ok so ive been trying to get back to reality for a while now.

6 months ago i bought a flip phone. and a month ago i bought a ai wearable. im currently spending the week trying this thing where i dont use a browser at all.

i haven’t used/posted to instagram since september 2020 and dont own any other social media other than x.com, formally known as twitter, the everything app.

lets reflect on the learnings and project for the future.

abstinence

yea to no one’s surprise, being off the social medias is the first step in achieving full grass-touching enlightenment. luckily, i havent indulged in that stuff for a while.

i used to think i was missing out. but people will find a way to reach you if its important (e.g. wedding invitation, birthday wishes, request for aid). the thing about early to social medias is that we exchanged contacts across several platforms. they can hit me up on FB messenger, SMS, discord or even @mentions comments on school era google docs to send me an email.

for fun, i logged back into my instagram just to see exactly what i had missed. there were a couple dozen DMs, half of which where just @mention tags of stories i could no longer see from catch-ups with random friends. the other half were reels my friends thought i would like, but those tapered out as i wasnt responding.

we all know that these platforms are maximizing for time spent on the app (so they can serve ads). i didnt realize how good they were at doing such. some of these reels are impossible to peel your eyes away from. whether it cake gore or attractive people i was hooked for like a solid 40 minutes more than i shouldve been. the kids are probably getting 1-shot.

i also have no shame to say that i checked in on all my former crushes accounts to see if theyre married or grown in an any way. it seems like theyre just posting less and less, and more about event check-ins (coachella, weddings, etc) than a random tuesday thirst trap. maybe everyone on this trend back to reality? upon picking another 20 ‘following’ profiles at random, i would say 15% are still posting every 1-3 months, 60% once a year, and 25% went offline.

the dumbphone learnings

as with most things, the dumbphone’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness.

this brick is slow af. it takes me 27 seconds to open spotify and start playing a song. it takes 4 minutes to order an waymo. its faster for me to ask for a friends phone, them put in their password, and then navigate to chrome for me to search for a quick fact. same thing with trying to take a photo - its just easier for them to take the photo and then send to me.

not to mention, the images i would take are worse quality than an iphone 4 (2010) – tho it is sufficiently capable enough at reckognizing QR codes. continuing the tirade, a cat s22 flip phone’s screen size is smaller a nintendo game boy or a half inch bigger than an apple watch ultra. as such, you can imagine UI builds for ‘mobile’ are most certainly not built for this phone.

i like this.

by having such a high barrier to using my phone, i (unsurprisingly) use it less. i go to the bathroom without doomscrolling until my left leg goes numb. i can walk from my room to the laundry without the need to blast music. i can wait in line at the coffee shop without refreshing 6 different apps. i sleep earlier because there’s no point to even trying to use it before bed.

even if i wanted to open instagram reels on this phone, the experience just wouldnt work. the time that it would take to buffer the next short video is too slow for the dopamine feedback cycle mechanism to reach critical slop velocity.

2FA and texting work fine. what else do i need from a phone?

well, i guess there are a few things that i miss. the biggest is that if im not near my computer, or if I want to send a blue bubble message to my friends, i cant do that in pure flip phone mode. i can recieve iMessages directly to the phone, but i have no way to reply (and it stay blue) unless its via the computer.

similarly i miss apple’s notes app and airdrop copy pasting functions. i’ve migrated to google keep, but its not quite the same. copy pasting from the phone means i have to either text it to myself or put in the google keep notes app. the bump is also a cool feature that i always feel awkward for not being able to fulfil.

it also sometimes really annoying to pull up a ticketmaster concert or airplane ticket, especially if ‘on the spot’. there have been times where i just connect my computer to the phone hotspot and show it on the computer because it would be faster to pull up.

these are pretty infrequent though. dont think that these few downsides are anything close to reversing the upside of having a screen time of ~8 minutes/day.

the other major thing i miss is the ability to take nice photos of nice moments as they show up. it could be as banal as the sunbeam hitting a bouquet, or important like seeing my brother succeed on stage. my grainy flip phone quality is laughable, if i even get it to open and capture the photo in time. in the first few months of dumbphoning i thought it was sufficient to just write these moments to memory, but i have stopped seeing them as vividly as i want to. and if there are any ephemeral moments like rare bird breeds or the fog rolling in – or even just beautiful art, i will forget them in days. i dont want to.

so, for those of you know know me well, you also know i have an iPhone (we bought for the company a year ago) that i’ve started to keep in my backpack as well. before you go ‘tHiS dEfEAtS thE WhOLe pOinT’, i cant download any apps to it. its synced to my work email apple id, so it doesnt do copy-paste either. i only bust it out for built in functions like maps, contact sharing and high quality photos. my screen time is similarly in the low minutes as the majority time spent comes from weekends where i need to use navigation (flip phone is not good enough tbh) to drive to costco or a friend’s apt.

the wearable learnings

i was always familiar with wearable AIs bc a nyc friend of mine Brett Bejcek quit spotify data science to start a company in the space in 2022. i started getting more seriously into wearable AIs when i met Nik Shevchenko at the mistral shack15 hackathon in early 2024. a few weeks later i met steve jang who tried to use the humane pin to do live translation, but it failed spectacularly (much like the company). i still chuckle at the memory of him rage slamming his chest and scoffing at the product under his breath.

i later met avi, who launched friend and chris samra of waves glasses. nik gave me an ‘open source’ friend which was just a $15 bluetooth microsensor and a 7 dollar battery pack.

i tinkered a bit with my own hardware projects over christmas, creating an arcade button that if you bonk will call chatgpt, and more recently a similar functionality with a rotary deskphone.

but the biggest change has been using the bee wristband. beyond beeing (heh) a top CES product and spawning from a hackathon project, it is also slick for $49.

The device itself is surprisingly minimal; its just a black plastic wristband with a single button that looks more like a basic fitness tracker than an AI device. the button, upon single press mutes the device, and on long press activates a call to chatgpt – but because its been listening to your conversations throughout the day, automatically generating to-do lists based on what it overhears and a personalized knowledge base of facts about your life – you can ask it questions about past conversations, and it’ll search through your personal transcript database (+ gmail/gcal) to find much more relevant answers.

since i have a dumphone that makes googling impossible, i really quite like this combo. if i need a quick answer to the capital of botswana or a guesstimate of how many views this video has, i can query the wristband – the way i would ask siri (if it was competent). supposedly it is capable of emulating an Android phone in the cloud to complete tasks like sending WhatsApp messages, but i havent tried it yet.

ur phone has to be within bluetooth radius and the app has to stay ‘always on’, so if you swipe up the cache of apps, itll stop transcribing. but otherwise, every single conversations are transcribed. no more – everything it hears, including youtube videos – is then diarized into seperate ‘speakers’ that you can assign names to, the way we do in google photos. the microphones are sensitive enough that if you can hear someone in a conversation, the device should be able to hear them too.

the privacy implications are staggering. are we ready to live in a world where every word we speak is recorded, transcribed, and made searchable by AI? There are 16 states (including California and Florida) that require two party consent to being recorded. I’ve pretty good about this but its unclear how others will behave. This device is essentially creating a permanent, searchable record of every conversation you have. Not to mention, the company stores full transcripts of everything, which feels like a massive privacy trade-off for the convenience.

there is a saying that ‘the internet is forever’. many celebrities and public figures apply scorched earth techniques to their social medias to avoid getting #cancelled like trudeau for blackface, james gunn for old tweets, or kevin hart’s ousting from the oscars. this wont work with the pervasiveness of these wearables. you can’t just delete the source tweet and hope no one screen shotted it or cached the internet arxiv.

with the adoption of these devices, everything becomes recorded by everyone. its like we’re all wearing police body cams. everything is now 100% immortalized forever. everything is heard and seen - even stuff you didnt hear or see.

im not sure how this will effect social contracts. maybe we become more truthful and attentive? maybe we become orwellian social listeners? maybe nothing happens.

all i know is that what is taboo today will become common place tomorrow. good luck vince ~