Hi Crowd!
Not a thing I expected to be doing in 2026, but here we are.
It’s no secret that I have a complicated relationship with my devices. I love what they can do, what I can do with them, hate what they make me do, and the reliance on them. I daydream about simpler times when I wrote tiny space efficient notes on carefully folded up pieces of paper and never worried about the battery on my pager because a AA would last months, and txt codes from friends meant that most often getting paged contained all the info I needed and there was no expectation of a return call anytime soon. Unless the message said 911 of course.
I upgraded to my first mobile phone in the late 90’s when I moved to Chicago and the management team at Victory got them on a package deal. It was crazy cool not having to find a payphone to get back to someone. But also, pretty much right away I started experiencing Phantom Vibration Syndrome (though I didn’t know it was called that at the time) and found myself constantly pulling my phone out of my pocket because I thought it was ringing. Well, vibrating because silent mode. It never really went away and got worse with model upgrades over the years that did more than just make calls and send text messages. At some point I decided the solution to this was turning off all notifications on everything all the time and that’s been my default setting ever since. I only know if I get a message if I actively check to see, nothing pings me anywhere ever.
You’d think this would be freeing. I thought that would be freeing. the reality is that I’m always checking because I’m worried that someone sent an important message and I need to get back to them. Womp womp. But I haven’t wavered from it, though I do frequently wonder if there’s a better way. Warren is talking about unphoning which caught my eye for the obvious reasons and he starts out talking about how Christopher Nolan refuses to have a smart phone because he knows he’ll get addicted to it and prefers to use the time that would be wasted doom scrolling instead thinking and imagining or whatever. I can relate to that for sure. Nolan isn’t the only person to have taken this stance, and as Warren notes Nolan and others like him are often in the position of having others around them that do the work for them which allows for this level of device detachment. Of the half a dozen or so people I can think of off the top of my head that have this hands off approach, 100% of them have an assistant or staff that are very hands on. So it’s more about delegation than avoidance. I also know people with tons of staff who carry 4 different phones all the time to manage different classes of notifications.
One thing that jumped out at me about Warrens note though is that his current solution is to keep the phone in his bag, with notifications on. So he’s reachable when needed, but it’s not in his hand so as to be checked every moment. This is a complete inversion of where I’ve been living, phone always in hand but never a blip from it. If I’m honest I also enjoy the padding being public about that no notification life gives me on responding, I never feel obligated to drop everything and reply to anything which has often afforded me buffer time to reply more thoughtfully than I would have if I responded right away. Anyway, flipping it feels curious and I might try notifications on for a bit while consciously not keeping my phone in hand. Even typing that feels scary but maybe the current flood of chaos and drama is actually a good time to try to break the scrolling addiction. Something something live transmissions.
Not totally related, but the first person is prosecuted for using a mobile phone OS that wipes the device when a distress password is entered after giving the distress password to CBT officers when crossing the border into the US. Expect to hear a lot more about this (and things like this) as the over reach keeps reaching. Speaking of privacy stuff, Quill is a self hosted open source notes/transcription app for video calls for people who don’t like AI note takers, and Faraday is kind of like Signal for meetings where no one has an account to tie anything back to.
Less secure but still somewhat related I’m revisiting the Hipster PDA. I mentioned the carefully folded notes of old and kind of nostalgically think of those days as the only time I’ve ever really felt organized in my life, compared with today having 20 different places I keep endless digital notes and then have to search through all of them to find anything. It’s not a 1:1 situation of course, but recently while cleaning up my office I threw out about 20 different pocket sized notebooks of various sizes which all had >10 pages of actual notes and the rest were empty. I recognize now, right away, this is OCD of not wanting to mess up the nice looking notebooks with random out of order scribbles. And yes I tried bullet journal method and that was even worse for me. Anyway the charm of the Hipster PDA is that it’s just individual index cards so you can reorder or throw out anything at any time. This is not a perfect solution or even a recommendation mind you, just thinking out loud about what I’m thinking about right now and giving a shot. I’ll report back on success/failure of it later as I’m sure it has you on the edge of your seat already.
I don’t know if all of this ties into the “going analog” movement of 2026 which is all the rage. As an old I remember life before all this stuff, and while I’m curious and excited about where things are going next I do recognize that 100% of the time new isn’t always better, but I think that for a lot of the new wave of analog devotees it’s a way of experiencing something that was out of fashion before they were born. Like kids I went to high school with who wore tie-dye and bell bottoms, but less cringy.
Speaking of complicated relationships, new AI rules in China are wrecking digital dating. Researchers are launching OnlyFans accounts to try and find funding for their Trump admin cancelled grants. A look back on the AI Psychosis Summit in NYC earlier this year that people are still citing as a watershed moment for art.
Shout out to the 100 or so of you who are in the Crowd Telegram group and saw some of those links a few days ago.
That’s all for now kids. More soon. xo
-s