~/jeffreymoro/posts/2025-10-31-dumbphone

It’s no secret that the Phones are Bad. We all know this. Some of us are able to bracket the deleterious psychologiacl effects of Phone and get on with our days. I applaud them, but I am not one of them. Some of us (me) are not so well-equipped. For some of us (me), Phone offers a bottomless abyss of distraction and temptation, a simulacrum of social participation and knowledge acquisition, all yoked to corporatocratic algorithms that yadda yadda yadda honestly I’m bored even typing it out, we all know the spiel, we have been trapped in this hell for fifteen years now with no sign of it abating but that doesn’t make it any more interesting. We know the story. Maybe Phone will destroy society as we know it. Maybe it already has!

Still, I wanted to know whether or not there could be a world outside, after, or beyond Phone.

So at the beginning of October I bought a flip phone, a TCL Flip 2. It was sixty dollars. It’s made by the same Chinese company that makes my TV. It makes calls. It sends texts. It doesn’t have Snake. I hooked it up to a cheap phone plan and waited for it to fix me.

I will warn you now that there are no grand insights in this blog post. I wanted a post-Phone world, a world where phones were just phones and not Phones. I didn’t really get it. The flip phone didn’t make me a better person. I didn’t suddenly get six hours back in my day. (You don’t want to know my screen time. Or rather I don’t want you to know it, because I want to hang on to the barest shred of respect you may have for me.) It was fun to hang up calls by flipping the phone shut. I do use the internet less now than I did at the start of the month, but that’s not really attributable to the flip phone, but rather because I locked my iPhone down so hard that it basically is a feature phone now. (No socials, no browsers, just texting and the Merlin bird identification app.)

(The bird of the day is the swamp sparrow.)

To be clear, the flip phone did its job capably. It made calls; it received calls. It sent text messages; it received text messages. One time I forgot to register my parking pass before I drove to work and I used the flip phone’s web browser to access the parking portal. It took ten minutes but hey it’s better than a university parking ticket. It took orders of magnitude longer to type out text messages but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I got to learn T9 and it’s always fun to learn new skills. I would have called people more but who really wants to get interrupted in the middle of their day. That’s not really the world we live in anymore.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it. The flip phone isn’t just a phone, it’s a concrescence of social tendencies and structures that reflect the world of its time c. 2004. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — although having lived through 2004 once I am wary of romanticizing it — but it is more friction than I am necessarily capable of taking on at this particular juncture in my life. I do think that technological friction is a good thing; I think one of the major problems with Phone is that it lets you do things easily that should be in fact very, very hard. (Things like: taking photographs, or disseminating your thoughts to a few million people at once.) But there’s a limit to which I have the capacity for extra friction around, say, calling my wife to ask if we have enough salad dressing for dinner and the call silently never getting delivered because she was in a dead spot for 4G service in our house. (To be fair this one is Verizon’s fault. But to have a flip phone is to constantly ask yourself if you’re willing to work even further around a superstructure that is absolutely never going to budget an inch for you.)

In the end, I eschewed the flip phone for one very simple reason: I still had to end up carrying my smartphone around much of the time. I need to use an app to get into my building at work. My car doesn’t have built-in GPS anymore, and occasionally I do like to know where I’m driving. And despite my best efforts, ain’t nobody was going to call me on the flip phone besides my wife who loves me very much and knows after fifteen years how to put up with my cockamamie technological schemes.

I am still keeping my Phone locked down as much as I can. At least now I have one fewer thing to carry around. Maybe one day they will make a Phone that is less of a Phone and more of a phone, and we can find some middle ground in this muddled mess we’re in. Until then, at least I’ll still get the bird of the day.

So that I don’t leave you hanging: