I gave up Instagram for Lent. No announcement, no deactivation, just… deleted the app off my phone the day after Ash Wednesday and didn’t go on it for a whole forty days and some change. On Easter Sunday, I came back to tell my friends and followers I’d be going for good, and they should find me elsewhere to keep in touch.
I’ve been wanting to write to you about this for quite some time. I’ve been wanting to write you in general, but I keep stopping myself. Nothing feels important enough. Everybody is on edge, people are getting stupider, flaming tornadoes ripped their way across Middle America on St. Patrick’s Day and we all just sort of moved on from it. Because what the fuck else are you supposed to do?
Shortly before St. Patty’s Day, I began frequenting a subreddit called r/dumbphones. Because Reddit is full of people and people are full of surprises, there’s a pretty healthy assortment of posters there who range from kind and generous advisors on the switch to a simpler digital life, to high and mighty purists who type like the proverbial Reddit Asshole and clearly don’t have many friends. It’s been both an invaluable resource for me as someone who is low-tech curious, someone who, in the words of one of the youngest members of that subreddit, “lost [my] childhoods to [my] phones. I’m not letting it take my adulthood, too.” Sometimes the subreddit becomes a time sink, but unlike the infuriating time sinks of Twitter, Instagram, and now Bluesky, it’s a time sink I can handle because it has boundaries. Anything discussed on the subreddit has to do with the subreddit, and the subreddit itself fills such a narrow niche, I can simply… disengage. I’ll see assholes trying to start shit and I just step away, my identity intact, my blood pressure stable.
My lurking on the subreddit began well before Lent, when my friend Ava sent me an ad for the Light Phone III, a dumbphone with a touchscreen that’ll put you out about seven hundred, maybe eight hundred dollars, a hefty price its haters call a “hipster tax” and its fans call “necessary.” We were on the phone at the time. I can still hear her voice cajoling me, “It’s really pretentious… I know you love pretentious…”
I do love pretentious. I mean, I run my website off WordPress, for Christ’s sake, because I want to be fun and different and play with the open source aspects.
So I started looking into it, and my research led me to r/dumbphones, which led me to… this.
The Cat S22 flip is like a berserk button for most of the users of the subreddit. For the purists, its ubiquitousness on r/dumbphones is a violation of the terms, as it’s technically still a smartphone: it runs Android Go, can support all the toxic apps everybody eschews, and has a touchscreen in addition to its T9 keyboard. For me, it was the best option for my transition toward a simpler digital life. I don’t have Light Phone or Punkt money. I don’t even have Kyocera money. But I have sixty bucks to spend on Backmarket for sure, and spend it I did.
Maybe I should rewind even more, actually. Alright, here goes. Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
You’re at an event full of “creatives.” Everybody’s an artist, a writer, a filmmaker, everybody’s broke and everybody’s swapping Instagrams. You or one of your friends makes some offhanded, whiny comment about how you hate Instagram. The person or people you’re networking with furrow their brows, stick out their bottom lips, and say in a high, reedy voice, “I know, I hate it too, but like, we need it.” To promote our work. To keep in touch. To see.
This was how I navigated Sundance Film Festival, that glossy fantasia many people call Disneyland for Filmmakers. When that dizzying week was over, I pulled out my iPhone, opened the app, and immediately thought—who the hell are these people?
I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for my whole life—there are pictures of me as a baby, seated at our chunky Mac desktop, smiling at the camera—so when I got my first cell phone and it wasn’t the iPhone my mother toted around everywhere, I was pissed. Instead, it was a slider, a phone with an external screen and a QWERTY keyboard underneath. I typed slowly, couldn’t have an Instagram, and couldn’t really keep in touch with my friends in a way they approved of.
I remember one flashbulb moment, sophomore year of high school. I sat with the mean girls. I mean, seriously mean. And there was this guy who was sexually fixated on me and the white girl in our friend group, a beautiful blonde named Siara. When he struck out with Siara for the one billionth time, the guy shifted his focus to me, bearing his bulk down on my tiny body during one of our shared classes. After about an hour of “can I get your number?” I caved, pulling out my little translucent blue and chrome phone. The guy practically choked and said, “Seriously?” I looked up at him. “What?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled away from me, his sweaty clothes peeling from my bare arms.
“See ya never,” he said.
The harsh divide between the haves and the have-nots only increased as we all grew older. Soon, it wasn’t just, “You have to have a smartphone and social media,” but “you have to have an iPhone and an Instagram.” Memes about the inferiority of Android proliferated, multiplying like rats, until everything, from apps to hardware to external lenses like the hipster-chic Moment brand, catered to Apple. “When you hit them up and the text is green” became the death knell for many a Tinder match. Basically, if you were anybody, you’d better be a body with an iPhone.
That iPhones and Apple products in general are so exorbitantly expensive is part of it. The conspicuous consumption—I have this, you don’t—led to some of the most deranged conversations I’ve ever had with people. An ex-friend of mine once bought herself a pair of AirPods while still rocking a Samsung Galaxy 10 with a cracked screen. Her reasoning? She wanted to look like she had it together. She didn’t care that her music sounded like shit, that it took extra steps to get her devices paired. She wanted to blend in with the other students at Cornell who ate AirPods for breakfast.
The problem with iPhone became, of course, the planned obsolescence they built into every new flagship device. You couldn’t just drop 2k on a supercomputer and call it good, you had to drop 2k and then another and then another. Sure, if you played your cards right, you could stretch that 2k out a couple years. My iPhone 13 Pro, which I bought after my old iPhone X betrayed me, has its moments, but still seems to function alright. Is it out of storage? Yeah. Does it harangue me for an iCloud subscription? Sure. Is its map basically nonfunctional in the sovereign nation of Baltimore, Maryland? You bet. But I still use it, sorta. I guess it’s my work phone, now.
I met a girl my age, Cass, at Subscape. She’s the frontwoman of a black metal band, Chiaroscuro. She’s got insane range. I saw her around town a few times after her band played Subscape. My friends and I were curious about her. She didn’t seem to have any social media presence beyond the band itself. She was deeply present in social interactions and never seemed to pull out her phone. When she wasn’t in conversation with someone, that was it, she was just doing something else. Eyes up. Engaged with the world.
I ran into her at Mount Vernon Marketplace after Taylor and I were coworking at a library. I reintroduced myself and she pulled out a pocket-sized notebook to take down my information. I’d just made Taylor and I some stupid business cards out of construction paper and I gave Cass one. She read it aloud before pulling a flip phone from the pocket of her black leather jacket and slamming it on the table. It wasn’t like she was making a point, either, she was just… getting it away from her body. My jaw dropped.
“Really?”
She looked at me, confused, before it dawned on her. She touched the clamshell of the phone and smirked. “What, this beast?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she said.
We parted ways shortly thereafter. A few months later, the Ruby Awards opened up for applications again, and I found myself wishing I’d gotten her number, so I could let her know to apply.
One day, after dwelling on her for about two minutes, I got a text on my iPhone from an unknown number.
I have a “Francis” in my contacts.
yes, I texted back, this is francis.
Great.
We met up for coffee at 10am, ostensibly to talk grant applications. Instead, I ended up asking her about the flip phone. She leaned back in her chair, thinking it over. Then, just as carefully, she answered me.
“I was really sick,” she said. “I had to move home. This was… oh, two years ago, maybe two and a half, now. And I realized… I could spend all my time on my smartphone, or I could… I could try something new. I could walk away from it. And I wondered, you know, is this even possible? Will I be punished for this? Now, going on three years, I… you know, I’m not. It is. It is possible and I’m doing it and I feel… you know, I’m clean.”
Those two soundbites, Will I be punished and I’m clean, echoed in my head for the next several weeks. After Ash Wednesday, I found myself, like Jim Carrey in Yes Man, being immediately affirmed in my decision to leave Instagram. A filmmaker I had auditioned for a year prior reached back out to me with an idea for a project. I was cast in a fun little genre-blending student film (the director refuses to call it “horror,” while the producer’s adamant that it is) as a pyromaniac. The Native American Media Alliance interviewed me for their 10th Annual TV Writers Program and I got in. All of this without the direct aid of the platform I’d been desperately cultivating for myself for almost a decade.
Did my small yet mighty Instagram account have any sway in my career as it stood? Yes and no, I’m sure. Sonel Breslav, one of the jurors for my year’s Rubys cohort, said oftentimes jurors use social media to provide context for the artists who apply for their programs. I understand the use case for it, generally—if you’re a working artist, your social media platform kills multiple birds with one stone. Portfolio, ideological identification, racial, ethnic, and gendered coding, as well as your location.
My account was an exercise in oversharing, with a purpose.
“You are a poster,” my friend Anthony said to me over late night coffee at the Bun Shop last December, gripping the table with his nimble fingers and gritting his teeth. “You have a fight in you.”
This was true. I knew it was true. I know I have a reputation among my friends and the people who watch me. I’ve written at length about this hole I’ve dug for myself, this angry persona I embody. It’s been around since the beginning, since the moment I got an iPhone, junior year of high school, and found out I could post my face for attention. I was heavily involved in the Instagram Intersectional Feminist Community by way of my race-shifting ex, whose curated “woke” online persona was so intentional, so sinister, it’s a miracle I haven’t become a reactionary post-Left douchebag. That led to my multiple meltdowns on Facebook and Instagram, my alienation of people I’d fought and prayed alongside during the No DAPL protests at Standing Rock in 2016, my illusion of “doing the work” and the seniority that granted me in every Lefty room I entered. But the truth was, I just posted, nonstop, head down, while my body simply stumbled into historical moments like a trans Forrest Gump.
When I write it all down like this—omitting so much, biting so much back—it’s a wonder I haven’t given up sooner. Given up on the idea that someone might see my Instagram, how beautiful I can make myself, and snatch me up out of my miasma of financial instability, toss me into that red-carpeted pigsty they reserve for all the other shiny young Internet micro-celebrities who cry for attention.
It’s helpful, how awful everything is. Like the man in the video I embedded above, there’s been just this war of attrition on my tolerance for the internet. We’re all writers, but nobody’s reading anything. Last year, I finished reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger, which set out to explain the current incoherent social milieu we all now navigate. One of my takeaways from that was that the solitude of the pandemic and the attendant neurodegenerative disease brought on by Covid, which most of us have now caught, made everybody weird, dumb, isolated, and really good at convincing ourselves we’re the gods of our own little fucked up worlds.
In my own little fucked up world, I can find evidence for this take everywhere, even or especially within myself. I struggle with our new/old social cues and the politics of repulsion that now govern my generation. The invention of the terms “breadcrumbing,” “micro-ghosting,” and “situationship” make me nauseous and confused. There’s a level of entitlement we all seem to have, now, but it’s like birdshot. It goes everywhere. I see it in myself right now, most obviously—I recently received a rejection letter for something I very badly wanted, and I spent an evening feeling sorry for myself instead of finishing the things I have due or fulfilling other people’s simple requests. I can see myself from outside myself in this moment as a kind of overgrown toddler, confused, frightened, only aware that I want it and I want it now and fuck everybody else who needs stuff from me because I do not have whatever it is I’m throwing a fit over. Again, though, I have to pause here and think back on my decision to leave Instagram. Had I stayed the course, back on Ash Wednesday, and continued my path as A Poster, would I be as careful in my response as I am now? As reflective? Or would I be, well, reactive, posting something inflammatory on my account in hopes that my pain could lead… somewhere beyond this moment. In hopes that my entitlement, however incorrect or misguided it may be, might resonate with an audience who can come to agree with me, take my pain on as their purpose, and, mobbing the institutions with their own screams, bring me one step closer to compensation as a working artist?
I’m not sure. I know I hurt myself, sometimes, with the way I spoke on my Instagram. The utter disdain I had (and continue to have) for Native Luxury and our addiction to branding ourselves, how it manifested in what we love to call “lateral violence” without really interrogating what that means. Yet here I sit, leaning my 12.5” iPad Pro against the Sunset Pass Pendleton bag I won at Bingo two weeks ago, typing on the blog I pay for—
But back to the meat and potatoes of this post—the phone. The journey. The good, the bad, the ugly.
Should I lead with the ugly?
I kinda fucked up when I canceled my Apple One Family subscription. I did it before I’d even set up the Cat S22 Flip. I did it impulsively, incorrectly. I thought canceling it would keep the subscription active until the end of the billing period, but recalling that Family Sharing meant everybody else’s subscriptions were billed to my card, I went to cancel that, too, and ended up totally slaughtering my whole family’s Apple Music plans. Did you know when you cancel Apple Music, they delete all your playlists? Temporarily, as it turns out, but still… pretty evil. I felt stupid as fuck when that happened, and like three times the big, spoiled, asshole baby I feel like most days. And most days I do feel like a big, spoiled, asshole baby, so that’s saying something.
My mom had to bail me out, like they always do, while my dad’s been trying to figure out what his next move is. While literally moving. Also, his cat’s sick. I can’t put all of that on myself, I know, but it’s the principle of the thing. I got a text in one of our family group chats from him saying “I don’t think I can live without Apple Music” and I felt like I’d just shot him in the kneecap. Like, yeah, I might have been on this whole “physical media” journey, but there’s no way he would have known that. I live here, and he lives all the way over there.
It’s weird, too, our cultural dependency on these subscription services. I grew up on CDs and vinyl. I was the one who got us all hooked on Spotify Premium when I bought us the family plan, and I was the one who took all of us off Spotify when Joni Mitchell removed all her albums in protest. Looking back and even now, I feel like a temperamental cult leader, declaring random objects to be our god and twisting the arms of everybody in my vicinity to get them to see what I see. Again, I don’t have that much power, but that’s how it feels right now.
Some of the other “ugly” in this switch—just having to sit with my thoughts instead of doomscrolling.
It’s gross. I look back and I see myself living and dying by the sword that is Super Online Politics and I feel a deep and abiding sense of shame. It’s an extreme, sticky shame, and I can’t seem to find the bottom of it. I remember I had a friend I’d met online who lived in Texas. She was awesome, and I can’t even remember her name. But I remember the name of the girl who told me to block her because she was ideologically impure—she had genital preferences when it came to who she hooked up with—and C told me that meant she was transphobic and an unsafe person to be around, especially for a delicate smol bean like me. I freaked. We had a phone call where I told my friend it was over. I still remember the baffled silence on the other end of the line. How she swallowed hard and said, “Okay. You were a really good friend.”
It’s at times like these I remember Cass saying, “I’m clean.”
Like it’s a drug. Like it’s something to wean off of until you stop reaching for it.
The good, then, next, since I got so heavy with it just now.
Well, the good is, I feel a lot more present. That could be bad, too, depending on your outlook, but for me, it’s good. I get to work through my emotions as they come, for example, instead of desperately finding injustices to attach each feeling to. I can listen better. I don’t have to read about weird made-up people canceling each other for micro-cheating or whatever. I don’t have to pretend to care (or worse, actually care) about hyper-online shit for the sake of seeming socially conscious. I read a whole horror novel in like, two hours, and decided on my own that I didn’t like it, and why I didn’t like it. I’ve been doing crosswords and navigating my city with more confidence. I started to draw again. Comics, mostly, no surprise there, but I’m developing my own style as opposed to comparing myself to other, better artists who know how to draw for the algorithm. It’s funny—I initially got online because I wanted to be different. I wanted to be special. Now, I’m out in the world, and there’s this all-encompassing sameness. The same alt clothing, the same memes, quoted ad nauseam, the same rejection of friction, of conflict, of intimacy. By disengaging, I give myself a fighting chance at that difference I so desperately craved, but more importantly, I can just be a person outside of the “brain rot” and the soundbites and the acceptable array of interests. Which is a good segue into the bad.
The bad is our cultural dependence on smartphones. Shortly after switching to the flip, I went to Home Depot to rent a van for our move. Although all the paperwork was right there, the cashier told us to scan a QR code and fill everything out on our phones. I didn’t have mine, so we ended up using Jamie’s and having her be the van driver.
Later, when I was home visiting my family, my little brother asked me to look up when the Post Office closes. We knew it closed at 4pm most days, but as it was Holy Week, and we grew up in a small town, it was really anyone’s guess. I stood in his doorway, mouth hanging open, going “uh” uselessly until I was able to track down my iPhone and look it up for him. Yeah, 4pm.
Finally, obviously, there’s the GPS, navigation thing. I’d been trying to train myself out of needing Apple Maps 24/7 anyways, just because of how bad it sucks ass, but it’s a whole other kettle of fish when I could just plug it into my Hyundai’s infotainment system and have my own Big Phone to use as a combo map, music, phone, and legally-texting-while-driving machine. I’ll be back with more updates about how my latest quest—downloading Hyundai’s navigation system off of their website and onto a USB drive that I can then plug into my car—goes.
Until then, more good. Obviously, I’m sleeping way better. Going to bed at night. Waking up in the morning. Pay no attention to how tired I sound here, I was genuinely inspired and nothing, not even the promise of a good night’s sleep, could stop me from finishing this blog-related task I’ve been putting off for ages.
See, getting off Instagram for two months (and then permanently) made me realize a few things.
One, I have a whole city of artists, healthcare specialists, volunteers, cultural workers, and facilitators outside of my bedroom. We hang out in person. We talk to each other. There’s a whole Signal groupchat dedicated to just flyers for events in Baltimore City and I can just look at it, on my flip phone, whenever. Two, by reclaiming the energy I lost on the ambient social engagement of managing a platform, I have a renewed appreciation for those around me. I think about people now. I reach out to them. I’m still not a great texter, but I have more follow-through and communication than I did before, with a stronger commitment to better my relationships. I’m not perfect, but I’m realizing the pressure to be perfect was coming from the cultural force we all feed into, the surveillance we consent to, the punishments we dole out and the humiliation we engage in in the name of accountability. As John Steinbeck famously wrote in East of Eden, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
That’s the good. I’m the good. I’m awful, I’m ornery, I’m mean, I disappoint people, and lately I feel like I’m lost in the woods somewhere, yelling into the dark, knowing full well nobody’s coming to help, but I can be better. I can be better because the people around me deserve better, and I deserve better, too.
If you’re interested in joining me on this bizarre and frightening journey of reappraisal, I recommend this video:
There’s also dumbphones.org. I used Jose’s “Dumbphone Finder” app to narrow down my best option (for now) for my new phone, and Jose himself actually has an online course for people interested in digital minimalism on that same website. Makari Espe, who did the above video, put the link to the Guardian’s newsletter in her description box, which guides you through paring down your phone usage in a much more incremental way than I did.
You don’t have to do everything I’m doing. I kinda don’t want you to—after all, who am I going to depend on to scan QR codes for me and send me the latest memes?
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