I hope the MK has let you guys reclaim your attention spans, because now that I have begun writing, I sense that this post might become a so-called “long read”. There will be multiple em-dashes and lists, but that’s just my writing style, not the output of an AI. You have my word that the words are mine.
My aim in writing this post is fourfold::
- To contribute with a case study to illustrate how my qualms about getting the MK is born from the circumstances that I find myself within (particularly as a Scandinavian) and the way I think about things. This will hopefully be valuable to both the Mudita team and to current and potential users of the MK.
- To bring in some fresh perspectives on the topic of digital life, mental health, sustainability, security, culture, and so on.
- To seek advice about how the MK could be made to work for me—if that’s even possible—or about alternative devices.
- To issue a warning.about the destination that countries are heading towards if they take the same path as Scandinavia has taken in the pursuit of digitalization and eternal economic growth.
My claim is that in today’s world, but especially in Scandinavia, it is simply not possible to use a mobile device which may simultaneously retain your mental health, be somewhat sustainable, and secure your information. To put it a bit ostentatiously, you can pick only one of the three.
But first, some background on me and the culture in which i live.
I’ve been looking for a less life-wrecking mobile device to replace my decade-old 1st gen iPhone SE, which, although still working fairly well, has been labeled obsolete by a certain fraternity of ghouls in Silicon Valley. It will no longer receive security upgrades, and important apps on it are getting whacked by the hour. I’ve seen some posts by other Scandinavians on this forum who are struggling to make the dumbphone or semi-smartphone life work for them, and their grievances seem to be quite similar to mine. This is my perspective on The Digitized Scandi Experience:
Overall, infrastructures which support living a simultaneously de-googled, private/secure, sustainable, mentally healthy, and smartphone-free life is gradually being phased out, while smartphone/app-based solutions are proliferating throughout the fabric of everyday life, locking the technology in place through new, tech-reliant social norms and expectations. Scandinavia has gotten so far down this path that it is practically and socially impossible—at least tremendously inconvenient—to live without a smartphone. As in many other countries, there is a rising counterculture of people who use dumbphones, but many of them cave in after less than a year. Their failure is not simply due to personal weakness, but a result of the infrastructural (and even social) marginalization that accompanies the dumbphone, which makes the low-tech life unbearable for most people in the long run.
In the replies to the posts of Scandinavians on this forum and others, some people seem to attribute the Scandis’ failure to live with the MK or other dumbphones to them personally, especially when Scandinavian users ask for more features on the MK, to which some replies suggest that they have misunderstood the purpose of the MK and that they should just "buy another smartphone that fulfils [their] wishes». But in much the same way that a lack of cycling infrastructure leads to cyclists being loathed both on the road and on the sidewalk (and also on the grotesque Scandinavian “combined paths”), countercultural Scandinavians are stuck between two camps, neither of which can appropriately meet their needs. Both camps tend to demand some sense of purity, in the sense that the devices and their users should not contaminate each other, but rather stick to their respective philosophies. Smartphone junkies demand conspicuous consumption, constant availability, and neverending content. Mudita purists (pun intended) somewhat understandably resist feature-creep and re-googling of their device, and some even tell Scandi users to just get a smartphone when they beg for features that are necessary in their lives. The sad reality is that many Scandi users do not fit neatly into any category, and are forced to be neither-nor by the sociocultural circumstances in which they live. This is because they have way fewer realistic options to live smartphone-free than, say, Polish users, for instance due to payments in cash being exceedingly rare in Scandinavia, which drastically increases the need for banking apps, which unfortunately are not securely supported on the MK, hence the need for more (secure) features.
To further exemplify, public transportation and parking in Scandinavia is absolutely terrible without using a smartphone. Due to the prevalence of parking apps (which require Google Play and a recently updated OS), maintainance and repair of parking machines is not prioritized, and the machines typically stay broken for years while their displays declare “USE THE APP”—just to really rub it in. It’s possible to buy a physical travel card for public transportation, but if you live in the districts, you have to travel to the bus company’s headquarters in the capital city to refill it every month. Allternatively, single use tickets are sold in a select few kiosks, but you’re screwed if you don’t live close to one. If you nonetheless get a physical card, validators onboard the buses and trains are often broken, and you’ll be fined anyway. Well, sure, you can sideload some of the transport apps on the MK, but they require storing your card information, which is strongly advised against by the Mudita team for security reasons (as far as I’ve understood). It’s also unclear whether and when these essential sideloaded apps will suddenly stop working on the MK, which is stressful enough in itself.
And that is just the practical side of things; the social and emotional side is much worse. Due to the normalization of app-based solutions throughout society, paired with the erosion of low-tech infrastructures, social norms and expectations have mutated to fit with smartphone technology. Schools, universities and workplaces use apps for communication and authentication, and expect you to use them lest you risk being labeled as uncooperative or downright unfit for parenthood or work. Moreover, since so many practices in society are digitized, choosing to live smartphone-free places a very real burden upon the people close to you, who must pay for your stuff or follow up on the kids’ schoolwork. This is annoying at best and a relationship wrecker at worst. Few people where I live communicate or plan get-togethers through SMS, which further isolates people who leave the grid. And don’t get me started on dating.
If you want to get an understanding of how infrastructures, social norms and everyday practices co-evolve and lock unsustainable and unhealthy social orders in place, I highly recommend reading Elizabeth Shove’s research paper «Converging Conventions of Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience" [https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/shove-converging-conventions.pdf] or her book of a similar title. This particular paper is about household machines, but is very applicable to smartphones. Shove illustrates her main point by comparing the locking-in of social norms and infrastructures to the operation of a ratchet (I had to google what that was) which, once having moved one notch in the forward direction, is prevented from moving backwards. Similarly, what prevents a smartphone-based society from moving «back in time» is that as the technology has become widely adopted, society has reorganized itself around the technology in a million different ways. «Going back» involves uprooting newly established social norms and everyday practices, as well as the economic gains that the private sector and/or the state is now reliant on to stay competitive. In other words, we’ve gotten caught in the web that we spun together. I can almost promise you that this research paper will drastically change how you understand the world.
Anyways, my point here is that being mindful and intentional about one’s use of mobile devices is far easier in societies in which it is still possible to live a lower-tech life due to the particular infrastructures of that society as well as how these infrastructures, along with the citizens that live within and reproduce them, shape social norms, expectations, common practices, and laws. In a high-tech society, it is difficult to ignore the collective norms that have evolved due to the wide adoption of the technology, notwithstanding how mindful you may be about it. You can meditate all you want, but it won’t alleviate the stress that is put upon you because your smartphone-free life has put all the responsibility for “digital housekeeping” on your partner, which is getting more and more annoyed with you, personally. Have fun reading on your e-ink device as your professional reputation is demolished, your kids regularly miss out on app-mediated information from school, and your marriage slowly crumbles. Not exactly zen.
Now, finally, to my point about having to choose between sustainability, security, and mental health.
I hope it is clear how the Digitized Scandi Experience narrows the range of options of how Scandinavians may choose to live their lives. At the same time, living with the smartphone also carries with it a range of serious problems which have been extensively discussed on this forum already, such as decreased attention spans, doomscrolling, poor sleep quality, etc. So living with the smartphone is detrimental to mental health, and living without it can also bring with it an overlapping set of challenges. Still, I would definitely prefer the dumbphone/MK life, and try to find ways to power through.
But two of these challenges seem especially difficult to overcome in The Digitized Scandi Experience, and they are:
- to secure my information, and
- to keep my phone for as long as possible so as to not contribute as much to the ecological crisis, neo-colonialism, tech-oligarchy, slave- and child labor in China and DRC, etc.
These challenges are interlinked because most device obsolescence is software-driven, and related to both cybersecurity and to companies’ inescapable pursuit of profit margins in a (state) capitalist world order.
Mudita has promised to provide security updates for three years. This is to my knowledge slightly under what’s considered «normal» in the business. Apple provides the very best coverage at a maximum of seven years. If you have read Shove’s paper above, you might have noticed the sentence: «there are clear commercial interests in constructing and advancing towards a particular vision of 'normality’», which I believe is relevant here. Three years is not even close to enough if we are to have a fighting chance against the complex of problems that I mentioned in point 2 above. But I guess it is how it is, and what «it» is, is a future of ecosystem collapse, war, fascist authoritarianism, and gated communities for the global elite. Oh well! ¯_(ツ)_/¯
If you nevertheless decide to keep your MK beyond these three years, prepare to have your identity and financial information stolen, given that you’ve sideloaded apps that the Digitized Scandi Experience demands from you—or maybe even regardless of this.
Yes, I understand that Mudita probably cannot financially justify supporting the device for much longer given their position in the market, given the digital infrastructure that they rely on from AOSP, and so on. To some extent, they must follow the industry norm of planned obsolescence. And they are also subject to the power of Google to do whatever they desire with Android. Mudita is also in a squeeze here.
All right. So in Scandinavia as of now, with regards to the holy trinity of mental health, security, and sustainability, the MK may at best deliver on mental health, maybe on security (if you accept the social stigma involved in the dumbphone life), but not on sustainability.
Compared to most android phones and the MK, the iPhone can deliver on sustainability—although seven years of updates is also laughable (come back when you have 30)—and security during that time, but not at all on mental health. Most android phones may only provide security for a few years, and not much else. The fairphone delivers on sustainability and perhaps also security, but its screen size and overall design is detrimental to mental health. Unihertz Jelly Star may possibly deliver on mental health, but does not deliver on sustainability (and maybe not that much on security).
So what can be done about this?
To be frank, doing anything about this will be very hard, and impossible without coordinated, collective action, preferably not in the form of so-called «consumer power», which is power in name only. It is certainly not possible to do anything about this as separate individuals, or even through the aggregated effects of our individual actions (like for instance through buying or not buying this or that). We must put pressure on politicians and find ways to secure the option to live a smartphone-free life. I’m not entirely sure how we could acheive this, but i’m pretty damn sure that only focusing on tips and tricks that each individual can do to cope with smartphone hell will lead absolutely nowhere, as always.
I also hope that this post can serve as a warning to people living in societies which have not yet reached the same extent of digitalization as The Digitized Scandi Experience. It’s not fun here. It is imperative that you work against it.
But I’ve also thought about a solution which may be interesting to the Mudita team: let us pay for security upgrades beyond the third year. I concede that buying a mobile device is fundamentally different from buying a loaf of bread, for example, because in contrast to the loaf, the mobile device is continually being made and refined by the developers even after you’ve purchased it. It would be great if we could keep our devices for much longer than three years and still be fairly secure, and I hope that this payment model could contribute to that, although I have my reservations about the subscription economy. But if Mudita could do this, the MK could really hit the jackpot by being both (comparatively) sustainable, secure, and good for mental health.
Until then, I’m on the fence.
Or what do you guys think?
(EDIT: mostly formatting, typos and phrasing (while retaining meaning). + about the fairphone and jelly star + reservations about subscriptions, and also this: I would also like a small phone, but I guess that wish comes second, I mean third, I mean fourth.)
? I totally get it that opting out entirely is possible, but it can also reduce access to certain social and dating networks, depending on location, age, and social context.
