I'm 24, have never had a phone. But I'm more weary of being able to be interrupted at any time. I'm a big fan of pull communication rather than push communication

Oh, yes yes yes, absolutely, there's a lot of that too. The idea that we have to be online at all times, no interruptions in connectivity. Email can come in at any time. Status updates, likes, upvotes; constant barrage of information. Yuck.

Y'know, our science fiction mostly didn't anticipate this. In William Gibson's fiction, you jacked into the matrix and you jacked out when you were done. Now we never jack out.

Whenever I walk around while my laptop is turned off and all I have is an offline Sansa Clip Zip running Rockbox for some music, I feel like I'm rocking out in Zion, unplugged and free.

> I'm 24, have never had a phone.

How do you even?

More seriously: not even a old Nokia 3310 or some other dumbphone to use in case of, I don't know, emergency, or calling someone to pick you up, etc?

My only phone is a beaten up Android thing with pretty much nothing installed on it but WhatsApp just for quick stuff like "ok, let's meet at $place" or "I'll be late". I'm not sure how I could do without.

This is such a common response.

You are aware that only very recently is not having a phone as weird as refusing to wear shoes, right? This is the one thing that bugs me the most about modern western society. People just think it's unthinkable to not have a phone and come up with all sorts of anxieties and emergencies that can come up without one.

Like I've said before, it really isn't that big a deal. Life is not as full of emergencies as phones have made us feel it is.

It's different when society and people expect you to have a mobile phone. It's not weird to not have one in 1975 because no one else did.

What other people expect me to do is way down the list on the reasons I do things.

I have a phone for emergencies, it's never off silent, I don't answer the phone I ring people back when it's convenient for me or preferably I text.

People almost get offended with the "You never answer your phone!"..well yes that's because I'm busy and the automatic assumption that I should drop everything to answer your call is a little arrogant no?.

Family and close friends know that if it's important/urgent they can text "ring me" and I'll ring them back straightaway everyone else rings out (I don't have voicemail either) as I found that if people can't leave a voicemail they'll email me whatever it was they wanted..which they should have done anyway.

This constant push for everyone to be always available at the beck and call of other people is insane and I refuse to go a long with it, I grew up without a mobile phone (didn't get my first one til I was 20 in 2000 and I miss those days).

I need to adopt this. My phone is a source of anxiety and I have no idea why. When my phone rings I literally get a pang of angst, like "oh shit what now". Maybe there is some other underlying issue, but I also hardly answer the phone. I absolutely do not have voice mail, and I have been considering making a messaging app that only notifies you of new messages on the hour each hour or some custom setting.

Perhaps a more customizable phone where only approved numbers can call and the rest are forced to a message saying something like "your number is not approved for this action, please leave an SMS and the person will get back to you when appropriate." I would love that.

> Perhaps a more customizable phone where only approved numbers can call and the rest are forced to a message saying something like "your number is not approved for this action, please leave an SMS and the person will get back to you when appropriate." I would love that.

You can do this already on Android, if you star them in your contacts and then put the phone into "Priority Only" silent mode, it'll ring for them and everyone else it mutes.

I found that just putting the phone into silent and ignoring it until I'm ready to deal with the calls was the better approach though, it took a week or so before I realized I was checking it less and less (I'd been trained like a skinnerbox) until now I look at it 2-3 times a day.

I should add that we don't value aloneness enough in our current society, the ability to spend an entire day undisturbed by anyone else is a valuable and prescious thing, been alone with your own thoughts is a refreshing experience, it gives you chance to stop and take stock and think about what is going on with your life, for some reason we prize "busyness" at the expense of just about everything else, I don't see any virtue in been "busy", I see purpose in getting done the things that are important to me.

While people are free to do as they please, allowing push notifications is more a courtesy to others than a service to one's self.

It's a courtesy to others at the expense of oneself and sometimes that expense is simply too high.

I'm around a decade behind you, I do have a smartphone but I dislike it and am (in my own lazy, passive fashion) seeking ways to minimize its use (I do find it very useful).

Agree regarding the more general points raised, etc. - but to be particular and technical for a second, it boggles my mind that I carry around an always-online computer with multiple location tracking mechanisms, a general purpose buggy virtual machine filled with buggy applications, and a radio chip which has direct memory access to system RAM.

The latter means that even if one had a way to run a formally secure system on the phone dry laugh, there could still be vulnerabilities / "streamlined mobile network operator access channels" down below - in the firmware (even fully FOSS androids have to deal with proprietary binary blobs on the radio chip) and/or hardware. Stock Lenovo/Windows etc. rootkits in BIOS are bad enough - but at least I don't carry those PCs around 24/7 with constant network access. Like, seriously.

>Are there young people out there who think modern pocket computing is just plain wrong?

In high school I was the only cell phone holdout.[0] I finally got one at the very very tail end of my senior year. (Like, a week away from graduation.) What ultimately changed my mind was:

1. I was tired of not being able to keep track of friends or access the (frankly really friggen cool) telepathic communication network we call SMS.

2. Realistically, yes the NSA is tracking you and they know wherever you are. On the other hand, so do emergency medical professionals and your parents and anybody else you might want who is now just a convenient phone call away. This has saved me from a night of being homeless in a large city more than once. Mundane emergencies turn out to be a way bigger deal than passive government surveillance.

3. Having the web wherever you go really is like magic. Yes yes I know you've gotten used to google and being able to look things up but it takes on a whole new dimension once you can do it anywhere at any time.

That having been said, I'm still not on Facebook. I have no plans to ever be on Facebook. I'm still not on any of the 'big' social media services like snapchat or instagram. I only really use SMS, I don't play mobile games, and I think the addictive little helper most people seem to have created in their pocket is really disturbing and implies a really painful social backlash that's going to come against the people who put this stuff in the environment.

It's increasingly clear to me that smartphones are comparable in their addiction risk to pharmaceuticals, and we're going to see a huge PR hit against tech companies when this becomes the consensus view:

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technolog...

[0]: I'm currently 20, FWIW.

In my limited experience the people around my age (22) who hate modern computing are usually social outcasts that hang around in 4chan's technology board or similar forums.