Mid-month project update. Let me talk about my phone!
Despite it feeling like a bad idea, I did buy a Bluefox NX1 to try it out. At work it has become, as we say in Scotland, ‘the talk of the steamie’. I even had the lady on the ferry ask me to take my earphones out when I showed my ticket so she could ask about it. It is – very striking.
I have to say – I actually love it. It is very small. Not the smalest you can get (which I believe is currently the Unihertz Jelly Star with a 3 inch screen), but with a 4-inch screen that seems *just enough* to do what I need while being not nearly enough to do what I don’t want to want. Attached photos show it next to my work phone, and in the hand.
Now, this isn’t some tokenistic dumb phone. This is a proper smart phone – full Android, full Play compatibility, the works. It runs BankID like a champ, Swish like a champ, Vasttraffik like a champ. What it doesn’t do like a champ is enable the worse excesses of having a phone. It’s painful to use emails. Awkward to browse the Internet. It’s a device that is becoming more like a kind of watch-fob – I pull it out of my pocket to check a thing or do a thing, but I don’t get sucked in. It’s not unusable, but it is *impractical* for a lot of things. It basically forces me to wait until I’m at a computer to do computer tasks. Every time I pick up the S21 now it reminds me of how blown away I was by the first Galaxy Note I owned – what we used to call Phablets (Phone/Tablets) before we all lost our fucking minds and decided even ‘small phones’ needed 6.2″ screens [1]. I mean, the Galaxy Note had a 5.3″ screen and we all thought that was ridiculous at the time.
I’d prefer not to carry a phone around at all. However, I am but one man – a heroic, Nietzschen Ubermensch, sure. A man that uncomfortably lives in the uncanny valley between myth and reality. Even so I cannot hold back the tide by myself. The digital infrastructure in Sweden *can* be navigated around but at such a cost of logistical Shit that I’m not prepared to do that. Yet.
Downsides – the camera is not great. I mean, it’s okay in a pinch but it lacks a lot of the features I take for granted with the S21. The attached photo of Some Ducks is about the best I’ve gotten from it.
But maybe a good camera isn’t really ‘every day carry’, really? Maybe I just thought it was because good cameras have been available at the press of a button for so long. Perhaps the answer here is to get an actually *good* separate camera and only bring it with me when I actually intend to take pictures. I have gigabytes of photos on my drives. None of them have the affective power of the photo books of me as a child that my mother presumably (?) still has somewhere (?). Surely a camera is, ideally, something that emphasises selective quality over convenient quantity? I can get photographic evidence always if I need it, it just won’t be 4K stock photo quality. Perhaps the real question here is, ‘to what extent is not documenting a thing the most mindful choice I can make’?
The Bluetooth on it is fine but I find it does struggle more in areas where there are a lot of overlapping signals. It goes excitingly berserk when I pass outside Kuggen, where my office is , for example. To be fair that sits in the intersection between Ericsson, the science park, the university, and a bunch of companies that test experimental radio devices. I suspect some of the problem though may simply be a lack of ‘oomph’ in the device. It can’t pack a lot of horsepower into its frame.
It doesn’t have NFC, so it can’t be used for Google Wallet (fine, I want to migrate from that anyway) or to tap on public transport. But here’s an example of the low-grade shittification of high-tech – I keep my phone in the inside pocket of my jacket when I’m out and about, and often I’d find just leaning against a pole with a payment terminal would result in me buying a ticket without intending to. I switched all those settings off, of course, but a malevolent update switched them back on. So every so often, without me knowing or being able to predict it, I’d pay a ‘standing up’ tax the price of a single 90 minute journey because I don’t get to make permanent decisions on the boundaries I set with my phone. So not having NFC solves that *neatly*. All other uses of NFC are so situational that I’m happy to solve the lowest possible tech way.
And, of course, it’s a pain in the hole any time you need to type in a password or a complicated URL That’s a front-loaded concern though. Part of the cost of setup.
If, as Marshall McLuhan once said, ‘augmentation is amputation’, then it logically must work the other way too. Amputation can be a form of augmentation. The loss of NFC restores my autonomy over my boundaries. It gives me agency over consent, and when it can – and cannot – be assumed.
As downsides though? That’s not bad – a sub-optimal camera and a bit of Bluetooth distortion every so often. I’ve been using this now for maybe three weks, and I think it might be a permanent shift. I like it a lot, and its many limitations are actually in service of my goals.
In the end I just put my work SIM in it, and it turns out it still works for everything I need it to without being a device shackled to my employer. So this isn’t a second device I need to keep in mind – it’s a replacement device. It doesn’t sync with Google Drive or Photos (I use a different tool for syncing now). it doesn’t have Spotify on it (I’ve been working hard on curating my old ripped CDs and replicating playlists). It is not Shitware Free (you can’t get away from Google unless you want to go down the sideloaded OS route, which I don’t for now) but it *is* Shitware Lite. It’s the closest I think I can get to digital infrastructure as an appliance for now. We’ll see how it goes as I get more used to it. There will almost certainly be problem edge-cases.
I made fun in my February update of the excessive everyday carry inventories that people are so entranced by in the digital minimalism movement. You can see mine now attached.
Infrastructure should disappear when it’s working. I’ll continue to think about how to ensure mine gets smaller and smaller to the point I don’t even know it’s there.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-small-phones?test_uuid=04IpBmWGZleS0I0J3epvMrC&test_variant=A