As the tech giants grow bigger and bolder, is smartphone resistance even possible, asks Tom Hodgkinson. Plus your views

Sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive without a smartphone. It’s getting more and more difficult. Banking, ticketing, social arrangements, shopping – our whole lives are mediated through our phones, with resulting massive profits for Apple, Meta, Alphabet and so on. We’ve been well and truly swindled by American tech companies into manacling ourselves with these devices, thinking that they’re liberating, when in fact they’re a tool of enslavement and monitoring and transform each citizen into a target for advertising. But they’re hard to resist.

It all started in the mid-noughties when Trump-backing PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel realised that friendship had untapped value. He was the first investor in Facebook, and was on the board for many years. Like other tech bros, he has recently moved into the war business. Time magazine recently explained the vision behind his data company Palantir, which is worth $374 billion:

“Palantir’s founding team, led by investor Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, wanted to create a company capable of using new data integration and data analytics technology… to solve problems of law enforcement, national security, military tactics, and warfare.”

Thiel bizarrely claims, according to a leak which was reported in the Times, that anyone who tries to get in his way in the form of regulation is on the side of the antichrist. Tolstoy, I think, would disagree: Christian ethics, according to the great Russian writer, were about not killing people.

So I suppose that makes me, as a dumbphone user, an antichrist. It’s comforting to read that I am not entirely alone in my rejection of so-called smartphones. Young James Marriott is a very good columnist on the Times, and is another antichrist. This week he wrote about how he has adopted the way of the dumbphone, even though he’s a young person.

“I swapped my smartphone for a ‘dumbphone’ a couple of years ago and count it one of the best decisions I have ever made. I estimate I have already redeemed thousands of hours of useful reading, writing, deep focus and thinking from the hypnotising vortex of the screen.”

In other words, freeing yourself from the clutches of a smartphone creates acres of blissful idling time.

But, warns Marriott, our government is so in thrall to what is euphemistically called “technology” but is actually American expansionist capitalism, that smartphones may become compulsory, thanks to ID cards. “One effect of the government’s digital ID card proposals will be to make smartphone ownership virtually compulsory. The ID card, essential for the right to work, will be held as a digital file in a virtual ‘wallet’ on your smartphone.”

This is truly a chilling thought, and rightly brings to Marriott’s mind Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where Shakespeare is banned and the people have been trained to love their slavery. Even more chillingly, this week’s Private Eye reports that people like being advertised to. They cited a survey claiming that around 57% of Brits love the ads that stream into their phones. They find them entertaining. Of course they’re entertaining: they’re made by the highly-paid and brilliant creative minds at ad agencies like Mother.

Anyway, I’m going to keep on fighting the good fight, and I’m thrilled that a mainstream paper like the Times is giving space to Marriott’s views. He concludes his piece:

“I believe a resistance movement has a future… Brave New World must remain optional.”

I’m with you, James.

And readers, please send me your views. Have you quit your smartphone? Would you consider it?

Live well,
Tom

PS See you next week for our first “Drink with the Idler” of the season. Our guest is Irvine Welsh. Free entry for subscribers.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Please add your thoughts in the box below.

Sir: Your thoughts on smartphones, the antichrist and Peter Thiel are bang on. He has got us by the short and curlies and must be hugely pleased that so many of us are not just accepting, but positively happy to keep it that way.
Michael Palin

Sir: On a comparable horrid foot, Spotify owner is now funding arms…using profits harvested from thousands upon thousands of creatives. Could not be more dystopian…
Diana de Cabarrus

Sir: I haven’t de-shackled myself quite yet . . . but here at work, our 20 something head of technology has recently “downgraded” to a dumbphone, he says he’s never going back. I found that ironic and telling – the head IT guy throwing his smartphone out.
Kristopher Gray

Sir: Thank you for this excellent post. I had a little smartphone but hated the fiddliness of it and the nastiness of the ‘world out there’ encapsulated and demeaned by this horrid little gadget, so stopped using it. The world is vast, exciting, bubbling, vibrant and three dimensional. It just cannot be captured on a smartphone. And I think the word ‘smart’ – so catchy to many probably – is a misnomer. Are anti-tech people (in this respect) ‘antiChrist’?   No – they are the smart ones. And possibly more Christian in their love of reality than those indulging in the pantomime substitute life on their smartphone.
Deirdre Balaam

Sir: I am not sure if you remember we met a while ago at your offices through my great friend Eliza. Since then I have had a couple of babies and having gone back to “work”, QUIT and really feel quite victorious – like I almost caved to the pressures of capitalism but faced it down and won. Now I spend my days pottering around the heath and local playgrounds and theatres and galleries, making friends, writing while they nap and eschewing my smartphone! Hence felt the need to respond to this. I realised that all the capitalist tools (including smartphone) make mothers feel their job is worth less, boring, pedestrian. It wasn’t even Instagram or anything like that which I have never signed up to. It’s more a splintering of the mind, which contrary to popular opinion, must be engaged in the most creative and liberated way to raise children with any kind of semblance of doing it well. I hate seeing mothers glued to their hateful little (enormous) tablets while pushing a swing. With all the zeal of a convert I want to preach to them a message of you will never get this time back!! Get off your phone!!! I have been reading a very wonderful book called How Not to Be Secular by James Smith. The argument is that we are living in a time of “exclusive humanism”, where the material world is all there is – we see this as an achievement, a move away from our credulous, upward looking early modern ancestors. We are buffered selves, shut off from the vaulted heavens and the stars and all the transcendence around us. The smartphone hems us in. But sometimes there is a crack, he says, and a sense of something haunting creeps in through a song, a piece of art, perhaps a child running freely and with purpose and resolve to climb onto a swing… So no not an antichrist in the slightest. Not in the true sense.
Flora Neville

Sir: I love these articles railing against smartphones. I do it constantly and frequently think about getting a dumb phone but then I think of all the times I am away from my laptop yet need to look at emails etc and realise I am trapped into something that so often drives me mad. I have been meaning to look back and reread the articles in the Idler about the various phone alternatives; I haven’t done that yet but I know where the mags are and that gives me some comfort and consolation. Keep on the case. I’m behind you all the way!
Nicky Foy

Sir: You could use LineageOS on a Fairphone and only install the apps that you want. So you can make it as dumb phone like as possible.
Torsten Pietrek

Sir: I’m with you completely. Part of me relishes the challenge of future confrontations with organisations which elect to ‘fire’ customers who don’t carry a smart phone (car park operators already mostly among them). However, the problem I find is that no-one is realistically making or supporting any phones which are not smart phones any more. People will tell you that ‘classic’ old models of Nokia phone, say, are still available and serviceable, however unlike old hi-fi equipment (my Seventies turntable and amplifier going strong and sounding better than their modern equivalents), they don’t really work very well on the latest networks. There are a couple of enlightened providers of ‘new’ dumb phones (Light Phone and Minimalist Phone), but they’re hard to get hold of and produced in such small volume that I fear they won’t survive long. My compromise is that I reluctantly use an iPhone, however it’s one of the most basic models from 2017. It works on the network and apps essential to functioning in society can be downloaded (being judicious with limited memory), but it has a shit camera which forces me to carry an actual camera to take pictures on (a much more pleasurable experience). Also the battery is rubbish so it generally dies before the end of the working day, which is perfect for gradually logging off and maintaining focus on the work you intended to do rather than being distracted by urgent last minute requests. Keep on living well,
Giles Beswick

Sir: Please keep fighting. With 4 daily hours spent on this devilish device, we are a lost cause, but we are currently fighting for our kids through the Smartphone-Free Childhood movement. It is currently growing in the UK and the US. Here is the US commercial (simply because it is shorter and funnier; the British branch has great materials out there too).  The future is offline.
S Chain

Sir: Yes, I think about trading the iPhone for the dumb phone all the time! I have only been actively using one for less than a year now, when it seemed essential to organizing my family’s life. Since that time, a large number of calls that I receive on it are scams, not to mention all of the unsolicited mail I receive, which requires precious time to delete and unsubscribe from. It seems our country has become a predator nation. One must resist this encroachment! I am reminded of what painter Edgar Degas said when the telephone was first introduced to France: “C’est donc ça, le téléphone ? Ça sonne, et on court.” “So that’s the telephone? They ring and you run.” We shall all become serfs and servants if we don’t mindfully use or possibly lose these devices.
Victoria Skelly

Sir: I remember being stuck in the underground at Chalk Farm unable to phone my wife at Trafalgar Square to say the trains were delayed. The platform actually had a coin phone but, unsurprisingly, this was out of order and presumably would be for the next decade. “If only we had mobile telephones” I thought to myself in frustration. Now I have one, I use it only to telephone people that I am delayed. I have a landline and a computer for all the other stuff.
Julian Barker

Sir: At 54 years old, I am the proud owner of a dumb phone, I have never yet owned a smart phone. I will never give in to the peer pressure to have a smart phone, until this government eventually take away our freedom of choice and force everyone to have one. The thought of having all my personal ID on a mobile chills me to the bone!
Debbie Yeoman

Sir: I have an old Nokia dumb phone languishing in a drawer. I keep dreaming of switching to it. I shall resist ID cards. I’m 68 and I’ll just drool a bit and say I don’t understand. Resistance comes in many forms.
Helen Gordon

Sir: Clearly, your approach to smartphones embodies the Idler spirit – avoid effort at all cost! “Lazy” is such an ugly word; let’s suggest that in sticking with your coal-fired flip phone, you’re avoiding the hour-by-hour (minute-by-minute?) effort that’s required to police your own smartphone usage – an Herculean task. Armed with a late-model smartphone, I’m always presented with temptations toward idiocy. I find, though, that it’s possible to find some balance through sheer willpower – the only social media app I’ve even downloaded is the same one that you kind folks use to post witticisms and ephemera, two classes of information I value. I post nothing – nobody needs a chronicle of my shopping habits, hobbies or alimentation. “The algorithm” serves me a mix of car crashes, DIY home repair lessons and people behaving badly (are they really all named “Karen”?), and if I could summon even more self-discipline, I could no doubt avoid these. But the benefits are many. Several help with the practical parts of daily life – fewer trips to the bank, or better interaction with healthcare. And more than a few support my own idling! You’ve no doubt got flip-phone solitaire at your idle fingertips, but I’ve got a flotilla of time-wasters – track the evening’s transatlantic flights as they pass Newfoundland? Can do. Tune my ukulele? There’s an app for that. And I can exercise my inadequate high school German by pretending to read any number of Bavarian or Swiss newspapers, any of which would otherwise require a trip to a big-city newsstand. And, thanks to what my wife calls “the computer in your pocket”, I can always look up that familiar-but-unnamed actor in the BBC crime dramas I’m addicted to. (It’s usually Patrick Robinson or Sanjeev Bhaskar.) It’s counterintuitive, but you may find that expending effort for a bit of self-discipline opens a gateway to a rewarding world of idle pursuits.
Walter Schoenknecht, Florida

Sir: My husband is a troglodyte; he owns neither a phone – dumb or ‘smart’ – and has no credit card, never has for his entire 62 years. People often ask how he manages to run a very successful business without either, which is anyone’s guess. Possibly the time and brainwidth he’d use doom/dumb scrolling is used less detrimentally… I have one though, but refuse to download parking apps, which means even the National DisTrust becomes impossible to visit. Good luck. I hope you succeed.
Jane Mann

Sir: I am your antichrist follower when it comes to the dangers of phone use and the general drift of sleepwalking into the clutches of the tech bros. However – there’s always a ‘however’ in these circumstances – at the risk of being viewed as a Fifth Columnist within the movement, I have a smartphone (what a misnomer). I can sense your white-faced fury building but bear with me before turning ‘incandescent with rage’ (what a great phrase); I have a smartphone but refuse to be drawn into the doom scrolling and hypnotic downward stares associated with many users. I use the phone for the quaint practice of…making calls, sending the odd text and checking the time. Occasionally, if travelling, I will at some point during the day check my general email but most of the time I ignore everything. My friends know how I am with phones and are cool with me replying to them two or three days later. My wife gets annoyed when my phone is turned off, which happens frequently. In stations or similar where long waits are de rigueur, I pass the time people watching or staring into space in a sort of semi-trance, thinking about things generally and time passes quickly. The only downside is that I feel like an outsider who has been catapulted into a strange world with alien customs. You mention Brave New World so I could be a bit like The Savage? Reassuring to know there others who feel like me.
Eric Banks

Sir: In response to your request/inquiry, I too have never had a smartphone. But I do have a laptop on which I’m bombarded with adverts by email (incl. yours). All best
Nicholas Newell

Sir: At this point, I’m afraid it would be very difficult to give up my smartphone, as much as I romanticize analog and dumbphones, and loathe the specter of tech feudalism… which is really what capitalism has been seduced into. Indeed, capitalists are now proles on these big tech platforms! As for governments, it’s indefensible socialist nonsense everywhere, from left-to-right. Here in the States, we’re surrounded by fuckery. On the right, it’s Trump’s ICE gestapo harassing workers, small business owners, and even large corporations like Hyundai. On the left, it’s suede denim police faux Maoists lecturing everyone about pronouns or “justice”, and if you mistakenly get it wrong, they won’t deport you – not yet – but they might ruin your life in other ways, such as loss of job or career… that’s when infantile Marxist-Stalinists aren’t burning black, women, or family owned businesses. Companies like Palantir will profit from both, just to keep their tech monopoly game going. It’s about suppressing any worker movements.
Back to smart vs dumb phones… Let’s keep in mind that dumb mobile phones are not without their privacy and security vulnerabilities. For example, anything sent unencrypted over-the-air is easy to intercept. This includes what is likely unsecured SMS text messaging. Dumbphones, like any mobile phones, can be triangulated and tracked. But yes, you won’t be hounded by ads… not yet, anyway. There is no such thing as 100% secure communications. However, there are tools available to any user to help them improve their privacy practice.
Use encryption — email, text, anything. Signal > WhatsApp
Use tracker blocking tools and ad blocking web browsers, search, LLMs, or extensions… Firefox ESR, DuckDuckGo, etc., and for Android users, download Tracker Blocker on F-Droid
VPN and/or Tor
Strong passwords and 2FA
Different emails for different uses, that don’t include your legal name
Stay off social media… or at least keep it at arms length if you must “social”
On the hardware and software side, you can always go in for a Linux distro and actually own your computer or laptop. Check out companies like Purism or Framework. Purism makes a smart phone with a Linux OS. Critics might say it doesn’t matter, because you can’t block it All. But this is faulty thinking. Would you throw out a perfectly good umbrella, just because a few raindrops hit your shoes?
Paul Ottaviano

Sir: It’s actually being for Christ, not anti, when you fight against smartphones. Smartphones are modern idols. We are home-schoolers and my kids do not have smart phones and they still read books whenever they travel by public transport, which they use pretty often, since they attend many sports clubs and music lessons. Often in library we are the only people there. And we believe in Christ, so being against smartphones is for sure not being antichrist. It’s for Christ, I believe.
Katarina Vroemenova

Sir: I have recently succumbed to a smartphone after years of strenuous resistance. Everything in life has just become so difficult without one: shopping, sending parcels, tickets, even managing doctor’s appointments. Donated to me by a ‘concerned’ friend, I deeply resent being railroaded into using the damn thing as I love my dumbphone unreservedly. I hate that my smartphone is so big and heavy, that mayflies last longer than the freshly charged battery and that I’m putting myself at risk of becoming one of the seemingly mindless, head-down, herd. However, the strategy I am using to manage all this is to treat it AS IF it’s a dumbphone. I use it for texts, calls, and the relatively few occasions when I need it for the tasks above. That’s it. One does not have to get sucked into all the ‘bells and whistles’ on offer – all the apps, social media platforms etc. Managing to resist these things hasn’t been as difficult as I expected. They seem even more banal and pointless on a small phone screen than they do on a conventional computer or a laptop. I have, over time, taught myself the discipline of resisting the “hypnotising vortex” by turning the smartphone off immediately after my necessary task is completed. It can be done! In recognition of my extraordinary strength of character I regularly reward myself with tea, cake and a real magazine in a lovely teashop full of real people. Up yours Zuckerberg.
Lorna Donohoe

Sir: I’m a smartphone hold-out based in Australia, and have never owned one, always having dumb phones instead. At present, especially because I haven’t travelled overseas for a decade, it only occasionally brings up annoying situations, or there are occasional activities that I can’t participate in. Unlike in the UK, smartphone-only parking doesn’t appear to exist yet in Australia. Last year, a local paper announced plans to run a dystopian cost-free driverless bus in Byron Bay, which would have required a smartphone to access. I wouldn’t have used it anyway, the main issue being the risk over time to human eyesight from the many millions of laser beams being fired into the environment by the LiDAR system. My main concern is that as life increasingly revolves around smartphone use, and it becomes the default mode, non-smartphone-users could in the future be required to pursue time-consuming and slow workarounds, which could be made so unworkably slow and time-consuming that their point is to send a un-subtle message to hold-outs. In December, Australia is bringing in age ID checks for social media, and for accessing ‘legal but harmful’ material online via search engines. I will continue to use my VPN to avoid both of these, while this remains an option. However a situation could arise where the easy option for accessing each social media platform is via a biometric scan, and the difficult way would be to supply scans of personal ID to every platform. For search engines this process is more likely to be smartphone-only. Many people haven’t got their heads around what this might entail. I bank with a credit union that doesn’t require the use of a banking app. The biggest effect of this is that when I’m away from home, I no longer have Internet access, which means that I can be fully present rather than partly in a virtual reality. Although I do receive moderately time-sensitive emails, and can be away all day, this has never caused a major problem.
Martin Oliver

Sir: I know you like to be bold and eye-catching and polemic. But in the end it all depends on how you use a certain tool! I do have a smart phone and I use it almost entirely to make phone calls. As for the social media apps (whatsapp, signal etc) I have desktop versions and treat them as a communication medium like Emails on my computer. Facebook, Instagram or Twitter I do not use at all. I have stopped watching TV, reading newspapers and consuming “news” in whatever form. And that has released loads of time for me that I can use much more efficiently and wisely!
Michi Roselieb

Sir: As tempting as it might be to ditch the smartphone, I spend too much time traveling for this to be feasible. Long-distance travel in the new millennium is essentially impossible without these devices: You must have them for all manner of communications from airlines, railroads, hotels/apartments, and on and on. Then there’s the extraordinary convenience of always having a GPS unit in your pocket when you’re in unfamiliar territory, even more so when you need to locate a grocery, restaurant, laundry, etc. And for those who use rideshare apps such as Uber (which I do not), smartphones are critical. When the day comes that I learn to stay in my room, Pascal-style, I believe I’ll be ready to move on from a modern phone, perhaps even get along with no phone at all. But that day has not yet arrived.
Kent Burnside, Franklin, Tennessee

Sir: In response to this week’s newsletter (Am I an Antichrist?) my own view is that it isn’t *me* that needs the smartphone, but all the companies and services who have decided that is how they want to interact with their customers without having to bother with employing all those pesky staff who used to fulfil that role with their needs for pay, holidays, etc. And don’t get me started on the so-called “free apps”. While the app itself may be free to download, it requires an expensive device to run it, a contract for the network connection, and all the regular updates that go with it, not to mention the cost in terms of loss of attention, focus, and the peace and quiet that comes from not owning a smartphone. Not what I would consider free. However, while I have been able to resist smartphones so far, I have to agree that they are becoming ever more necessary to do anything. My only hope is that customers will tire of apps and demand a return to real staff to interact with before I eventually have to give in and get one.
Christopher Bramhall

Sir: Good on you. I bought a dumbophone a few years ago … and am still using my smartphone 🙁 hats off to you.
Sue from Oz

Sir: No.
Nick Glozier

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