I’m a smartphone addict. I admit it. I’ve just checked my screentime on my Apple iPhone SE and it’s 1 hour and 28 minutes per day on average, a figure that should be shocking except that I know, from those around me, that it’s not very much by modern standards. I won’t name names but I know people who have 6, 7, 8 hours of screen time per day. This is the point at which the phone becomes another domain, another life. You will spend a less fortunate person’s lifetime staring at that screen, lost in the colours, the attention grabbers grabbing out at you. Dragging you in.
It's easy to get a sucked into moral panic about smartphone use. But when the original iPhone was released in 2007, the world was a different place. George W Bush was President. Tony Blair had left office just 2 days earlier. But fundamentally, we were a world waiting for the excitement of possibility. This was still an era where people had been wowed by the capacity of iPods, their ability to perform as glorified external hard-drives. Given that we now live in a smartworld, where everything from dishwashers to toasters are wi-fi enabled and accessible via the cloud, the world in 2007 was different. The idea of a phone which also had a camera was still novel. One that could also play music and podcasts? Unique.
So we can hardly blame our past selves for getting sucked into the world of the smartphone. BlackBerry, on one hand, were building a phone for business, for men in suits who needed to email their mistress or dealer. Apple, meanwhile, were creating the omni-phone, the quintessential smartphone experience. Slick, modern, all-encompassing. The good folks at Samsung and Huawei won’t like it, but every serious smartphone since has essentially been an iPhone. Big, vibrant display, and an incrementally improving set of functionalities.
To address all this, I called up Joe Hollier, who’s the co-founder of Light Phone, a company that manufactures so-called “dumb phones”. Initially, they raised some $415,000 via Kickstarter from terminally online folk who wanted a way of scaling back their smartphone addiction. That was for the model one. They’ve released a second version of the phone off the back of $3.5m of crowdfunding. The Light Phone II, which is on sale now, retails at a slightly eye-watering $299 – but the cost isn’t the interesting thing. What’s interesting is the philosophy.
I’m joined for this conversation by my friend Toby Mather, who’s CEO of Lingumi, an edtech company specialising in language tuition for children. I brought him along in order to provide the perspective of someone who’s building a business off the basis of the opposite impulse: getting people to spend more time on their phones.
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.
The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.
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