> My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.
You can surely get pizza delivered, though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house. So having a cell phone is valuable even then.
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
> though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house.
When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!
> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?
There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.
What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.
abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
So let’s agree that removing smartphones from one’s life is beneficial.
Why not a dumb (mobile) phone, then? Why the passion for a landline? You can still exercise full control over when/where you answer it, but you gain a lot of useful convenience as well.
A dumb phone seems like a pretty good compromise to me. Especially in situations where you're traveling. You'll get tracked and still have to deal with interruptions from texts, but you can always turn it off and that should keep it from disrupting you when you want to be focused on where you are/what you're doing/who you're with.
Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
Also whenever possible I do not want to be reachable or distracted, say when having dinner out with my family, at a concert, or just standing in line in the post office. I make the decision when to open a laptop, it cannot summon me, and it takes more intention to use.
Most VOIP services will route SMS to email or a messenger of your choice. I get SMS just fine on my wifi devices, which I monitor when I am expecting a delivery.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.