The Complicated Promise of Digital Minimalism
Words and photos by Nadia Bailey
I got my first smartphone over a decade ago: an iPhone 3G, purchased mid-2009 ahead of my first big overseas trip. I treated it gingerly, almost reverently — afraid of breaking it, paranoid it would be stolen.
Slowly, I became accustomed to it. Then I relied on it: when I was lost, there was Google Maps. When I was bored, there was Twitter. When I wanted to know what my friends were doing, there was Instagram. My iPhone told me how well I’d slept and how many steps I’d walked. The size of the phone changed with each generation, but its presence remained the same: a neat, black rectangle which connected me to the world.
But in the last few years, the impression of benign usefulness began slipping. I don’t think I need to describe what it’s like to feel oddly lost without the weight of my phone in my hand. I’m incapable of watching a movie or reading a book without my attention half-elsewhere, thumb reflexively hovering over the Instagram icon regardless of the reason I unlocked my handset. Every time I open an app, I give up my data willingly, unthinkingly, so that the algorithms that drive them become ever more seductive to me.
Frustrated by my dependence, I try some hopeful half-measures: turn off notifications, triple-press the Home button to turn my screen black and white, leave my phone on the other side of the room. I delete apps only to download them again. Nothing sticks. If there’s a solution to my problem, I’m not going to find it by trying to trick myself into believing my iPhone’s capabilities are somehow less than what they are. What I want is a blank slate. Enter the Light Phone.
The Light Phone is, in essence, a very beautifully designed dumbphone. Created by Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, an artist and a product designer who met in a Google incubator program, the phone represents a return to the analogue world of my childhood: it supports no apps, no ads, no email clients, no social media. The screen, which uses the same E-Ink tech as a Kindle, is matte and reflectionless. Its size and shape is that of a credit card. You can do exactly three things with it: call, text and set an alarm. It’s intentionally designed to be used as little as possible.
I set some arbitrary rules for myself. For three weeks, I will use only the Light Phone. I won’t look at social media. I will check my email a maximum of twice a day. I will commit to observing what happens within myself over the course of this experiment. Then, for the first time in more than a decade, I put my iPhone away.
For the first few days, being without it is almost overwhelming. It’s high summer, a slow time as a freelancer, and suddenly I have nothing to do. Vast canyons of newly available time open up to me. Vaguely, I wonder what everyone is doing but the usual twinges of envy, dread and longing that accompany my social feeds are conspicuously absent. Two days later I finish a book I’d started two days before and a week after that I start dreaming again.
On a functional level, the Light Phone requires some getting used to. The screen refreshes every few seconds with the same inverted flash common to Kindles, while text often ghosts on the screen between updates. Typing a text message without the help of predictive text or autocorrect becomes painstaking. It takes me an average of two-and-a-half minutes to type out an error-free message. At first, it’s wildly frustrating. Then I just get used to it.
On an aesthetic level, the phone is a pleasure to use, all minimalism and greyscale. It’s designed to appeal to a certain kind of person — probably elder millennial, working in the creative industries and with a certain level of disposable income, for whom a janky flip phone would represent a betrayal of good taste. Considered critically, the Light Phone is an exercise in canny branding: a phone for people who want to buy into a philosophy of people who are not dependent on their phones. At best, it’s a Band-Aid solution to a much larger problem. At worst, it’s an expression of late capitalism’s boundless capacity to commodify our longing for a simpler existence and then sell us a neatly packaged, aspirational solution.
We should be less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than “a mass movement of attention."
That being said, using the Light Phone begins to result in tangible changes in my behaviour. Rather than splitting my focus between the physical world and my extended digital networks, I’m forced to pay attention to what’s going on in my immediate vicinity. I spend less time grouching over nice products that pop up in my Instagram feed and that I can’t afford. I actually call some people, just to talk. I read news articles end-to-end instead of just skimming the headlines. What’s going on in the world is as awful as ever, but when consumed outside of the contextless barrage of hot takes and retweets that confront me every time I open Twitter, I feel marginally more able to process it.
At some point, I begin to toy with the idea of switching to the Light Phone permanently. Even without turn-by-turn directions or music (both of which are slated to be included as Light Phone tools in the future), the proposition tempts me. Why not just opt out forever? But as Jenny Odell has noted in her philosophical treatise How to Do Nothing, this is a misplaced urge. “The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. “It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.” We should be less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than “a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to redirect it again, together.”
Seen in this light, the Light Phone offers something of value. Regardless of whether you see it as a useful tool for combatting digital burnout or a cynical, for-profit solution to our nostalgia for a less digitally-dependent past, the Light Phone’s strength is its refusal to be distracting. Its design is purposeful, geared towards specific actions rather than the open-ended possibilities of a smartphone. Nothing about it is entertaining.
Like Odell, I’ve come to believe that permanently opting out of smartphones and their attendant social media platforms is not a viable option for most of us. Instead, we might look for ways to expand the time we spend outside of those systems. “We absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to,” she writes. Perhaps what the Light Phone — or indeed any dumbphone — can offer is exactly that: time and space outside of algorithms, of outrage cycles, of public opinion, of data tracking, and the vast capitalist system that depends on keeping us anxious and held in a state of continuous partial attention.
