There was a point where I loved my iPhone. As a 19 year old freshman in college, my world had already been expanding every day as I learned to navigate life away from home. Adding constant access to the internet into the mix made that year feel like a springboard into the future. With a map in my pocket, I couldn’t get lost. With a (still functional!) Google on hand at all times, any question could be answered in an instant. I could post photos and idle thoughts for all my friends to see without a single moment of hesitation. I checked my phone constantly because I was excited to see what new thing it could show me.
At that point in my life, I’d rarely met a piece of technology I didn’t like. Video games, digital cameras, flat screen TVs, each new thing felt like an obvious improvement on what came before and smartphones were the ultimate leap into the future. It’s hard to remember now but that greasy piece of glass we all harbor a quiet disdain for once felt like a sign that there was a future and it was going to be incredible. If you’re old enough, you know this story. There was one world before smartphones and another after and for awhile, the one that came after felt like it was better. Flash forward 16 years and I fantasize about throwing my phone into the ocean or, for the sake of the environment, shooting it with a huge gun.
I’m far from alone there. On average, most people I talk to have more contempt than admiration for their smartphones these days. Our pocket sized computers stopped representing a boundless future and now serve as a stand in for off-hours work messages, compulsory ads, and doomscrolling. As the process of Enshittification rages ever onward, I’m certain most of us have found ourselves having a conversation over the last year or two with cliff notes that amount to, “when did these things get so bad?” We reach for our phones not out of excitement for what they might have to show us, but because we’ve been effectively trained by various algorithms to come when called.
I think no matter how benign, we all know a bad habit when we see it. The thrill of transgression is part of the appeal of bad habits, the rush that comes with doing something you know you probably shouldn’t. It’s why cigarettes are cool. For most folks, bad habits remain a small outlet for that thrill (smoking a cheeky drunk cigarette with friends from time to time) or they get to be enough of an issue that they have to be dealt with in one way or another (quitting smoking, getting sick from smoking, etc) but as far as addictions go, smartphones and social media are more akin to corn syrup than cigarettes. They carry no social taboo and in fact our world tries harder with each day to get its hooks deeper into us. So what happens when a bad habit isn’t a transgression? What happens when a thing that’s bad for you has become so embedded into everyday life that you’d be called silly for trying to quit?
This is essentially where smartphones have left us, with a large portion of the population addicted to profit-generating dopamine feedback loops and the rest being tempted at all times to join them by algorithms designed to know them better than they know themselves.
As for me, I’ve been a power user since the start. My entire life has been lived online, with my career having started on social media and mostly remained there as it’s become harder and harder to do anything else creative without first displaying that you’re in possession of a strong social following. I was spending hours online each day between my phone and my computer. It started as goofing around, became an outlet for creative expression, and then slowly faded into something I only do out of inertia. And not long ago, I finally snapped.
I was scrolling Instagram and saw an ad for a “secret email trick.” In the ad, a post-it note that read “Secret email trick they don’t want you to know!” sat beneath an inexplicable pile of gelatin. The gelatin was quickly swept out of the way by an even less explicable kitchen knife, as though the person making the video were foraging for secret email tricks. If it’d been made by some bizarre TikTok kid it might’ve actually passed for comedy, “POV: you are looking for a secret email trick they don’t want you to know”. Instead, it was a genuine attempt to get my attention. It was an add for some app that cleans up your email. And I watched it. I watched it all the way through.
When was the last time I saw anything I liked on here? I thought to myself, Where the hell are all my friends?
From there with each ad I scrolled through from there, all I could see was the horrible, desperate, slop that was being dragged across my screen. Everything was either a poster for a class action lawsuit, a plucky actor posing as an influencer type with some line like “did you know you’re supposed to be a cow?”, and ads for a game where a little guy either shoots a gun at numbers or slowly rotates a sword in a circle. I closed the app and deleted it. But it wasn’t enough.
Every app had become like this in one way or another. In an attempt to chase the earworm machine that was TikTok’s endless video feed, each app had pivoted into its own unique flavor of fever dream. Instagram had its reels-focused ad slop, Facebook had become a graveyard for AI generated videos of people drowning, and Twitter’s new ownership had reworked it into an algorithmically driven radicalization machine that served up a proprietary mixture of amateur porn and “short films” designed with the sole purpose of provoking the viewer to commit some form of hate crime. I deleted them all but to my horror, I still reached for them constantly.
In the absence of my apps of choice, my habitual phone checking instead led me to check apps I’d never cared about. I frittered around Goodreads, Patreon, and Discord. The flavor of slop had changed, but my eagerness to seek it out hadn’t gone anywhere. And I was beginning to fear that the damage they'd done was having an effect on other parts of my life.
For years (especially since the concentrated ultra-scroll of the 2020/2021 lockdowns), I’d been concerned about my diminished memory, cognitive speed, and ability to focus. I, like many, have been concerned with my growing inability to do just one thing. When I watch a show, I feel the urge to check my phone. When I read an article, I find myself clicking away midway through to check something else. Sitting and reading a book, once a thing I did on command without much extra thought, now required me to be in “the right mood.” In short: my brain had been souped. There was internet sludge in my brain and it had to go.
I’ve done this dance a handful of times before, moving with the frantic resolve of someone briefly coming up for air from an addiction and trying to leave all socials behind cold turkey. With those attempts having failed, I knew that if I wanted to take a real swing at changing my behavior, I’d have to go piece by piece. I figured I’d start not with the platforms themselves but with the delivery system that had invaded my life first and most egregiously. This wasn't going to be solved until I could destroy the device that'd gotten me here. I had to kill my smartphone.
Coming Next Week - Part II: So You Want To Kill Your Smartphone
Hey gang, I’m back. I’ve been working on a book for most of this year and thus a lot of my free time has been going towards that. But I’ll be back over the next handful of weeks to talk more about my decision to downgrade to a dumb phone and how it’s going for me (alongside some thoughts on internet addiction, internet culture, and how the two are increasingly becoming one.) If you enjoy that sort of thing, you’re in for a treat.
Otherwise, some regular pieces will be coming out as well alongside these, so there’ll be treats for all