Flip Phone Diary #3

On AI and the right to human interaction

In my last Flip Phone Diary, I wrote about how it’s more expensive to be offline than online because we’re easier to control when we’re plugged in. Having a smartphone lets companies track and advertise to us, and they subsidize useful services like GPS mapping and instant communication to make their devices feel indispensable. The end result is that the phone screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye: the first stage of meaning-making, that, like the physical eyeball’s retina, turns the indistinguishable light and stimuli of the modern world into shapes we can understand. Corporations mold realities and push them through these digital retinas, and I think we need to interrogate whether what they show us is real and how it affects us.

Relatedly, being online has felt worse lately. Elon Musk’s Twitter algorithm regularly boosts accounts that call women “things,” mixed-race people “mongrels” and proudly declare interracial couples should be stoned to death. Mark Zuckerberg eliminates pro-Palestine content and will start boosting the misogynist variety soon. Being on Twitter, in particular, has felt terrible lately, like I’m trapped in a room with people who want to stalk, torture, rape, and kill me, and like the room’s owner will take those people’s sides if I fight back. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience that’s made me view my phone like a heroin needle. I only half-understand why I keep going back to it.

Between these reams of hate speech, ChatGPT slop abounds. I can’t look at popular tweets without seeing blue-check accounts respond with servile and hallucinatory pablum. Everywhere I turn on the Internet, I either read statements that used to get people fired or I get talked at by robots. It’s made being online feel nauseating lately, and in moments of lucidity, I want to put down my smartphone and never pick it up again.

No one who respects themselves is going to tolerate being made to feel this way. And because capitalism absorbs attempts to resist it, people with money won’t have to. A company called Light Phone is working on a phone that has a GPS, an alarm, a music player, a camera, and no social media apps. I also regularly get ads for Brick, a device that makes you tap a physical object to access your social media apps. Light Phones currently cost between $300-$600 USD and Brick is a band-aid that lets you continue having a smartphone. I think in the next 2-5 years, social media companies will go one step further and offer paid subscriptions that let people opt out of interacting with machine-generated content altogether. The rich will pay for the human touch, while the proles will be left to wade through AI-generated slop.

We need to fight this for the same reason Kate Wagner wrote that we shouldn’t let developers build windowless bedrooms to fix housing shortages. Human contact, like sunlight, shouldn’t be an amenity but a fundamental right. On a contract job a few years ago, I wrote a private school’s weekly newsletter that went out to donors whose combined net worth totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. I know they wouldn’t tolerate being spoken to by robots and you shouldn’t either. Don’t let anyone convince you you deserve to be spoken to by robots and don’t outsource writing, the act of thinking, to a machine. We need laws to protect us from algorithmic conditioning rather than Light Phones to escape it. That will only happen if we develop the political will to make them.¹

Tech companies don’t care whether what we consume is good for us so long as we stay plugged in. In his essay on Netflix, Will Tavlin writes that the streamer creates “Tide Pod cinema… a high-gloss product that dissolves into air” and is embracing AI because it doesn’t care whether the movies it releases are good. In his review of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine, Sasha Frere-Jones writes that Spotify is equally unconcerned whether we like what we're listening to so long as we keep listening. These companies’ sole goal is to keep us locked into their service, glued to our screens, and paying our monthly subscriptions so we’re suggestible, manipulable, and disconnected in the physical world. The antidote to this is to get out and do things: to interact in real, less mediated, and less surveilled physical space.

I have a vision of the future in which working class people get given smartphones that addict them to opiatic, placating content while the rich get given Light Phones and enjoy clear heads. It’s akin to last century’s rich building their neighborhoods in clear air above the smog of cities they polluted, and this century’s trying to escape the earth they’re destroying in rocket ships. I don’t want this to come to pass. I’m practicing unplugging, buying physical media, and learning to live in the world without a smartphone, and I write about it for free because I want other people to try that, too. We have a world to win, but we won’t win it if we let machines do our thinking and writing.

---

If you like this newsletter, please sign up using your email! Substack’s trying to turn itself into a walled garden by encouraging people to follow me on their app rather than give over their emails. That means that if I move on from this software, I won’t be able to take you with me.

---

Recommended Reading

• I particularly liked Kate Wagner’s five-essay series on Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which starts here, and wrestles with the question of whether people have free will or whether their morality and intelligence are subordinate to a hierarchy of feudal bonds (or our contemporary case, capitalist class relations) that make them irreconcilable with one another.

• I also liked Nathan Taylor Pemberton’s recent essay in Strung, which only comes via email and which you can sign up for here. His essay, “Social Game,” was about how needing a partner to play tennis opens you to the world in a way that a solitary sport like running or weightlifting doesn’t.

1. Join People Against Prisons Aotearoa if you live in New Zealand and would like to help us develop the political will to change society.