The Dumbphone Trend: Are Owners Really Losing Their Minds?

My friend Lilah is the crunchiest person I know. She refuses to kill bugs and rats. She once made me try her homemade wine (disastrous). A few years ago, she quit her food-justice nonprofit job to live in a yurt, and after that she went to grad school and moved into an attic, where her roommates were squirrels. Against her will, she did own an iPhone for a time. She had no choice: A university administrator explicitly told her she couldn’t perform her studently duties without one. Two-factor authentication and all that. But Lilah’s Lilah, so upon graduation, she gifted herself a dumbphone. And boy was that phone dumb. Designed for those weaning themselves off the real thing, it connected to Wi-Fi but not to the internet, and it certainly didn’t accommodate apps. Lilah now navigates the world smartphoneless. “I think my main reason for getting rid of it was that I felt like my brain was being consumed,” she recently told me. Most of my fellow twentysomethings want to go dumb like Lilah. I’m familiar with and sympathetic to the urge: I waste hours a day, and lose hours of sleep, to the tyranny of the scroll. I’m trapped in a shame spiral for spending so much of my precious life watching videos of complete strangers until my eyes sting and my head aches. And, ideologically, I like the sound of withholding personal data from corporations, of not succumbing to ads every time I unlock my home screen. But I haven’t gone dumb, and the reason is simple: I’m terrified! Ditching my smartphone would be completely disorienting. It would significantly reduce my overall competence. It’s deeply embarassing—it really makes me feel like a giant baby—but I am certain that my smartphone is a part of me. I mean that literally: The panic I feel when I lose sight of it is visceral, existential, as if pieces of my physical body are missing. This thought is neither insane nor original. Back in 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced their “extended mind hypothesis,” the idea that external tools can extend, in an all but physical way, the biological brain. Checking the Notes app for your grocery list? Using Google Maps to get to a friend’s house? That's not just your phone at work, and it’s also not just your biological brain—it’s a single cognitive system composed of both. Since the age of 14, when I got my first iPhone, my mind has welcomed Apple’s increasingly powerful operating systems and, over the years, fused with them. My phone and I are now totally, completely enmeshed. But is un-enmeshment a worthwhile pursuit? And is it, as dumbphone users seem to believe, even possible? In 1985, the late psychologist Daniel Wegner published a theory about intimate human relationships called transactive memory. He argued that long-term couples store information in one another and that their collective pool functions as something of a joint memory card, a single “knowledge-acquiring, knowledge-holding, and knowledge-using system that is greater than the sum of its individual member systems.” This is uncannily—maybe humiliatingly—applicable to my relationship with my iPhone. At the end of my senior year of high school, I went to the Apple store to replace my worn-out device with a new and improved one. In classic irresponsible-teenage fashion, I hadn’t backed up my data from recent months, so my photos from that school year disappeared. My memories of that period, it turned out, disappeared along with them—a road trip across the South, a friend’s dramatic breakup. I knew, intellectually, that these things had happened. But I had no real feeling for them, no specific images to trigger my recollection. When one’s close partner leaves, Wegner and his coauthors write, “there will be entire realms of one's experience that merely slip away, unrecognized in their departure, and never to be retrieved again.” I’ve placed blind trust in my smartphone to hold and shape and reinforce my narrative of my past. I’ve unwittingly given myself permission to forget about the family trips and social milestones it has not preserved for me. Clark and Chalmers, in their paper, reach a similar conclusion: “If we remove the external component,” they write, “the system’s behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain.” So it was just as I’d feared: I was most likely beyond help. My brain had spent its formative years, and continues to spend its adult life, making room for the functions of my phone. The enmeshment is in its late stages. At this point, it’s hard to understand how I could possibly benefit from going dumb. Many of us find our reliance on smartphones—external devices that we can leave at a bar or accidentally drop in the toilet—worrisome. But Clark was quick to remind me, when we spoke this past summer, that our brains can break too. “You could have a mild stroke or something,” he said. That bleak reality led me to the (perhaps even bleaker) thought that my smartphone may actually be more reliable than my biological brain. I feel a sense of certainty that my brain will one day decline, that it may actually be in the process of doing so as I write this, but it feels unlikely that I’ll one day have to navigate life without a pocket-sized, internet-connected vessel. The quality of the smartphone is moving in the exact opposite direction as my brain—over my lifetime, the capacity of these devices will only grow. The continued existence and availability of the smartphone, or of the devices that will one day replace them, is also more certain than that of a partner. Our partners leave the house every day to go to work; our partners might even leave us for good; and our partners will, without a doubt, die. My iPhone might shatter into a million pieces, but the software that makes my iPhone uniquely mine lives (in theory) forever. Clark assured me that my feeling of enmeshment is not just normal—it’s by design. Tech companies “have a vision of technologies as potentially mind-extended,” he said. “No doubt about that.” As much as I’ve fantasized about going dumb, I’ve also fixated on its downsides, in part as an intellectual exercise, but mostly to justify my continued incessant smartphone use. For one, my relationships might suffer. Plans with friends are often made on the fly—would I be left out of those? Conversations frequently begin with a reference to something I’m expected to have encountered on social media, read in a group chat, flinched at in a New York Times alert. How would I keep up? I use an app to activate the laundry machines in my building’s basement—I’d have to start trekking to the laundromat! It would also, more troublingly, reveal the true capacity of my naked brain. If we truly share a memory system with close, long-term companions, as Wegner argues, and if external tools are just as much a part of the human mind as is the brain, as Clark and Chalmers believe, then the transition from lifelong smartphone user to sudden dumbphone user would result in a profound blow to my mind’s operating system. If I get a dumbphone, I’ll have to face the rudimentary version of myself. And although the true capabilities of my bare-bones brain are a mystery to me, I do know that the change would be a downgrade—Wegner’s description of a breakup between close-knit cohabitating partners sounds similar to how one might describe dementia. In their original paper, the tool Clark and Chalmers used to illustrate the extended mind was a notebook—they could not have foreseen the omnipresence or multifunctionality of the smartphone. The smartphone has usurped and consolidated power, and its sudden loss could have dire consequences. My next question to Clark was just that: Just how dire? Could it, in a way, be considered a cognitively disabling condition? Well, yes, he said: “I think that as we move into a future in which the societal norm is very much a kind of mild cyborg of some kind, then to not be that would be to be effectively disabled within that society, or differently abled within the society.” “Interference with my phone,” he added, is “like giving me some brain damage.” This might help explain why the people who opt into this cognitive state are in a very small minority: In the US, 98 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 own a smartphone. The number only drops a single percent for Americans ages 30 to 49. When enmeshment becomes the norm, where does that leave the un-enmeshed? Most of us are buying into minds that incorporate the smartphone, normalizing this coupled system. Much like someone with a cognitive impairment, dumbphone users are left disoriented by their outsider status. “It’s a real worry, the creation of a disempowered class,” Clark said. “Every time there’s a potential for something roughly like human enhancement, it has this flip side to it, which is, what happens to people that either don’t get it or reject it?” Many smartphone owners hate—or at least claim to hate—their phones. The internet is full of desperate cries for help from people who “can’t STAND” them, call the devices “invasive,” complain that “everything is dependent on apps.” But my friend Lilah’s post-iPhone era hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. When I texted her asking what about the dumbphone inconveniences her the most, she replied: “Im gonna text u on my computer when i get home bc long messages r one of them lol.” This particular difficulty—she later wrote to me in the familiar comfort of her Macbook’s iMessage app—often dissuades her from responding to messages altogether, which, she says, has made long-distance friendships nearly impossible to maintain. When she absolutely needs to reply to someone—say, her boss—she’s forced to “sit on the phone for nine minutes to text out my grammatically correct message.” She only sometimes receives group messages. And spontaneity is a bit tricky: “I'm not leaving work thinking, ‘Oh, I should go here,’” she told me during a phone call, “because I can’t. I actually don’t know how to get there, and it’s almost impossible for me to do that.” And, if I’m being honest, Lilah’s life isn’t even genuinely “post-iPhone.” “I feel like I’m not full feet in,” she admitted, disappointedly. When we recently took a flight together, she flashed the digital boarding pass in her Apple Wallet to the TSA agent and was forced to reveal that she had brought an “emergency iPhone” with her on the trip. Turns out she still needs to own one—her teaching job requires her to use an app to clock in each day. I’m still jealous of Lilah, though. Assuming her emergency iPhone is only whipped out for true emergencies, she doesn’t end her days having lost hours to Instagram or having accidentally spent a walk in the park browsing the internet. And the switch has come with some unexpected perks: “I’m paying attention to how the interstates connect,” she said, “which is actually kind of interesting and led me down some research into city development.” But Lilah was never as enmeshed as I believe myself to be. “I don’t think I’ve ever had the sense of safety or comfort,” she says of her relationship to her smartphone prior to going dumb. Clark, to my surprise, expressed some opposition to the movement. “I think our self-expectations as a species have changed to take account of the technology, and that’s just as it should be,” he said. “I’m a little bit concerned about the move towards dumbphones, because I think it is generally a retrograde step.” I take some comfort in that. For those of us so far gone, whose extended minds exist largely inside of devices that have distilled thousands of tools into one, the solution doesn’t feel clear-cut. I’ve spent my life integrating the iOS interface into my cognitive system—its impact is there to stay, whether I like it or not. My biological brain has grown like tree roots between the spaces in a pavement pattern. Simply removing the pavement would leave gaping holes in the root system. Any relief I’d feel would come with a cost, the satisfaction strictly ideological. The term “phone addiction” has wiggled its way into the common vernacular and has become a near-universal self-diagnosis among my cohort. But that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m not addicted to my phone. I am my phone. Lilah said it best: It’s consumed my brain. “Phone enmeshment” feels more accurate. If I ditch the device, part of me will vanish with it. I’ll face the unextended version of myself. I’m not sure I care to meet her.