Your Relationship With Your Phone, Continued...

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Welp, this rabbit hole goes deeper than I thought. This is the second in a series about relationships with phones and "The Pull." Here's the first in case you missed it, Making It Your Own With Your Phone. The series will go as long as it needs to go to feel complete.

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I framed the problem incorrectly.

While phone shopping, I happened upon a video called, "Best Dumb Phones 2025 [watch before you buy]." The video isn't recommendable, it but blessed me with a gift.

While watching I thought, hey, a bunch of these aren't even dumb phones! wait? what's a dumb phone?

Wrong question.

The question is not, "how do I use my phone less?"

The question is not, "should I use a smart phone or a dumb phone?"

The question is not, "which dumb phone should I get?"

I had to zoom out.

The real problem isn't the apps nor the phone.

Its a relationship problem.

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Fundamental Misalignment Of Intention

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Internet infrastructure we all use, was given for free or super cheap, woohoo.

When it comes to infrastructure and public utilities like electricity and the water, you use more, you pay more.

With today's data plans and "unlimited data" whether you use the phone for 2 hours a day or 16, plans often cost the same, or marginally different. On wifi you can binge all day for no additional cost. However, if you use facebook for 16 hours a day, they get paid more than if you use it for 2.

A deal with the devil via quid pro quo, uneven tit for tat.

When it comes to our phones, "what you get" is explicit-- marketers have done a great job at this. "What you give," is sinister. The explicit give takes the form of hardware purchases and data plans.

But, you're not paying facebook for data access. You pay your carrier. So what are you actually paying facebook?

Your paying them with your attention, and your data, which they use to sell you ads. There's no "you give me 5 minutes of attention and I'll give you 5 minutes of ads." Shrouded in darkness, let's shine a light on it.

Imagine entering into a relationship that starts like this...

Hey, wanna be friends?

Ya, sounds cool.

Ok, just so you know, I want to use as much of your time and attention as I can. That way I can make as much money as possible from you. I do this in such a way that it is non-obvious. If I sense I'm being too much, I dial back. I use a variable reward structure to make you addicted. I'll say our relationship is primarily about connection, and I will make genuine connection available, but not with me, only with people like you in my network. This genuine connection will be hard to find and functions more like a secondary, tertiary, or even quaternary aspect of our relationship. I do things to disconnect you from yourself and anyone besides me. I use everything vulnerable you have shared with me not to stab you in the back, nor steal your possessions, but to continue gaining more of your time and attention. I give you no vulnerability or genuine connection, but I pretend that I am and you won't be able to tell, leaving you with strange feelings of shame and emptiness about our interactions.

Umm...I don't wanna be your friend anymore. Sorry.

Yoinks! This is exactly what companies like facebook do. As George Carlin said, you don't need a formal conspiracy to have a conspiracy. Perhaps Zuck is a reptile who goes to orgies with Jeff B and the elite. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter in this context.

I'm don't know if Zuck is a lizard. But I am certain that facebook makes more money when I see more ads, and they are a publicly traded company. They are heavily incentivized to get me to watch as many ads as possible. Thousands of people literally conspire to get you to view more ads.

That has nothing to do with their purported mission statement. I don't know of a single company with an ad-based business model who says that their mission is to sell more ads. This inherent conflict of interest creates problems. There's never a grounded conversation about it when these relationships begin, nor throughout them.

You can't have a healthy long-term relationship when it starts out disingenuous and continues that way.

So long as division and fear porn bring Zuck more money than truth, you will get division and fear porn. Truth will be sprinkled in every now and then, but truth is not a priority for them. But Drew, what about the fact checkers! Forget fact checkers.

They are a joke. They don't exist to check facts. They exist to convince regulators that facebook cares about truth at least a little. Have you seen videos of our public servants attempting to speak with tech executives? The public servants are horribly underprepared and ignorant most of the time. Fact checkers keep the ad machine running by putting on a little puppet show to temporarily occupy the regulators.

The core-- serving you whatever crap gets you to watch ads, has not, and will not change, unless regulators make people go to jail. Maybe. If there's anything I've learned from the war on drugs, making people go to jail does not stop commerce. It just hides it. Real change happens when companies are financially incentivized to do something else.

This is how we win. Vote virtue with your dollars. Vote virtue with your attention.

Whats pitched as "connecting the world" is the most highly advanced advertising system ever created. Ads are connection detractors. There's a fundamental misalignment of intention via the current incentive structure.

Everything in the universe is downstream of intention. Whether intention is known and shared is another thing. Start out a relationship with your intention, and ask other parties the same. If the intention changes, share it.

It'll help you sleep at night.

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Downstream Impacts On Phones and Business Models

The intention of ad-based companies is to get you to see ads as much as possible. This grew so big it impacts companies that don't sell ads. Business models shifted from selling hardware with a side of data, to selling data with a side of hardware, to selling ads and using hardware and data as bait; akin to McDonald's dollar menu. That dollar became a bunch of other food you never intended to buy. That phone becomes years of your life that go missing (not hyperbole).

Nobody tells you this things at the phone store.

The latest iPhone and Samsung have ad-based intentions.

Phones like the Light Phone, Wise Phone, and Punkt have a rebellious intention-- fuck ads, fuck transhumanism, they say.

Early 2000s Nokias have a profit-via-hardware intention. Remember when people would run over them with vehicles and they'd still work?!

There's a 4th weird category, not of phone, but of consumer, the "Awakened Laggard." Geoffrey Moore's work explains consumers via buckets in terms of their adoption. Here's his groups with examples of phone users.

1. innovators- the guy who invented the Punkt phone, Light Phone, etc
2. early adopters- your spiritual homie focused on virtue cultivation who bought the Light Phone III on pre-order
3. early majority- people who bought iPhones version 2 and later
4. late majority- people who bought iPhones version 8 and later
5. laggards- your neighbor who uses a dumb phone in 2025 and never had an iphone.

Hardware and tech specs don't map atop this people-based bucketing. Feature-wise, 2025 newfangled dumb phones have similar specs to an early 2000s Motorola StarTac, albeit with a different network.

An Awakened Laggard in 2025 may use the same tech specs as an early adopter circa 2002, but has drastically different intentions- device-as-tool, reclaiming attention, focus, presence and quitting digital addiction.

This hit me in the diligence process--if I can get a Nokia for 35 bucks in 2025 because its marketed at a laggard, why would I drop 300 for a Punkt phone because its marketed at an early adopter? Later in the series we will dive into tactical-practical picking a device and paring down.

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Unlocking The Power Of Shared Intentions

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Shopping isn't my thing, so I used AI to compare options.

I plugged my spec list into Claude. Claude is "Chat GPT plus ethics." s/o to Sean for the rec.

After watching that dumb phone video, youtube recommended others. Turns out, tons of people have solved this phone problem, even though nobody in my immediate circle has. Peter has, but he's an internet friend--I haven't met him in person yet. Credit Gus for the Light Phone intro, but per memory he uses that in addition to another. I'm counting "solved" as replacement, not addition.

There's a massive, growing number of people with shared intentions around being in right relationship with their phones.

Rather than smart/dumb, list your intentions and specs for this relationship between you and your phone. What is important? What are your non-negotiables? What seems like a non-negotiable that isn't? How can you test that? What is less important?

Next time, we'll dive into more specs, features, and tools for making the switch.

Smart minds use dumb phones.

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Stay smart,

Drew

PS- if you're near Orlando, join us for an upcoming wisdom sharing circle. 🕊️ Next one is April 10.
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