Dumbphone dilemma

It's no news for long time readers of this phlog (which, goodness, is

almost a year old now!) that I'm not a fan of smartphones. The long

list of evils that I attribute to them includes, but is probably not

limited to:

• Devices with cameras, microphones and GPS receivers which are

always on one's person and always connected to the internet and

are powered by closed-source software are ideal surveillance

devices and will inevitably be used as such at least some times

by both state and commercial entities.

• The walled garden "app store" paradigm gives computing device

manufacturers an historically unprecedented level of control over

the software that runs on those devices and introduces an

historically unprecedented barrier toward development. Many

people's primary computing device is now one that they have almost

no hope of being able to program.

• The rapid release of new phone models, the huge marketing hype

surrounding new releases and the excessive social cachet that

comes from having the latest phone leads to people upgrading every

year or two, even though their phone still works fine, which is

tremendously wasteful and contributes to a ballooning e-waste

problem.

• Having an eternally internet connected device always within reach

facilitates a kind of endlessly distracted headspace which is

terrible for your attention span and your social well-being, and

even if you are aware of this it's hard to resist it with will

power alone because software for the devices is actually

engineered deliberately to induce precisely this state of mind.

• The user experience in generally is actually just pretty bad.

Battery life sucks, typing on a touchscreen really sucks, the

things often get unfomortably warm if you put them under load.

But, of course, I cannot deny that the things can be convenient,

sometimes tremendously so. So I do use one, but I'm very particular

about it. Aside from my first, 7 or 8 years ago now, I have never

actually bought a smartphone. A nice side-effect of the endless

high speed release of slightly improved devices mentioned above is

that you always have a close friend or family memeber who has just

upgraded and whose old phone is now useless to them, so you can just

survive off their cast-offs. Whenever I get a new phone I

immediately flash it with Cyanogenmod or, nowadays, LineageOS, even

though this always, on every device I have ever tried, has huge

negative consequences for the performance of the GPS chip, for

reasons I cannot fathom. I only install stuff from F-Droid, and

never put any Google software on there or link it to a Gmail

account, even though this eliminates a lot of convenient uses

because institutions like banks or cities never publish APK files

for their apps, instead relying on Google's walled garden, so I

can't, e.g. use my phone to buy a bus ticket in Helsinki and have

to seek out a paper ticket vending machine like some kind of

caveperson.

So I am an embittered, reluctant smartphone user at best. When I

reread Bruce Sterling so clearly pointing them out as the

fundamental vehicle by which the Internet of Things will be

imposed upon us whether we want it or not, just like

electrification was previously, I felt the stirrings of the desire

to reject them outright and proudly.

It's long kind of bothered me that almost nobody does this. I've

alluded previously to the fact that, up until about a year ago, I

felt pretty negative about technology and the internet because I

felt like plenty of people were aware of the many massive problems

but nobody seemed to have the kind of principled committment

required to stop using the problematic elements (well, except, as

always, Stallman-sama). Even hardcore privacy advocates, tor

developers and people like that all had smartphones and Twitter

accounts. I listened to an intereview with Bruce Schneier, who I

have long trusted and admired, with one of the people behind the

"Technoskeptic" podcast[1]. After talking about all the problems

with smartphones, Bruce baldly asserts that we can't just not

own a smartphone if we're unhappy with this, as if it were

physically impossible to survive without one. The host of the

interview immediately replies that in fact, he doesn't have a

smartphone, completely demolishing Bruce's claim, and Bruce

simply ignored the guy and went on with his pre-planned line.

I'm really disappointed that he didn't take the opportunity to

actually talk to the guy about this option.

So I wondered about biting the bullet and trying the allegedly

impossible. I did some research and I could quite cheaply (about

EUR35) get a nice Nokia "dumbphone" (the 150) which would suit

my needs quite well, which mainly means that it can do calls,

SMS and play mp3s from an SD card. This covers everything

important I actually have to do day-to-day, and would let me

relegate my smartphone to travel-only use, when the GPS,

translation and other such functions really are tremendously

useful. Heck, I'm even very excited to learn that apparently

the SD card in this phone will show up as a USB mass storage

device if I plug it into my computer. This is an absolute killer

feature for me, as sad as that sounds. This used to be totally

standard behaviour, then for some reason, both it and expandable

SD card storage became as rare and hens teeth. My enjoyment of

my phone plumetted immediately once getting files to/from it

involved anything more complicated than just plugging it into

my computer and mounting it and then using perfectly standard

tools.

The only thing that's really holding me back is the simple fact

that if I went ahead with this place I'd be buying a new

electronic device, powered by a custom LiPo battery and therefore

destined to be landfill, more to make a philosophical point than

anything else, and I don't really feel comfortable with that. I

take the stewardship of the things I buy pretty seriously and

newly manufactured computing devices come with an especially

heavy sense of responsibility. Buying one not to fulfill an

actual need but just to make me feel better about myself is a

dubious proposition.

This is a special case of a much more general problem. When you

decide to change your lifestyle to make it more minimalistic or

sustainable or whatever, if you're not careful it's surprisingly

easy to turn the initial energy of this undertaking into an

episode of buying new stuff to replace old stuff you already have

and which works just fine, simply because you want to own more

minimsliastic or sustainable versions of what you already have.

This is an easy trap to fall into but it can totally defeat the

purpose of your new resolutions. It almost always makes more

sense to stick with what you already have. I've invested quite

a lot of time and effort in minimising the amount of harm that

my smartphone can do to me, perhaps I should be satisfied with

that and not buy a new device I don't really need just to

prove a point?

[1] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/podcast002/