Week 4: a tough week
Hi there…
This is my newsletter where I write weekly about deleting all of my social media accounts and getting rid of my smartphone.
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This week I got locked out of my bank, locked out of my Whatsapp, and nearly missed a flight. For the first time, I thought this whole no smartphone thing might be kind of difficult.
I then spoke with Charles Radclyffe, co-founder of EthicsGrade. EthicsGrade covers the ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance) risk of tech companies.
At the same time as running EthicsGrade, Charles has lived the last three years without a smartphone. We had a great chat. He renewed my optimism.
As always, feel free to respond to this email – I’d love to hear from you.
I hope you enjoy reading.
Week 4: a tough week
I wonder if the honeymoon phase of ‘no smartphone’ living is at its end; the time I was spending excitedly exploring the city - map and compass in hand - is instead being spent listening to broken-up elevator music on never-ending phone answering lines…
“Please hold while you are connected to the next available agent.” I hear, over and over again.
Over the course of the last week, I have had three fairly significant issues:
Banking
Six years ago I moved to the UK from Miami. At first, I kept my US bank account, it was bad; it had high transaction fees and, would randomly stop working. It was always very difficult to get it to start working again.
Then I found Monzo. It was the opposite; simple phone banking, fast responses from seemingly real people on the app: welcome progress from stuffy old-fashioned, in-person banking.
I liked Monzo a lot. I told friends and family to switch to Monzo (my sister Skye did), I paid for Monzo’s fancy metal card membership, and on occasion, I would write to customer support; sending ideas for how to make Monzo better.
But of course, Monzo is mobile-only banking. Everything on Monzo has to be done with a smartphone. And I don’t have a smartphone anymore.
I needed a new different bank… one with as many branches as possible. I had to be able to do banking in person, both in the UK and abroad.
HSBC seemed pretty decent, with 4,000 or so branches around the world… also there is a branch right next to my house, and one right next to my office.
So I switched to HSBC… Logical? Right?
But it wasn’t quite that simple.
What followed was a painful trickle of letters delivered to my house; some of which I had to fill out and send back; some I had to safely put away; some with numbers; others tempting me to borrow money; one with little-calculator-looking-number-typing-thing, that I needed to access my account online… all of which were apparently ‘essential’...
All the while, I was using my Monzo card to pay for everything.
But I knew this money-well would dry up… that’s because:
1. I didn’t have all that much money
2. I had no way of knowing how much money I was spending
3. I was spending too much
4. I had ambitiously put a lot of my paycheck into savings this month, and without my phone, I had no way of accessing those savings.
(I play this little game with myself every month, in which I put some money into savings, and then end up just taking it right back out, as I inevitably overspend.)
Alas, the well dried up, so I had to borrow some money short-term from friends and family. Which is never fun.
I have since been waiting for Monzo to send my savings to HSBC, but they are really taking their time. Monzo says the transfer failed, and HSBC says it’s still in progress. After a couple of hours on the phone, I began to see that neither Monzo nor HSBC had a clue what was going on.
Messaging
Since ditching my iPhone, I have somehow remained connected to Whatsapp on my computer.
I felt a bit guilty the whole time. I would message friends on Whatsapp and they would respond something like “oh, did you get your phone back?” and I would have to half-heartedly explain that “no, I just am using Whatsapp on my computer,” to which some of my closer friends would respond “isn’t that cheating?”
It probably was cheating. I was planning to address it in a future episode, and ask you - kind reader - if I should get off Whatsapp?
But Whatsapp has spared me that question, by cutting off my computer access. Now when I go to the ‘web.WhatsApp’ page, I have to re-sign in by scanning a QR code with my phone. Which, of course, is not possible.
Being cut out of Whatsapp has felt sudden and uncontrollable. A lot of my work communication is done through Whatsapp… as time passes, a slow creeping dilemma will grow harder to ignore: how important is this endeavor and my newsletter, compared to other really important things in my life… like remaining employed?
In case you are new here, one founding rule of this newsletter is: as soon as I touch my phone - for any reason - I have to permanently end this newsletter.
Traveling
This week I booked a couple of days off work to go and visit Serena - my old flatmate, and dearest friend - in the Canary Islands, where she has been living for the last year or so.
I bought my flights and planned to leave my house at 2:30 AM on Thursday to catch a 6 AM flight from Luton; a small airport just outside of London.
In anticipation of the irrational early hour, I prepared to fly solo with no smartphone; no Uber, no digital Boarding card, no quick book Covid test, and no Monzo account for last-minute finance for a 4 AM preflight brew.
I had everything I would need written down and printed out. I slept sound, “I got this.”
At 2 AM I awoke, shuffled around my room, gathered my things, and got dressed.
I left the house and got the first black cab I saw.
Ten minutes, two miles, and one weak attempt at conversation later, we arrived at Blackfriars station.
But, for no apparent reason, it was closed. As I was getting out of the cab, the driver said something along the lines of, “Wow, I have never seen Blackfriars like this before.”
It was 2 AM, cold, dark, I didn’t know exactly how to get home, the only people on the road were drunk and stumbling, I didn’t have a smartphone and I was about to miss my flight to visit Serena.
But then I met a guy called James.
James ran over to the cab just as it was preparing to leave, and asked the driver for a ride to St Pancreas.
James was a little drunk; he had gone for a few beers with friends, which - as it sometimes does - became a lot of beers with friends. He had a Scottish accent, and described his state of inebriation as “fuckin banjaxed mate,” which I figured meant “pretty drunk.”
He had made his way to Blackfriars to catch the same train as me and had been waiting for a while, presumably equally confused about the closure of the station. His phone was dead.
James said, “come with me in the cab mate, I’m on the same train as you, I'll take you there…”
So we rode in the cab together, got to the station, calmly smoked a cigarette, then frantically ran to catch the train.
We had a long chat. In-between occasional hiccups, James talked about life and food. He’s big on food and actually served the queen a meal some months ago.
I got James’ email and added him here - so James, if you are reading this, it was good to meet you. And entirely thanks to you, I'm here and waiting in Lanzarote airport, nursing a savage sunburn, writing this, as I wait to board my flight back to London…
***
It has only been three weeks or so since I began this project, and I’m already running into issues. I was curious about what it would be like to go way longer… for years rather than weeks…
So I spoke with Charles Radclyffe, who runs a company called EthicsGrade, and hasn’t had a smartphone for three years.
Charles began by asking how my offline experiment was going. I gave him a quick run-through.
“Without trying to sound dramatic, it has been completely life-changing…” I said.
Charles laughed and agreed. ‘Nice. It's a great thing you're doing and particularly great that you're writing about it, because the first reaction I get from people whom I’ve told about life without a smartphone is “how’s that even possible?”’
Charles continued, “For me, what started as an experiment three years ago has become a permanent fixture. But more than that, it's totally changed my relationships with people and technology. Not having a phone is a lot less painful than people think. It has its downsides for sure, but I think you can come up with strategies to work around them quite easily.”
Charles said he isn’t ‘anti-tech’, but instead described himself as ‘post-tech’; meaning he’s aware of the harms of technology and tries to benefit from more considered use, by using each bit of tech for a very specific purpose. For example, Charles uses his phone as a tool, to perform specific tasks like calling, as opposed to using his phone to kill time.
“I think you've got to do whatever you can, within the limits of what’s possible. For example, I don't use Whatsapp, but I do use LinkedIn, though only as a business tool, and Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools. But would I use those apps socially with my friends? No, definitely not.”
It turns out Charles’ idiosyncratic relationship with technology extends well beyond his phone (a 1994 Nokia 2110.) He picked up his laptop and gave me a Zoom-tour of his house, showing me all his old gizmos and gadgets; a 1978 Atari; a B&O TV and B&O home entertainment system, both from the 80s; a 78’ Radioshack home computer, among other things.
As our conversation continued, Charles made a few points that really stuck:
1. Phones and computers are designed to die, it's called ‘planned obsolescence’ and its environmentally catastrophic, the business model won't last
2. It may become harder to live without smartphones in the future. It’s already impossible in some countries, like Kenya, which have ‘technologically leapfrogged;
3. Few people understand how phones and computers actually work. Charles used to be the head of AI at Fidelity and has met very impressive young people who can write sophisticated machine learning code, but don’t understand the fundamentals of how a computer works.
Charles is teaching his kids about computing using old computers, which allows them to really see how it works. They will grow up understanding this tech on more a fundamental level than many people. Which, I imagine, will be very satisfying.
As always, thanks for reading. I love getting responses to this email… just click ‘reply’ and write to me.
Edited by Danya Muchinsky & Taima Hervas