Too Much of a Good Thing

Nearly fifteen years after the first iPhone, most phones still look like iPhones. Large, responsive touchscreens have replaced the squeaky navigational keys of yore, and our phones have evolved beyond simple communication tools to become "everything devices". Endless entertainment, all the world's knowledge, and a slew of bottomless social media feeds now live in our pockets.

When there's something new to see, a haptic pulse taps us on the leg. We overload on all-you-can-eat information buffets till our eyes are sore. A gaggle of closed-source algorithms study our habits to learn what we like and show us more of it. They promise to make our lives simpler and more connected, but our phones are distracting and attention-hungry.

We've grown increasingly attached to these pocket parasites, but it's hardly our fault — most of the apps we use have been designed to trap us. Twitter and Instagram train us to check in by satiating us with intermittent rewards, YouTube autoplays videos it thinks you'll like to keep you locked in and watching, and Meta's Facebook deliberately hides the option to delete an account, urging would-be quitters to, instead, consider a "temporary deactivation".

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients."

—Herbert A. Simon
DESIGNING ORGANIZATIONS FOR AN INFORMATION-RICH WORLD

They don't cost money, but these apps aren't free. Your attention is the new commodity, and it's (quite literally) sold to the highest bidder. The accounts you follow, the links you click on, and the phrases you search for are logged and retained, letting data brokers slip valuable targeted ads right into that squishy thing behind your eyes. The End-User License Agreement you signed explains all this in detail — you did read it, right?

Is this the fate of our species? Doomed to shamble a nexus of walled gardens, milked by a swarm of ever-present, all-knowing AIs? Can we rehabilitate our damaged attention spans and reclaim our lost mindfulness? Or is it too late?

There's an App for That

In May of 2018, Google announced their Digital Wellbeing initiative, centered around a new app that charts the ways users spend time on their phones. The number of notifications you receive, the number of times you unlock your device, the amount of time you spend using individual apps, the websites you visit, and the amount of time you spend on each are logged and presented in a handy dashboard.

Google's app allows users to set daily usage timers for specific apps and websites, temporarily locking them out once the allotted time is spent. However, in practice, this "lockout" is more of a mild inconvenience. As Google's own documentation states, "To use the app again, [...] delete the app timer."

A "Bedtime mode" is also included, which desaturates users' phone's colors a few minutes before they intend to go to sleep. The reduced visual stimulation is meant to bore you into putting your phone down, but I imagine late-nite manga enjoyers and I Love Lucy binge-watchers might find this feature lacking.

Apple's iOS offers a strikingly similar collection of digital wellness features, even parroting their peer's ineffective app timers (just tap "Ignore Limit" to bypass). While both applications succeed in raising awareness of our phone usage, neither does much to help us curb it.

There's a Phone for That

Yeah, the Internet is cool and all, but have you ever looked at a tree? In stark contrast to the mainstream, a cottage industry has cropped up, purveying pared-down devices that do less so you can live more. The first of these to catch my eye was the Punkt MP01, a Swiss mobile with two (count em, two) features: calling and texting.

Maybe it was the nostalgic, retro-throwback design that got me. Or the eclectic mix of bespoke birdsong ringtones. Whatever it was, I immediately fell in love.

I reluctantly mastered the lost art of T9 texting, and after a few weeks I stopped reaching for my pocket during pockets of boredom. I was looking up more, and I must have been smiling more, too; I found that friendly strangers approached me far more often, at train stations and coffee shops, just to shoot the breeze. Instead of frittering my time away on Twitter or Reddit, I stopped to smell the proverbial roses. And for the first time in a long time, my mind felt free.

Of course, this new lifestyle wasn't without its challenges. Without a web browser, I couldn't find quick answers to life's little questions. I sometimes wished I had a camera to capture special moments, and navigating Seattle's bustling nightlife without a ridesharing app proved, at times, difficult. I was sure I didn't want to go back to a smartphone, but what if there were another way? A "Middle Path", somewhere between smart and dumb?

In a willful violation of Google Voice's Acceptable Use Policy, my brother Josh and I hacked together a server-side Python script that (1) listens for texts, (2) parses them as commands, and (3) replies with relevant information. Thumbing our noses at the natural order of things, we connected a dumbphone to the Internet.

Our plan was simple: we'd write a series of scripts to augment my phone's innate functionality, making it smarter, but not too smart. We used an off-the-shelf API to whip up a weather module (hm, looks like more rain), then got our hands dirty with a Wikipedia module, giving us on-demand access to (the first sentence of) over six million encyclopedia articles. A tip calculator might come in handy, and it'd be downright foolish to leave home without a coin toss simulator for settling disputes. What the hell; let's throw in a magic 8-ball for good measure.

We quickly lost sight of our "less is more" mantra, striving instead to push the limits of what was possible. In a fervent bout of mad science, we added a text-based implementation of Snake (now played on a frame-by-frame basis) and a two player, text-only Chess, complete with matchmaking and persistent save game backups. Recalling our original mission for a moment, we used the Uber API to crank out a text-based ridesharing app, which I actually used somewhat regularly to get around.

Before long, the only thing missing was a camera app (which is kind of a tall order considering the MP01 doesn't have a camera). Operating under the assumption that almost everything one could ever wish to capture in a photograph has already been captured in a photograph, we developed an advanced "image-generation algorithm" that types text into Google Images and downloads the first result. Photos were subsequently uploaded to The Cloud™, allowing friends to like™ and comment™ on (approximations of) my exciting life.

Pictured: a reasonable approximation of my daytrip to Seattle Center

We looked upon our creation, and it was leet... but maybe we'd gone a little overboard in places. What was our goal again? Something to do with minimalism? Having completely lost the plot, we'd created the very thing we sought to destroy: a bloated, feature-riddled mess.









In promotional materials, Punkt calls the MP01's 2G technology "tried-and-tested", but they could have just said "obsolete". Most US carriers have abandoned 2G, with the last holdout rumored to be shuttering its service this December. After their bungled, buggy MP02 launch, my faith in Punkt evaporated, and I couldn't see myself putting up with rival Light's laggy e-ink offering for long. So, completely disappointed by every attempt to tackle the problem, I set out to solve it myself.

There's a Hack for That

If the phone I want doesn't exist, then I'll build it! How hard could it be? In a misguided appeal to my own anachronistic sensibilities, I picked up a nonfunctional rotary phone and immediately started gutting it, replacing its aged components with modern equivalents. If I'd stepped back for a moment to see the bigger picture, I might have realized that a hip-mounted, rotary dial cell phone might not be the most practical thing in the world, but I was blinded by an insatiable thirst for hipster street cred.

By the next morning I'd come to my senses, and, as I brushed the previous night's debris from my workbench, I had a revelation. This digital minimalism thing had never been a hardware problem in the first place; it was a software problem. I didn't need a smarter dumbphone — I needed a dumber smartphone!

I made a pilgrimage to The Drawer of Old Phones and dusted off an antiquated Google Pixel (2016). My face reflected, hesitant, in the glass of the dormant mirror. Could this beast really be tamed?

Even on their own flagship devices, Google's Android ships with a boatload of bloatware: Google Chrome, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Play, Google Photos, YouTube, Gmail, and more(!) all come preloaded, but, unlike the apps you install yourself, these can't be removed. As Google puts it, "you can't delete this app since it came pre-installed on your device", but somehow I doubted that.

Pictured: adb shell cmd package uninstall working its magic

As is often true, that "can't" was more of a suggestion than a statement of fact. I enabled my device's developer options, turned on USB debugging, then used adb to prune those pesky pack-ins. I did spare a few features; calling and texting (kinda staples for a cell phone) aptly dodged deletion, and Google Maps just barely made the cut (I was tired of getting lost). My final splurge was a camera app; not strictly necessary, but what if I saw a UFO and no one believed me?

Like that, my great work was complete. I'd successfully stupefied my pocket computer, and I couldn't've been happier. "Let's pop some champagne!!", thought I.

"Not so fast", interjected Android's Multiple Users feature, introduced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

As it turns out, the two-bit uninstall command I dug up on Stack Overflow can only remove packages from userspace. Their binaries persist, in suspended animation, in the device's system partition, and creating a new user account (a lesser known yet annoyingly extant Android feature) reinstalls the lot of them.

Yeah, they're out of sight, but how bored do I have to get before I cross The Threshold and add a guest user? Personally, I'd rather just not have the option. I donned my cloak and cracked my knuckles. It was time for a sealing spell.

I unlocked my phone's bootloader, rooted it with Magisk, then used adb to change the 'fw.show_multiuserui' flag in Android's system/build.prop file from a 1 to a 0, thus disabling the Multiple Users feature and plugging my pocket information fountain once and for all.

Hm.. this champagne has gone flat.

Your Phone as a Tool

In their seminal 1997 treatise The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Xerox PARC researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown proclaimed "Calm technology will play a central role in a more humanly empowered twenty-first century." A survey of today's technological landscape paints a far bleaker picture, but I believe this prophecy may yet be fulfilled.

What is needed now, as our species enters an era of unprecedented access to information, are the tools to filter that information. Practical, unobtrusive tools which deliver only the information that is necessary, and only when it is needed. "Calm technology" which respects our limited attention rather than striving to monopolize it.

To be truly useful, such technology must be easily obtained and easily configured. While my experimental solution clearly misses these targets, I intend to simplify the process so that any interested person may try it.

ƒorte, the launcher/home screen app for this project is currently in development, but a proof-of-concept version is freely available on Google Play. Source code is available on GitHub.

I am presently constructing a custom, minimal Android ROM which cuts all but four features: calling, texting, camera, and nav. Once complete, I plan to build a web installer (not unlike the one used by ProtonAOSP), which will allow users to flash builds to their devices using a straightforward, intuitive GUI. The project will be open source and free in every sense of the word.

"Light Notifications" will make use of the periphery to deliver text message notifications without interrupting the task at hand. OLED screens are especially suited for this, as pure black pixels consume no power. This paradigm shift will require a conversation with friends and family: "If it's urgent, call me."

Our phones are our most personal computers. We count on them to inform our decisions, stay in touch with loved ones, and house some of our most precious memories. But, to the corporations that design and manufacture them, our phones are a profit vector.

A device that respects you shouldn't be a radical idea. Like a pen or a pocket knife, such devices should be ubiquitous and available to anyone who wants them.

It won't be easy, but I've made up my mind: I will make this vision of our future a reality.

Continued in Part 2 (coming soon).