Here's an interesting object: a deliberately 'dumb' phone "designed with the 21st century in mind." Which would imply that the hallmark of our century is no longer massive and accelerated technological development, but an orientation of caution and functional paranoia towards it. Punkt disarticulates the cellphone from the internet (without going so far as to entirely refuse it--internet connectivity becomes something you opt in to, rather than the default.) While the claims about allowing the user greater access to 'the here and now,' fewer distractions, etc. are predictable and pat, much more interesting are the phone's security features: "not designed around the owner entering sensitive personal information," integrating the Signal protocol for the encryption of call and text metadata so that cellphone companies' "harvesting and selling of valuable metadata" is interrupted and, again, no longer the default setting. Small as this example is -- a single, imperfect, somewhat obscure object -- I think it indexes an important position of possibility: the ability to imagine consumer technology without surveillance, the necessary (even if experimental) decoupling of these two concepts.
Marisol Vasquez (post 9/15): Thank you so much for posting this. I appreciate the eloquence and concision to think about how concerns of surveillance and privacy factor into a design. The question of "Dumb Phones" as a solution to "Smart Phones" is one I have also been pondering over, but rarely have my concerns revolved around security, and moreso around 'digital minimalism,' deployed here in its more mainstream colloquial use. The question of dumb phones designed around privacy and security also provokes, for me, the question of what is lost: the networks, platforms, connectivity, that engender this kind of convenience at the cost of extracting user data and privacy. There is also the "Light Phone" that has come out but is almost unusable even as a 'smart phone' https://www.thelightphone.com/
ReplyDeleteI also find it peculiar how 'phone design' reinstantiates the "binary" and "oppositional" thinking between "dumb and smart" "usable and unusable" "convenient and inconvenient," etc. These signifiers instantiate a clear hierarchy of values...
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ReplyDelete^ I was just about to link the "Light Phone" as well! Marisol, that "dumb" vs. "smart" binary you mention has recently caught my attention, too. There's a 2017 article ("The Smartness Mandate") by Orit Halpern and a few others that traces the history of the discourse of "smart technology." But I wonder if "dumb" (or a better, nicer (?) word) can be a type of alternative platform, hardware, software, etc. design that privileges something even poorly made, under-made to resist not just surveillance technologies wired into the device but the sleek, streamlined aesthetics that cover all that up, too.