It’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but the moment has almost certainly already arrived: It’s no longer cool to use a smartphone.
You could argue it was never really “cool” to use a smartphone, and you wouldn’t be wrong. If coolness is the elusive summation of nonchalance, independence, and unavailability, then using a tool whose express purpose is to make you as available as possible, is, by definition, hopelessly uncool.
Still, somewhere along the line---probably the moment when smartphones went from being something we wanted to something we felt we needed---the cultural scales tipped. Today, it’s totally normal to be phone shamed [As in: Can you just, like, put your damn phone away during dinner?], not unlike the way Hummer drivers are car shamed or celebrities with lush, green grass are drought shamed.
Excess, in its many forms, tends to breed backlash. As a friend recently explained: “I mean, everyone looks kind of like an asshole when they are on them all the time.”
Of course, there are options for battling your smartphone addiction. You could try practicing self-restraint, or better yet, leaving your phone at home. If you lack the fortitude for that, you could use a pager, or opt into the flip-phone trend. For a time, everyone heralded wearables as the savior that would liberate us from the tyranny of these tiny computers, which is a hilarious joke because what are wearables if not even tinier computers attached to our bodies.
“There are all these apps and wearables, and they’re all claiming to give us our life back,” Joe Hollier says. “I couldn’t help but feel like they were lying.” Hollier, a New York City artist and designer, is one half of the team behind the Light, a phone that promises to wean us off our smarter phones.
You could think of the Light (now raising funds on Kickstarter), as a really dumb flip phone, minus the flip. It doesn’t do much of anything, and that’s the point. “We designed it to be used as little as possible,” explains Hollier, who is working on the Light with engineer Kaiwei Tang.
The credit card-sized prototype has modest ambitions. It can make phone calls, store up to 10 speed-dial numbers (entered through an app on your smartphone), and answer calls forwarded from your smartphone. It runs on pre-paid minutes and has a touch interface that lights up (hence the name). It’s about 4 millimeters thick and easily fits in a wallet. You might use it when you’re running down the street to the laundromat, or on a bike ride, or when you don’t want to be tempted by the glow of your smartphone. It can either extend or retract the functionality of your smartphone.
But it's about more than just the gadget. In a lot of ways, the Light points to a bigger truth. Despite living in an age of unprecedented technological know-how, we're reaching the point where we want our stuff to do less, not more. We intentionally buy "shitphones" and proudly carry outdated iPhones as a way of saying, "See, I don't really care about this stuff." We hate the way our phones control us, yet we don't put in the work to take back that control.
Honestly, it's unfortunate that something like the Light has to exist, even though it appears to be a perfectly nice thing to own. If you're the optimistic type, you could think of the gadget as a tool to readjust our habits. Maybe we'll use it to retrain ourselves to understand it's not totally necessary to check Instagram while we're waiting in line for the bathroom. But more realistically, it'll be like a technological transitional object---a way to feel connected while gain some distance and independence from our smartphones.
