Keeping a cell phone involves massive trade offs where you have to give up a lot and expose yourself to tons of new risks in exchange for connectivity. There are other abilities you get with a phone but for most of those it would be better to use a device like a laptop which would be a little more cumbersome but less harmful and more powerful.
A cell phone gives you some things while also taking many things from you. Sometimes the most empowering thing you can do is leave it at home.
Even the most open of Android Roms still require giving a bunch of proprietary drivers, firmware, and applications root access for the most basic of hardware functionality.
A major reason I gave up on phones and got a tiny laptop to run qubes on.
> proprietary [...] firmware
Your tiny laptop has this too.
> proprietary [...] applications
There are plenty of AOSP-derived ROMs without this.
The vendor partition is a black hole of poorly understood and mostly proprietary garbage that can do whatever it wants.
Also if you do not ship your ROMs without OMA-DM and similar malware, you are not even permitted to connect to some cell networks.
There are a comical number of apps and blobs copied from the vendor partition of stock roms to make most of those "open source" roms function on recent devices.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state/14...
At least on a laptop I can run QubesOS to hypervisor isolate the rare hardware that requires blobs, like wifi.
Also I think you're ignoring my first point. I don't think any of this paranoia is reasonable. Unless you're being targeted by state actors, none of it is necessary to fill a reasonable definition of "controlling your device." This is all in response to an article about a child who doesn't like phones because he doesn't like social media. The adtech machine that powers social media is pervasive and it has its fingers in proprietary smartphone OSes, but it doesn't have its fingers in AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS, so installing one of those is an easy and achievable way of avoiding it. Whether it's possible to remove every last drop of proprietary software is a side-issue here.
Consider Intel ME firmware is a literal well documented backdoor we do not allow on US government systems... only civilians.
Most of the time our adversaries do not need to be covert enough to mess with firmware. Consider OMA-DM apps that run on most phones with insane permissions taking orders from cell towers.
https://gist.github.com/thestinger/171b5ffdc54a50ee44497028a...
We cannot even keep public open source repos like NPM free of supply chain attacks. Proprietary blobs make it that much easier to hide things.
Also all you need to backdoor every encrypted messenger is a kernel module that ensures /dev/urandom is a bit less random on the devices of targeted dissidents and journalists. Now look at how many proprietary blobs from piles of random vendors we load into modern phone operating systems, even "open" android roms, and think about SolarWinds for a second.
Degoogling and solving for privacy from corporations makes CalyxOS a great option for many, but privacy and security against actors willing to more blatantly violate laws is not as easily an attainable goal on Android sadly. I spent months building the aosp-build project and compiling and signing my own AOSP roms from scratch but even then there are just an insane number of blobs with way too much power to ever be able to trust.
Binary blobs with root access to my devices is a non starter for my privacy goals, free software preference, and threat model. QubesOS is about the only OS that suits my requirements, and even then it only runs on hardware that is hard to trust. Ideally it can be ported to my ppc64le Talos workstation soon.
All of that is only half the reason though. I was addicted to connectivity and over reliant on tech to live my life. Giving up my phone means not having constant bombardments of information and notifications and distraction making it difficult to be present in and enjoy the real world. When I walk away from my desktop computers, or leave my home, I am offline.
The ability to confidently navigate the real world and be comfortable in my own head with minimal tech took a while to build, but it feels like a superpower now. I have no interest in going back. Giving a phone to a kid feels like child abuse to me now given how much control I feel I have over my own brain again. I want that for others, especially kids.
I would maybe carry a Precusor when it gets a matrix messenger as a single purpose wifi only device I use to coordinate with people at events, but in no rush.
Why didn't you (want to) do this with your phone? Couldn't you turn off notifications, leave it on your desk, maybe leave it at home? Was it too much of a temptation at all?
One person could use a gas-powered weed whacker, while another weeds by hand. I'll bet you money the second person is a better gardener, knows more about how to get rid of weeds, enjoys themselves more, and is healthier. But they're shunning technology, oh no!! They must be a fool, to be pitied and judged.
There's nothing wrong with giving up violent weapons for pacifist ideals. And "the real problem" is taking one person's life decisions and boiling them down to something inaccurate to fit your own narrative.
Phone aren’t tools anymore. They are digital slot machines designed to increase usage. It’s well researched and established and an easy google.
Using tech for creating instead of consuming is for kids and young people.
Leaders of the tech companies don’t let their own kids use it. Easy google.
You have to ask people who grew up both with it and without it at the same time, not people who didn’t have it at all, or had nothing but tech.
Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media: https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teen...
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/dangers-of-social-media-f...
An interesting in between, look at the world as it’s changing way: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1...
You made me think about how when I started using the internet (early 2000s), it wasn't optimized like that and it was still so addictive. I can only imagine the damage it does to kids minds nowadays.
And, I love comic books, and this is different.
Comics of the 80s felt designed to let kids imagine a world bigger than the one they were in they had a place in a bigger world.
Stan Lee has some great interviews on it.
Not really sure how the previous posts relate to social media and mobile use in children which is well established
My kids have restricted mobile and no social media access.
But parents did use to think that comics would ruin their children - I'm responding to the disbelief in that.
It's all based on this book Seduction of the Innocent: https://www.amazon.com/Seduction-Innocent-Frederic-Wertham/d...
Here's an article about it: https://slate.com/culture/2008/04/the-campaign-against-comic...
The scare went all the way to Congress.
Here's a book about the history of the comic book scare: https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Cent-Plague-Comic-Book-Changed-Am...
I understand the boomer sentiment of „phone bad”, but let’s be realistic.
You can’t do banking, communication with friends and family, looking knowledge up without a phone. Some countries’ services also de facto require it (unless you want the process to take 3 months longer than it will using a phone).
Best to educate the kid like parent comment said
You could raise a kid in a cave for the first 10 years of their life before giving them their first glimpse of a screen and by age 13 they’ll be on the same level as every other kid regarding technological literacy. It’s totally a valid parenting strategy to be skeptical of the value of screens for children.
And this is the proof of why people need to use smartphones less - you actually believe this, don't you?
You can do banking through mail or at a bank office, you can communicate with family and friends a variety of ways without a phone, and you definitely do not need a phone to look up knowledge. Sheesh.
A technological advancement is not necessarily a social or human advancement. Often we don't know at the time how it's going to pan out. Take the situation around "AI" right now, around which there is at least significant caution. No doubt you will disagree, but a great many people including myself think that smart-phones have been a great loss for society and individual health.
> supercomputer that fits in your pocket and you can lookup everything humanity has done in seconds.
This contrived retort is actually getting very jaded, because almost nobody uses it to "lookup everything humanity has done in seconds" - they use smartphones for TikTok and to order a pizza. Meanwhile "everything humanity has done" is still in any encyclopedia.
> I understand the boomer sentiment of "phone bad"
TFA is about an 11yo who decided "phone bad"
> You can’t do banking, communication with friends and family, looking knowledge up without a phone.
And that's a BIG PROBLEM. Not a desirable feature. Fortunately we have 11 year old kids who are bright enough to see that too. With a few more of them we'll get a society where you can do banking, communicate and learn using a wide choice of humane technologies.
We still believe in things like markets, right? That human needs and demand drives technology, rather than the other way about?
I spent a lot less time being self-destructive with it than my phone.
I am online only when I am in front of a desktop computer, or rarely a laptop when traveling.
We humans are just not built to be efficient when constantly context switching.
It’s like giving up your swords cause evil people are using swords to kill people and you wanna “protest.”
Much better to teach people to ignore sensationalist social media, which is the real problem here.