Smartphones are today's opium of the masses

2023-02-05

Let's be honest for a second to ourselves: We all spend way too much time in front of our digital devices these days and that is nothing to be proud of! Desktop computing is certainly no exception and has its very own flaws, but smartphones really take it to the next level and are just a catastrophe for humanity as a whole. But what makes them so bad and can we fix these issues?

Do not get me wrong, there certainly are some great aspects about smartphones that create the possibility for them to be great benefit to our lifes. For me, these points primarily are:

Regular phone functionality on the go
Capturing and viewing photos/videos of friends and family
Playing your favourite music wherever you go
Providing an always accessible calendar and task list for organizing your life
Helping you to navigate in unknown areas
Creating a hotspot for tethering a real computer on the go
Direct-chat applications like Signal or WhatsApp for asynchronous communication (even though this one is certainly controversial)

However, all so-called "smartphones" I have come across so far are tremendiously incapable of precisely fulfilling these needs and these needs only, extremely bloated and overall privacy-killing spyware masterpieces by default. In total, they are just about the perfect tool to ensure mediocrity and keep people trapped in the giant hamster wheel of life, which is why I also like to call them today's opium of the masses. To be more specific, these are some of my problems with smartphones:

They make you incredibly unproductive due the constant availability of social media and the web with plenty of clever "keep the user on our platform"-algorithms.
They make you less independent as you can (and therefore will) always rely on them to answer questions, remember phone numbers or addresses and so on.
They make you less social - just try to think of the last time you had a real conversation with someone in a waiting room.
They aggregate lots of highly personal data and therefore invade your privacy to an unprecedented extent.
Their battery life is usually pretty bad due to their constant usage and all the bloat.
They are mighty expensive toys due to their short life span, poor repairability and ever increasing prices.

Luckily, I am not the only one who noticed these issues and some people that are way more clever the me developed solutions, which make it is possible to at least fix some of these problems.

The easiest and most important step is to greatly reduce the apps installed to the bare minimum you need and also remove unnecessary system components with the help of the Universal Android Debloater , which is a handy tool for uninstalling parts of Android without rooting.

CalyxOS and LineageOS for microG — Universal Android Debloater

Another big step is to switch to FOSS or at least privacy-respecting apps, for which F-Droid is your number 1 source. You can read more about my FOSS journey here for some inspiration.

If your device supports it, I also highly recommend you to switch from the manufacturer's Android ROM to a freedom (and privacy) oriented custom ROM such as CalyxOS or LineageOS for microG , which in most cases also extent the software support and therefore life span of the device.

Finally, tweaking the system to be less disturbing as well as to have more steps (a. k. a higher friction) between you and your habits is of crucial importance. I recommend the following steps:

Enable a custom DNS server with ad filters such as dnsforge.de .
Turn off all ringtones and notifications sounds together with lock screen notifications.
Switch to grayscale visuals only (mostly called Reading mode or accessible via the accessibility settings).
Install a minimal launcher such as Olauncher .

Olauncher
Potentially strip down the functionality even further (e. g. by removing the web browser) to make you not want to use your phone.

With all of these changes in place, I can happily report that I finally do not hate my phone anymore, but instead can see and use is as the tool it should have always been. I can only recommend you to give some (or possibly all) of these steps a go yourself and personally experience the positive impact on your life...

PS: A huge shout-out to ChrisTitusTech for writing an excellent article about this topic, which was a major inspiration for me.

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