I purchased a Light Phone in May 2024. It arrived in October 2024 and I've been using it as my primary communication device for about a year now.

The Model II is smaller than a bar of soap and, true to its name, feels very light. It has a black and white e-ink screen with a backlight that flickers as it redraws the content. It has no camera and cannot render pictures. If someone texts me a photo, it gets automatically forwarded to my email. I am only able to send 24 emojis: 😅 ☺️ 🙃 😍 😜 😂 😭 😎 🙌 👍 👎 🤞 ✌️ 👌 👋 🙏 ✨ 🔥 ❤️ 💔 🏆 🎯 👑 👀 . Unfortunately, these cannot be customized. I can receive a larger set of them, but often the emoji appears as an empty box: ☐. With a long press, I can forward the message containing the empty emoji box to my email, go get my computer, open my email, and then, finally, realize that I completely misinterpreted my girlfriend's message ("Never talk to me again 🤪" is not the same as "Never talk to me again 🤢").

The Light Phone web dashboard allows you to customize your "Tools," which appear when I press the big side button. These are sort of like apps, but the terminology, I think, is important. An app is something to be played with or scrolled through; a tool is something to be used for a purpose. My phone has seven tools: Phone, for texting and calling; Alarm, for waking me up; Directions, for getting me places; Directory, for looking up the hours, address or phone number of some store, restaurant or museum; Music, for playing locally downloaded music; Settings, for configuration (and turning on the hotspot!); and Timer, for doing laundry.

The Directions tool has some serious flaws. I can view a map of where I'm going, but it takes forever to load and when it does load, I can barely make out any details on the tiny black and white screen. Usually I use CityMapper on my computer to plan my route before I go anywhere new and write down or (try to) memorize the turns needed. But if I'm out alone and need to, say, meet friends at a bar I've never been to, it works well enough. They will text me a link to Google Maps, I'll ask for the name of the bar because I can't use the link, they'll send the name of the bar, I will look it up (the search feature is surprisingly good!), read the subway directions (it knows the train and bus schedules!), try to understand what streets I need to take after I get out of the subway (if I'm lucky, the bar will be in the grid part of Manhattan), get out of the subway, turn the wrong way, realize that I've walked too far, re-route and turn around and wind up at the bar perfectly late. I'm quite happy with this whole process because I think it's forced me to get to know the city better. Plus,

The Music tool is my favorite. I have 5 albums and a handful of singles on there. The phone supports Bluetooth, but also has a aux port, so I can listen to music even if I (hypothetically) sent my Bluetooth headphones through the washer and dryer. As far as I know, you can't create playlists, which I never really did anyway. I just shuffle all the songs and listen to them over and over and over again. I haven't gotten sick of Acid Rap in eleven years. Why would I now?

Texting can be somewhat of a pain - the keyboard is small and sometimes unresponsive. It compels me towards terseness. If I didn't reply to your text, I'm sorry, but my thumbs were sore. Sometimes I decide to call people, especially if they're just sent me several texts that don't even fit on my screen. Also, I recently realized that I had taken for granted one feature of the modern smartphone: you can read incoming messages even as you compose your own. On the Light Phone, the keyboard and the composition field take up the whole screen, so by the time I've typed out my message, the person I'm texting may have sent three more, sending the conversation in a whole new direction. "Anyone want to join me for pickleball tomorrow at 1pm?" my friend might say in a group chat. "Sounds fun!" I'll reply, but in the meantime, another friend might have written, "Can't, have to go to my grandfather's funeral ☐." Hilarity ensues!

When people see me using it, I tend to get one of two reactions. The first is ridicule. One friend refers to it as "your fuck-ass phone." Some of this is probably well-deserved because a) why would I spend $300 on a phone that barely does anything, b) it's so annoying that I my texts are green, and c) I'm so annoying for thinking that I'm better than everyone because I'm such an iconoclastic Luddite who refuses to buy into the life prescribed to us by our techno-fascist overlords. The other reaction is from people who totally get it. "I want one!", "I almost bought one!", "Ugh, I wish I could get one but I need Y app for Z," they'll say.

Regardless of their initial reaction, everyone wants to know how it's changed my life. Am I truly free from the chains of modern society? Am I using all my newly found free time to drastically improve my life, conquer my anxiety, and make the world a better place? ... No.

I read more - I usually bring a book on the subway and I have magazines in the bathroom. I still use my iPhone at home on Wifi and I still scroll aimlessly and anxiously through "content" on it (and on my computer), but it's definitely nice to escape more easily. For the last two months or so, my pattern has been to let my iPhone die, leave it totally off for a week, charge it when I need one app or another (usually the Garmin app or a 6-digit pin code app), get stuck looking at memes for a while, and then turn it back off for another week after realizing how much worse I feel after all this supposed entertainment.

More than anything though, my Light Phone has made me less independent. If I get lost in the city, I need to ask a stranger for directions. (If you're my age, that might sound scary, but it's also kind of important to have incidental and non-transactional interactions with other people because it's good to not be scared of people you don't know and aren't paying to be nice to you.) When I go out to eat at restaurants with QR-code menus, I need to look over my friend's shoulder. When I go to a concert, I need my friend to buy the ticket for me (or email them my ticket). In the dozens of moments in life where some tech C.E.O. has decided that we each have to look down at the personal computers in our hands, I look up and say, "Hey, can you help me?" "Oh yeah, because of your fuck-ass phone!" my friend will jeer, but he will help me anyway and isn't that kind of beautiful?

So, yes, I'm still largely dependent on smartphones, just not my own anymore (I am a leech!). But my Light Phone forces me to think about how we can design systems that work without smartphones, that work for people who can't afford a $799 iPhone, or whose prepaid data plan ran out, or who cracked their camera and haven't had time to go to the repair store, or who got banned from all Google services because of a mistake in an unaccountable algorithm, or who just forgot to charge their phone last night. Can we navigate the subway, pay for a cab, get medical attention, see a movie, or buy food without a smartphone? How will we fare when a solar flare, foreign adversary, or authoritarian regime disables our data networks or the servers behind them? What if society became a little less convenient for people lucky enough to have working Internet-connected computers in their pockets and a little more resilient, interdependent and human?