On Not Having A Smart Phone

I walked into the Verizon store, the one near a haunt of mine during my college days in New York City, Union Square. Inside, chained to the walls and the tech-space equivalent of short bookshelves, were any number of phones with touch screens. They were all on, running some sort of "See! this is how I function; press my face and I'll let you navigate around me" pre-recorded self-tour. Among these shiny, bright offerings, were two clams – phones that flip open at their pelvic hinge and make a nice slap sound when you very dramatically close them after a conversation with a friend.

One of them boasted a kind of indestructible exoskeleton, water-proof seals, probably kevlar glass, the sort that a mountain man worried about jaguars or the typical underwater wielder might take with them to the office. The click of the buttons sounded like a Glock releasing its pin. No quests full of wild animals or high risk terrain were in my future, except that I was living in Brooklyn. Had I the money I would have absolutely paid the few month's rent to get that bad boy. Beside it was about as dumb a dumb phone as you could imagine. It was clearly made of sad plastic, most likely recycled Walmart bags melted down into a soup, pushed into a mold, and popped out into a well-used cardboard box full of its many copies. Probably not a very large cardboard box, since I'm assuming this phone didn't sell record numbers. Neither phone had any kind of "Looky at me" performance running on their tiny 1"x1" frontal displays.

From the market of vendors, all of them smiling and walking other folk through taps and swipes and otherwise rubbing smooth surfaces, one fated to speak with me walked up and asked how she might help me. From my pocket I drew out my white gen. 5 iPhone (ca. 2012). I want to replace this phone, I said, holding out the shiny white brick, with that, pointing to what looked like a dead, oblong insect. "Let me check your account," she said, without really acknowledging where my finger pointed. A couple of computer clickety-clak's later, "Good news!" she announced. I'd earned enough points or I was a loyal enough customer or I had won a raffle–I don't recall exactly–but I was in for a free upgrade. Upgrade? My iPhone was working fine. Not that I was a power user. When I was a green horn, it gave me little blue lines from my dorms in Ludlow, through metro stations, to the college campus in midtown. But New York is a grid, and I was soon able to figure where I needed to go, and if I couldn't, I wandered around a bit, making a bunch of right-turns in a tightening circle till I found the address I was looking for. By the time I left New York city, the streets were arrayed in my head like a memory palace. Besides that, I called friends, texted (a bit?) and kept not using safari as best I could.

"That phone," I said, pointing again at the pathetic shell, whose only glory in life was perhaps that it was chained to the display shelf just like the latest generation iPhones and the Android equivalents. I want that phone. A moment's pause, and she clarified: "Oh, but you see, you have a chance for a free upgrade," gesturing with all the fingers on her hands to the display shelf with the iPhone options. I said I understood. I want that phone.

She made the sort of glance that I had seen before on the streets outside, where you're sitting outside enjoying the sunlight, sipping on an oat-milk latte and some undesirable turns the corner and make a woozy bee-line toward your umbrella. I realized that the problem was not my enunciation. I was the source of a social inconvenience. I was emitting a smell. Perhaps the computer wouldn't know what to do with a customer who prefers the substantial downgrade to the marginal upgrade. Maybe she had never pushed that series of buttons and didn't even know if buttons for this transaction existed. Maybe her boss would want to talk with her after ("Hey! I hope your first week's going well; I did notice that you sold a taxidermied dung-beetle to a customer instead of upgrading his iPhone of a few years to the iPhone that was released Tuesday. How did you even manage to do it in our system?"). Whatever it was, a few minutes later I left with all the social acclaim of Huckleberry Finn walking around with a dead rat in his pocket. I can't remember her ever offering to show me how the phone worked.

That happened some fifteen years ago. I've had some kind of dumb phone in my pocket since then. I wish I could say I've kept the same one, but something about the dumb phone market, which has only slightly changed in the last five or so years, is that there is little functional difference between a dumb phone and so-called burner phones. A burner is the sort a spy purchases with cash and plans to throw into the river after making two calls; a dumb phone might be bought with the expectation of maybe using it for ten thousand calls and countless texts, but whose digital soul grows restless for the quiet and peace at the bottom of the Hudson after maybe a few revolutions round the sun. It's never really the software that needs a face-lift or faster computer. It's the best-by date of the body. Materially, the mortal coil encasing my iPhone's software could have outlived empires, if the software didn't need it to shed its skin like a crab. The smart phone is planned obsolescence under the subtle guise of growth and improvement. The dumb phone is planned obsolescence without pretense. Ashes to ashes, as the priest says. Or, as the industry might say: from dumb to dump.

I suppose nothing's going to be made for everlasting use until we get the social conditions that produced toasters from the '40s. So I've had the same kind of phone for over a decade -- call & text, no data -- but not the same model. Perhaps my pride and joy is the dumb phone I had till a couple of years back, the ZTE Z233VL Flip (just rolls off the tongue, don't it). There I was, watching that classic modern western with friends, i.e., John Wick 4, when the anonymous character, Nobody, takes out his dump phone and I am the only guy in the audience who knows that particular pad of buttons like you know the dashboard of your first truck.

I admit that I have mostly enjoyed life with a dumb phone. Not that everything's fresh coffee and raw milk. It'd be a stretch to say it is as useful as a smart phone. In fact, there can no question that life without a smart phone holds many and varied moments of what one would call inconvenience.

I'm not only thinking of those moments when I'm on a university's campus and I need to pay the meter to park my car on the road and the thing only accepts cashless payments through its app so I have to stick a piece of paper on the dash ("No smart phone. How else does one pay?"), or the times when someone sends me a gif or anything more involved than an exclamation mark and my phone has a stroke, or when my phone number gets put into a group chat and my phone sometimes interprets it like people are texting me individually. 

Oh, also: the text isn't legible to my phone so I have no idea what they're saying to me/each other/us, or that one restaurant during those few years which offered the menu via a QR code stamped onto the table, or the porta john in a park in Mount Rainier which asked me to scan the QR code in order to open the damned door so my potty-training efforts just might leak out onto the pavement, the fact that LinkedIn believes I am a possible fraud or bot because I can't verify with my camera and so now I don't have a LinkedIn account till I don't know when, or the numerous companies who expect me–with nearly the same level of legal-social enforcement behind the signs saying 'shoes and shirts must be worn inside the building'–to use their app to enjoy their goods and services. There's a deeper sense of inconvenience at play.

If not having a smart phone is good for anything, it is a near perfect metric for measuring the slow but steady consolidation of social, economic, and political life into a single digital object: if you had any tangible experience in how hard is it to do something without a smart phone this year vs. five years ago vs. a decade ago, you would notice what can escape our attention. For the modern world, the smart phone's presence is effectively ubiquitous, rendering its presence all but invisible to us. This invisibility tells us what kind of thing the smart phone has become.

Picture a dear friend, someone you've known for years and years but haven't had a chance to meet in person for a long time, inviting you to his home. He's married now. Three kids, a dog. A well-paying job. He sends you the address via email. The house looks so cozy on Zillow. You're so excited to see him. You get to his driveway, you knock on the door. There he is. You embrace. The dinner is bright and seasoned. The drinks are delightful. The dessert, divine. 

After laughing so hard you spill some of your port, you ask if you could use the bathroom. Of course, he says, and shows you the way, from the dining room, through the kitchen, past the laundry room, through the back door –where are we going? did he hear me right? does he want to show me something?–across the lawn, into the woods, stopping in front of a tall structure maybe four feet wide with a crescent moon cut out on the door. With an awkward chuckle, you mention something about actually needing the bathroom at the moment. He opens the door. This is it. Toilet paper is hung on the wall. There's a bottle of disinfectant, too, and be sure to drop a healthy scoop of wood chips and a dash of lime down the hole when you're done. "I'll be inside getting the coffee on," your friend says, leaving you in front of the outhouse.

Earlier this year, Sam Altman compared AI services to utilities. React to this however you wish, but Altman was not establishing a new model for tools. Our challenge is not to gather up in fierce readiness against the temptations of a passing fad. Refusing a smart phone is not, and refusing AI things will not be, like refusing to buy a Furby. We must decide to live outside something which will be sold to us like it is indoor plumbing. It's a decision whether to adopt something intended to become as enormous as a new political, social, & economic infrastructure. One definition of the smart phone is: the information infrastructure the early 21st century technological regime most wanted you to have. There is no sign it will be the last.

Thinking about technology as infrastructure is helpful, certainly in clarifying how we might think of some tool and what it means to use or refuse it. To take the smart phone infrastructure as an example, one thing the infrastructure of utilities shapes is etiquette.

Since about five years ago (i.e., especially since Covid), not having a smart phone has for many effectively become a breach of social etiquette. It is like not having running water in one's house, like not having a house wired for electric outlets, like not having the vents for hvac, like not having wifi. These are not only invisible and unquestionably expected for a suburban home. They are all examples of the ways in which material infrastructure invisibly facilitates and enforces a certain set of social norms.

Infrastructure is the stage for any appeal to what is socially appropriate. It's not to say that one type of infrastructure or custom is always "downstream" of the other. In the beginning, when a city, a suburb, a village, a neighborhood, or a nation are being founded, infrastructure and custom are much more pliable, and before the buildings and roads are laid, custom has room to direct. But when the bridges have been built and the towers erected, to insist against the former is to live in conflict with the latter. 

This is exactly why it was so critical, for instance, when Jane Jacobs articulated her set of customs and conventions for New York street life; she was writing before Robert Moses’s dream of splitting lower New York City in half was realized. Had she protested and written a mere decade later, her seminal book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961), would have been titled How Robert Moses Killed Lower Manhattan (1969). If only Jonathan Haidt had not waited for the data and the reports and the studies to be absolutely sure of what was going on and had instead allowed his social instincts to guide his reflections, his diagnostic book, The Anxious Generation, might have been I See Where This Leads.

You can run down the list of reasons why someone shouldn't have a smart phone: it is an easily concealable, portable window into the obscene; it's clearly, unequivocally bad for kids; the whole reason why governments want its citizens to have smart phones is that they are surveillance-devices whose main components were designed and funded with military-oriented research grants. What you cannot escape is that the smart phone is for 21st century man what stone-paved roads were for the 1st century Roman, and what the LOMEX would have become for New York City in Jacob's time. It's an essential piece of the infrastructure that makes the empire run smoothly into the future. That smoothness, if adopted en masse, translates into unspoken expectations of family, neighbors, friends, merchants, and the taxman.

If someone wants to live without a smart phone, he might accuse a larger system of imposing something he would prefer not to have, but he must acknowledge the kind of inconveniences he will burden not only himself with, but will inflict upon his friends and comrades. There are times when this cost is very high. 

Once, I was attempting to chat with a friend (ironically about ways to survive technological upheaval). This person's time was very precious, and he (or she) was doing me a great favor chatting with me. They were overseas, and the easiest way would have been to call over Signal. But I don't have Signal on my phone, and the Zoom meeting I set up proved worse than useless. They ended up calling my phone from theirs, after an eternity of trying to work around the fact of my not having a smart phone. We were both upset. I was red in the face. I felt shame for not being easier to get a hold of, for offering my dear friend the equivalent of an outhouse in the woods because I simply would not tolerate city-water running throughout my house and poisoning my kids with fluoride. 

This is the power of infrastructure. It shapes so much of our lives, our relationships to each other perhaps most of all. Call it scandalous, inhuman, distorted, evil, barbaric, post-human. In the mundane episodes of life, the failure of the few to play along is felt as a sharper, more personal insult than the larger insult of the infrastructure itself. Nor is it the infrastructure that suffers from your recalcitrance. It is your friends.

This relationship between convention and construction is as it should be. Walls and rooms and furniture are excellent teachers of custom and comportment, and we should defer to their gentle recommendations. The front porch is the infrastructure whose rocking chairs and white columns invite southern hospitality. Broad streets are what teach cafe-goers to chat with friends lingeringly. Those who built cathedrals in the Middle Ages knew very well what the vaulted ceilings and engraved stone and brilliantly colored windows would do to people's actions and beliefs and expectations before the altar–and this to wonderful effect. (The guys who really understood this relationship at the time were, of course, the Normans, who tore down the ecclesial infrastructure of old England and replaced it with their own architectural signature, so that every time an Englishmen loyal to Harold Godwinson stepped into a cathedral, his entrance was a tiny betrayal of the world built by the Anglo-Saxons and a tiny concession to the world as ruled by William the Bastard.) If every infrastructure is a kind of room with furniture, the smart phone is one the size of a datacenter with a door nob the shape of one's thumb and a key milled into the contours of your face.

The reason why I don't have a smart phone is the same as why I don't want to live in China or why I don't want to drive in a Tesla or why I won't put security cameras inside my home or why I don't like open floor plans. They may teach us some way of living, but they are rather poor tutors in the sort of etiquette I want my family and my community to live by. Their ubiquity will nudge one into a particular way of seeing the world and of treating others. I have no profound defense for modern dumb phones, combining Morse's tool for code at a distance and Bell's for conversation at a distance. They support and suggest a kind of behavior like anything else, and parts of it are ornery. What I can say is that the world around us today couldn't stand on such a thin foundation, and it seems to me that, if you stopped where you are and never upgraded your smart phone, the future world we are hearing so much about wouldn't be able to stand upon that foundation, either.

I traded in my iPhone for a dumb phone all those years ago because I didn't want the excess of access it offered. I continued not to have a smart phone because I never really needed to get one (though there have been some seriously close calls). But one thing I have found more recently in not having a smart phone is this: there is a muscle group I've had to exercise which would have atrophied had I accepted the smart phone as critical for one's existence. Here are bundled together the fibers of spiritual askesis, political vitality, a kind of MacGyver meets Harry Tuttle attitude toward tools, and a stance of alert intentionality. To live without a utility is not to live negatively or reactively, as it might appear from the outside. It habituates reflection about the things one is living with. It is to live otherwise.

In the future decades, it seems such practiced skills as these will become all the more needful. That is, if we don't want our lives and our etiquette to be influenced by autonomous driving ("He offered to drive me home after the party." "What a stalker."), robots whizzing through cafés, grocery stores, and homes ("The boys room was always dirty; now they don't have to clean up anything!"), and who knows what will finally transpire from AI ("What do you mean you live and work and play with your hands?").

In view of my using commercial air travel, buying industrial food stuffs, running my laptop on Unix, or having a social security number, I readily admit to a bit of hypocrisy in the decision not to live within the frame of the smart phone. Surely these are central to modern infrastructure as well. Seems a bit inconsistent to do without one and rely on the rest, eh? To this I say: goodness, would that we had a tidal wave of techno-hypocrites.

Who knows how long I'll have a dumb phone. Maybe they'll be mandatory at some point. When smart phones need an AI chip in them, maybe they'll stop upgrading the old smart-dumb phones and ignore me when I change a gen. 5 iPhone into an everlasting telegraph-cum-walkie-talkie. Till then, feel free to call and chat.