Every year, someone comes along with a dumb phone — or a not-quite-dumb phone, smart enough to be useful but, supposedly, not smart enough to ruin your life.
The one that sparked this for me was the new Commodore Callback: a flip phone, of all things, with no browser, no social networks, and only limited Android apps.
Then there are phones like the Mudita, which go the other way entirely: calmer, slower, built around the idea that maybe the best phone is one that does very little.
Obviously, this is a response to a real problem. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
The Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, and people in that orbit have been making this point for years: these devices are not neutral. The apps are not neutral. The colors, the notifications, the endless feeds, the little red dots, the way content appears and disappears and refreshes forever — none of that is accidental. It is designed to pull you back in. It is designed to keep you from leaving. It is designed to turn every spare second of your life into something that can be measured, nudged, sold against, and monetized.
And it worked.
People can’t sit through a movie without checking their phones. They can’t read a book without twitching toward the screen. They can’t play a video game, have dinner with someone they love, wait in line, take a walk, or experience the mild discomfort of existing without reaching for the glowing rectangle.
The beeping distractions in our pockets keep dragging our attention away from wherever we actually are. We are constantly being interrupted by machines that pretend to serve us but often serve someone else’s business model first.
So yes, there is a big problem.
But there is another side to this, and I don’t think we should wave it away too quickly.
Because the phone is not only a distraction machine. It is also an Object of Power.
In the past, I’ve used other terms for this man-machine fusion. “Cyborg” is the classic science fiction word. Kasparov uses “centaurs,” which I don’t particularly like. I’ve also used “metahumans,” which is maybe a little much. But I think I’m going to embrace my full nerdishness here and call us “newtypes,” after the special humans in the old Japanese Gundam series who develop special abilities by virtue of being born in space and the colonies and so on.
Anyway, I digress. Slightly.
The point is: we are already newtypes.
Not in the mystical anime sense, unfortunately. I am not sensing enemy pilots across the battlefield. But in a practical sense, yes.
You can have an idea while walking down the street and record it instantly. You can dictate an essay into your phone. You can shoot, edit, and publish visual material from almost anywhere. You can look up a fact, compare sources, translate a sign, scan a document, send money, book a trip, message someone on the other side of the planet, or ask a machine to help you think through a problem.
It is cybernetics, even if we don’t usually call it that. It is a coupling between human intention and machine capability. It gives us capacities that would have sounded ridiculous not very long ago.
And yes, AI accelerates this further. I don’t mean that AI is magic, or that it always gives you the best answer, or that it will necessarily bring the best out of your own thinking. Often it won’t. Often it is too agreeable, too eager to continue the conversation, too willing to smooth out conflict instead of sharpening the point. But still: talking to an AI is, in a crude way, like having a conversation with the internet. A very fluent conversation with the internet. That is not nothing.
The span between idea and craft has shrunk dramatically.
That matters.
Yes, laptops exist. Tablets exist. But they are still friction. They are still objects you have to sit down with, open, and arrange yourself around. Even with touchscreens, they are not the same thing. The phone is different because it is always there. It is intimate. It is pocket-sized. It is one hand away. You can whisper to it. You can use it while walking. You can catch the thought before it evaporates.
So when people say, “I’m going back to a dumb phone,” I understand the impulse completely. There is dignity in it. There is sanity in it. There is probably better sleep in it. For many people, it may be exactly the right move.
But I also wonder what we pay when we give it up. Not social media. I am perfectly happy to call most of that brain-wracking trash. What I worry about losing is the power.
Because going back to a dumb phone can feel a little like sticking with horses.
And horses had many advantages over cars. They were beautiful. They were quieter. They connected people to the physical world. They did not produce the same industrial-scale damage. You could make a whole argument for the horse. A good argument, even.
But you would not want to ride a horse to work every day if your job is twenty miles away. You would not want to go on your next holiday in a carriage. You would not want emergency services to depend on horses. At some point, the older technology may be calmer, but it is also less capable.
The smartphone is often bad for us. But it also makes us more capable than we were.
The question is whether the answer to a corrupted tool is to abandon the tool or to fix the corruption.
A camera is not the enemy. Maps, search, translation, the ability to create from anywhere — none of these are the enemy. Even AI, for all its problems, is not simply the enemy.
The enemy is the capture. The enemy is the conversion of every useful tool into a casino.
So I find myself caught between two reactions.
On one hand, I look at devices like the Commodore phone or the Mudita and think: yes, good. It would be nice to get rid of all the noise.
On the other hand, I resist the idea that the only path to sanity is retreat.
Because retreat has a cost. And sometimes that cost is hidden under the very appealing language of calmness, simplicity, and intentionality.
The future is not going to get less cybernetic. It is going to get more so. Today it is a phone. Tomorrow it may be glasses. Later, it may be something in the ear, on the skin, or in the nervous system. Eventually, someone will manage to put something like a full computer in your head, and you’ll be able to enter a video game by closing your eyes.
When that happens, we are going to need much better answers than “just don’t use it.”
Maybe part of the answer is regulation. Prevent companies from placing the video game directly into the mind in the first place. Ban certain persuasive design patterns. Restrict addictive feedback loops. Make default settings humane. Separate essential tools from engagement traps. Treat attention as more of a protected resource than an infinite strip mine.
Maybe part of the answer is design. Phones that are powerful but not predatory. AI systems that solve the problem you bring them instead of trying to keep you talking forever. Interfaces that respect the fact that a human life is not improved by being interrupted every seven seconds.
And maybe part of the answer is personal discipline, though I don’t love answers that put everything on the individual. Yes, we need restraint. Yes, we need habits. Yes, we need to turn things off, delete things, block things, set boundaries. But it is absurd to place one tired person against a trillion-dollar attention industry and call that a fair fight.
What I don’t want is for us to abdicate the power just because the power is dangerous.
The phone lets us be more than we were, or at least do more than we could. It compresses the distance between thinking and making. It gives ordinary people tools that used to require whole rooms, whole teams, whole institutions. It makes us newtypes–awkwardly, unevenly, with terrible posture and ruined attention spans, but newtypes all the same.
So no, I don’t think the answer is simply to go back. I don’t want the horse. I don’t want the carriage. I don’t want to pretend that less capability is automatically more virtue.
But I also don’t want to keep living inside systems that profit from making everyone nervous, distracted, lonely, and stupid.
The real challenge is to keep the powers without keeping the poison.
That sounds difficult because it is difficult. It may require better devices, better laws, better defaults, better cultural norms, and a much harsher attitude toward companies that knowingly break human attention for money.
But I would rather fight for that than give up the whole thing.
The problem was never that we became newtypes. The problem is that we let casinos design the prosthetics — and the fix is not to trade them for tamer ones. A low-tech prosthetic is still a smaller self. The point is to keep the full power and refuse to let a casino own it.
And maybe that is the right frame: responsibility. We are newtypes now, and the question is whether we can become responsible ones.
