AI Is Not the Demon — Your Phone Is

I’ve been working to reduce my smartphone usage for years. I recently made a few strategic choices that have brought a sharp and decisive improvement, and now I’m able to go for days at a time — perhaps ultimately indefinitely, once I get a few professional two-factor authentication processes in place — without turning my smartphone on. I want to get more philosophical in a moment, but here are some nuts and bolts of my process so that you can understand the context of the realization I alluded to in the title.

My first essential step was to split devices: I kept a smartphone, but removed its SIM card and began using it as a WiFi only device. I bought a LightPhone 2 — a device I can’t recommend highly enough. (I fear the LightPhone 3, with its bigger form factor, backlit screen, and larger app collection is moving in a bad direction.) The LightPhone calls and texts — basically nothing else — and has a non-backlit, e-ink screen like an old Kindle. It can also be a WiFi hotspot. (Another option high on the list, to which I might eventually resort, is a Punkt phone.) So most of the time, I’d have both devices with me, and turn on the smartphone (via the LightPhone hotspot when outside home or office) only when I needed it for some purpose, usually navigation or a communications app.

At first I thought that inserting the additional step of activating the hotspot, turning on the smartphone, and tethering it would produce enough operational friction that it would inherently discourage smartphone usage. That was true, but only to a certain degree. After awhile, doing this got habitual, and I found myself again using my smartphone more frequently. Now the default was just slightly more inconvenient internet access… not much of an improvement.

The inspiration struck, since one of my key uses of a smartphone is for navigation, to try a dedicated GPS device in my car — a Garmin, in this case (an old 52 if anyone wonders). This was providential — using the Garmin made it essentially unnecessary for me to fire up the smartphone, and once it was unnecessary, my tendency to use it for discretionary purposes was highlighted all the more starkly.

Here’s the heart of the matter: the insidious nature of smartphones is essentially that they take many genuinely useful tools and place them at our disposal through a single device. Thereby we become acclimated to that device; as an object, it becomes a constant companion in seemingly countless disparate daily tasks. (Perhaps now you see the trajectory towards ever smaller and more seamlessly “present” omnidevices, to culminate in wearables and then in implanted devices?)

However, what comes along with that device is a host of tools we did not initially desire, but which we can be taught to desire merely by dint of their easy presence with all the tools we initially appreciate. In a way, this is the basic cadence of digital acceleration. We want X, and with X comes Y, and by and by, we find that we want Y, together with all its sequelae in terms of our behavior and ultimately the intimate shaping of our affective and appetitive life (and the annihilation of traditional human culture… but again I digress). Because you can bet that Z is coming next, and soon. And pretty soon we are “on beyond zebra,” as those of us from the Seussian beforetimes might say, into a world wholly alien to anything we would ever have thought sane, beautiful, or desirable. We have been groomed. The omnidevice is a tool for transhumanist grooming. It is the essential tool for this purpose.

The thought of ditching your smartphone cold turkey is probably impossible for you to entertain, which is why, even if you accept what I am telling you, even if you know in your heart of hearts immediately that I am correct, the whole project seems to be unworthy of consideration, since there’s nothing you can do about it. That is why my discovery is hopeful — you can begin right now to “unbundle” the most important tools currently concentrated in your omnidevice into separate devices.

I now have a landline (and a Bell rotary phone with physical bells whose ringing is not a digital simulacrum); a small, pocket digital camera (though of disappointing quality; I need a better one); a digital wristwatch with a nice quiet alarm; a dedicated GPS that sits in my car; a dumb phone that functions well — and even has a talk-to-text feature; a home “media center” with an ancient Linux-juiced laptop that has no internet access and is connected to a hard drive that contains my Gen-X mandated 500 GB of bought, begged, borrowed, and stolen music files (I reject the “subscribe to your life” model of Apple Music and Spotify — and please consider what the “grooming” character of these algorithmic music platforms will do to music itself); and a laptop for internet access that sits on a table in my home or on a desk in my office. We are damn close to the “the internet is a place” meme, and when we get the house ethernet wired and throw out the WiFi, we’ll be there. Incrementality is the way.

I already quit watching TV decades ago, which has made this easier (though I note that “quitting TV” is an illusion in the age of YouTube in our pockets). But should I want to watch a movie with my wife (our toddler does not watch and has never watched TV or movies), I use the laptop.

I have found that ditching the omnidevice as much as possible — not just restricting it, but aiming to replace it with separate devices — allows the “mud” of digital murk to settle to the bottom, and lets me see more clearly how unnecessary, indeed how positively harmful, are the non-essential tools and platforms and “experiences” (I release the safety on my Browning when I hear that word) the omnidevice has seduced me into believing I “need.”

Without this vehicle for the penetration of AI into all the intimate spaces of your daily life, the glamor of AI fades (at least, in its primary consumer-facing manifestation of the new chat bots — but of course, these are the grooming agents for what is being prepared to come next). When you can take the essential act of looking up from the screen, and make this act habitual by getting the screen out of your pocket, the spell is broken almost immediately — I find myself thinking, “I believed that? I was obsessively looking at that?” Cutting off the tether to the omnidevice is a single gesture that opens a space for the dispassionate reassessment of all the elements and attractions that arrive through that single conduit. It is the central gesture that returns a more conscious control and discernment to you.

I feel like I can breathe for the first time in years — perhaps in decades. There may be more steps coming in this journey, but I truly believe this is a critical one. The central illusion of the internet itself, that it is an exhaustive repository of information, knowledge, even of wisdom — this begins to feel like a bad dream from which I’m awakening. How foolish some things seem in the sober light of day — the illusion, for example, that physical libraries and contemplative public spaces, serendipitous meetings with people and books, are replaceable by a screen and an internet connection; that the arduous lifelong exploration of an unfathomable mystery, felt and anticipated in love and longing, could be replaced with keyboard clicks and short-format video — “this one weird trick.” It was all a con, and the smartphone put the con in your pocket and in front of your eyes at all times.

Your smartphone is the demon, and it is lying to you.