re not really for everyone. But one thing you may not be aware of anymore is that GPS navigators are still being sold at tech stores. They may not come with the best transit prediction like Google Maps or Waze, but they are an option. If you have a car with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, you could also just use an old Android Phone/iPhone, see if it is compatible with it, lock out most of the stuff and just keep Google Maps and Waze on it to connect it to your car. Tape it to the car if you need it but make sure you are aware that that device CANNOT leave the car with you (except for maintenace).
For music, honestly, iPods have been making a resurgence in the last few years and they’re fucking cool as shit, you can buy used ones on eBay or refurbished on Elite Obsolete Electronics. iTunes for Windows or Apple Music in macOS can be used to add songs to them still, and if you pay for Spotify, you can even download music from it and import it to your iPod! If you want more details on it, I made a video all about this (although its a bit rambly, so if you really just want the technicalities, skip to 7:40).
Two-Factor Authentication can be a bit tricky, but if you think you have the patience to set it up and its supported by whatever you want to authenticate on, a Yubikey would be a wise choice. Unlike authenticator apps offering digital 2FA, Yubikey is a physical pendrive-like device you can connect to your computer or phone that acts as physical 2FA.
3.2.2. Step 3 may not be for you.
If it sounds like the optimal choice, it’s because it is, but it also comes with a lot of drawbacks and friction on your life. I still use my iPhone on the side, the only difference being that it is not my primary device. Sometimes, it actually sits at home, and diverts calls to the dumbphone whenever possible.
However, if you absolutely need services like homebanking, Uber, GPS, etc., this can be extremely disruptive. Jose Briones, the great “grandad” of the dumbphone movement has spoken about this in the past:
“As someone who has been [using a dumbphone] for the past 4 years [counting from April 2024], I can tell you that there is a significant decrease of your screen time when you switch to something like a flip phone. (…) But there’s also a significant increase of convenience and friction in your life that a lot of people are not used to and a lot of people don’t want to engage with. Over the past 15 years, we have acquired a lot of conveniences in the digital world. The ability to look up information, the ability to hail a ride from wherever we are, the ability to stream music and gather whatever, talk to whoever in any part of the world.”
- Jose Briones, “Why Dumb Phones Won’t Cure Digital Addiction”
I’ll be honest, he’s completely right. Don’t be fooled by my miraculous tales of being the “dumphone user cyberpunk hacker engineer”. I still use my iPhone from time to time. It has homebanking, it has Uber when I need to quickly get from point A to point B, Uber Eats when I need to quickly get a meal when I didn’t have time to cook that day or didn’t really feel like it. My conveniences, so to speak, are all located in it, so I usually only use it when I really need to use them, and so, I went from a 6-7 hours of screen time a day to a weekly average of almost 40 minutes, with some days where I don’t go over the 30 minute mark.
Given, this means that I’m using the flip phone more, but it’s a communication device. I’m using it to talk to other people, either on WhatsApp, through SMS or by calling them. I have essentially re-engineered my relationship with my phone and my smart phone, which is why I tend to call it a pocket computer nowadays. And Jose explains this as not only a thing you can do in a transition, but as a viable alternative if you’re not ready to go down the smartphone route:
“(…) if you’re one of those that you still want the convenience and you don’t want the distractions, then what you need to reengineer is your relationship with your phone. (…) There are certain different ways to do that.”
I agree with his, although I don’t exactly agree with the first method he proposes, which are apps and devices that block features on your phone unless you unlock them yourself. And this can get kind of fucked if you have developed an addiction to your phone. I used to be very addicted to watching YouTube and porn on my phone and what I had to do was set a network block through my iPhone to block all access to YouTube and adult websites, but I found myself constantly turning it off.
It got to the point where I had to block it again, then ask my sister to put in a passcode and ask her to never let me see it ever. This acted as a deterrent to go and “unlock” this blockage and I’m proud to say I’ve been roughly porn free for about 3 months now. :)
The smartphone, being something that is consistently being locked down more and more by companies nowadays, is getting harder to use in our advantage, but there are still ways around it, so if you identify something on your phone that’s making you use it for longer than you think you should, find ways around it. Block it. Delete it. Lock it down.
“So, yes, a dumb phone will not cure your digital addiction or digital dependency, as I like to call it. It will help, but it will also introduce friction into your life. The question is, are you willing to deal with that friction?”
This is an interesting question, and some pieces of friction are capable of being mitigated, and there are others you will have to deal with. But if some of them are friction you feel are incapable of dealing with, do not go down the flip phone route. Locking down your smart phone isn’t a 100% done deal, for reasons I’m still going to get into, but it’s still a viable option.
There are a few things you can do to do this:
- Deleting unnecessary apps like social media and entertainment apps. This can be less of a done deal since you might end up downloading the apps again but it’s a first step.;
- Setting your phone to grayscale. This is backed by current research because phones use colors in very subtle ways to keep your attention and changing to grayscale can disrupt those kinds of techniques companies use to grab your attention;
- Using a simple launcher (people tend to call them “minimalist” launchers which is kind of cringe to be honest). This is a launcher that switches app icons for just text. Current research also links that it’s not just the colors but the image of the app icon that can also grab the user’s attention. Removing the icon forces you to read the name of each app on your phone and it can force you to have to make intentional choices about what part of the phone you want to use.
3.2.3. Step 3 SHOULD be for you
Dumb phones aren’t for everyone’s lifestyle, but as time has been passing, I’ve come to the realization that they SHOULD be. You know how I talked about Snowden in Chapter 1, right? It turns out that Edward Snowden has contributed to further discussions on technology security has time moved on and, in 2016, in an interview he made for ‘State of Surveillance’, a crossover between VICE and HBO, Snowden talked about the ways authorities can intercept your phone activity.
“Every phone has what’s called an IMSI, which is actually for the SIM card. That’s your subscriber information: what your name is; what your phone number is. All of our devices, as they travel throughout the day, are constantly broadcasting in sort of this radio orchestra. IMSI catchers masquerade as the legitimate cellphone tower, so when you’re saying ‘Hey, cell phone tower, can you hear me?’
Instead, a man in the middle - somebody with an IMSI catcher in the trunk of their car, in their briefcase, in their office - has it send a louder signal back to you than the cell phone tower and says ‘I’m the cell phone tower’. (…)
It’s incredibly easy, you buy these things off the shelf – every police department in the United States seems to be buying these things nowadays.”
- Edward Snowden, State of Surveillance (2016)
These things were being used during the Snowden disclosures in 2013, they were being used in 2016 and they’re still being widely used today. In a publication made by Fortune Business Insights, they measured that global sales of IMSI Catchers around the world, drawing out trends and tendencies and a lot of data. In 2022, the reported transactioned capital in deals for IMSI Catchers ranged around 165 million US Dollars. It’s forecasted that this number will reach 337 million by 2030. A lot of these transactions are being made by law enforcement and governments around the world, and being sold by companies in the U.K., Nordic Europe, Israel and the Arab Emirates. They conclude that “this trend is raising concerns about privacy and civil liberties, as the use of IMSI catchers expands beyond law enforcement and into the hands of private entities and malicious actors.” (Source: IMSI Catcher Market Size, Share & COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Type, By Application, and Regional Forecast, 2023-2030)
Apparently, this technology was planted in parts of cities, which was bad enough, but it wasn’t effective enough. Snowden disclosed, in that same VICE/HBO interview, some fucked up information.
“There is joint CIA/NSA program called, appropriately enough, ‘Shenanigans’. [It] was a project to mount on airplanes an IMSI catcher and fly it around the city. They can tell when you’ve travelled, they can tell when you move and this all happens without warrants. (…) Shenanigans was happening in Yemen. That’s where it was being tested and you go ‘Well, look, this is being used to aim missiles at terrorists. I’m okay with that.’ But these programs have a disturbing frequency, a tendency to move from war front to home front. And within siz months of Shenanigans being reported, the Wall Street Journal reported that the same technology was now being used domestically inside the United States.”
One interesting tidbit here, is that he claims that Shenanigans was also implemented with the FBI, using a “specific aviation unit” that he claims will normally surveil civil protests. He claims this had happened with the BLM protests in Baltimore related to the death of Freddie Gay in 2015. This almost akin to autocratic regimes that already use these kinds of technologies to oppress, silence and monitor political opponents and dissidents.
Appropriately enough, dumbphones seem to be not just a way to escape the mental prisons that companies put us in. They can also be used to “go dark” or “off the grid” against these monitoring systems. The topic has to do with the current architecture of smartphones nowadays. In an interview for The Joe Rogan Experience (god forgive me for citing a fucking Joe Rogan podcast), he is asked about the effectiveness of turning off your phone against these attacks, to which he says:
“Well, so it does, in a way - it’s yes and no. The thing with shutting your phone off that is a risk is ‘how do you know your phone’s actually turned off?’ (…) When I was in Geneva, for example, working for the CIA, we would all carry like ‘drug dealer’ phones, you know? (…) And the reason why was just because they had removable battery backs where you could take battery out, right? And the one beautiful thing about technology is, if there’s no electricity in it, right, if there’s no go-juice available to it - if there’s no battery connected to it - it’s not sending anything because you have to get power from somewhere.”
- Edward Snowden, JRE #1368
This is interesting insight if you think about the current landscape of smartphones nowadays. Every smartphone being made in current year no longer has removable battery packs. Some outliers do like Fairphone and Unihertz, but phones nowadays are all being manufactured with sealed enclosures and unremovable batteries. Like Snowden says, “how do you know your phone’s actually turned off” when you turn it off?
Dumbphones in the market have this advantage over all other phones, no matter which one you pick. Be it the CAT S22 Flip, the Kyocera 902kc, the Nokia 2660 Flip. Pick a dumbphone and all of them have removable battery packs. If you wanna be a paranoid bee but still use a touch screen phone, there’s the Librem 5.
Edit: This post used to have a section promoting the Librem 5, but it has come to my attention, from respected sources such as Techlore and Louis Rossmann that the company behind it, Purism, has been putting into play extremely reprehensible commercial pratices in the sale of the Librem 5, such as reverting refund policies and a lack of shipping transparency, with some pre-orders made in 2018 not having their phone shipped as far as 2022. The phone, despite its privacy and security promises, seems to only be focused on the hardware side of things, with software security having had a sort of backseat, which made me apprehensive and regretful for even promoting the phone. I want to apologize for not having done my due diligence by investigating more on the topic.
3.3. Graceful Shutdown
We’ve talked a bit about the theoreticals of smartphone and social media addiction, its terrible effects on the mental psyche and the ways you can divert your course off from the agendas of companies who want to turn you into a corpo ATM, and towards your own life, on your own terms.
As I’ve said before, smartphones aren’t inherently bad. But in my opinion, while corpos are still the ones behind the choices related to how this technology evolves and functions, then I’m not sure we should be making extensive use of them if it results in further manipulation, as they make a profit off our time and attention.
I may also have introduced a bit of paranoia about your country monitoring your phone calls at any time by placing bugs in your city, so sorry about that. It’s something I think we should all be a bit paranoid about, honestly. It is because we’re not that current governments can still get away with what they do, and why situations like these are only discovered years after the fact.
Phones have certainly changed a lot over the years, but it’s not just phones that have changed right? There are wiretaps around the city, planes with wiretaps surveilling cities. Something happened with your urban landscape right? That’s what we’ll cover in Chapter 4.