The Atlantic

Phones Will Never Be Fun Again

I tried to shop for a flip phone. All I found was slabs.
Source: Illustration by Daniel Zender. Source: Getty.

When they came up with machine-sliced bread, did we start referring to other bread as “annoying”? After the invention of the dishwasher, did we start calling our sinks “stupid”? Post-railroad, did we slander boats as “useless and embarrassing”?

Obviously not. Yet after the smartphone came along, a category of product that was once known simply as “phones” became, rudely, “dumb phones.” If a phone didn’t have an app store and a powerful operating system and an internet connection, it was no longer considered particularly admirable that it performed the core function of telephoning. It was dumb. If you held one, you’d be like, “This doesn’t do anything,” despite the fact that it did at least one thing perfectly well.

Well, everybody hates their smartphone now. These phones are . They us and us and our lives. Now “younger generations” are supposedly crawling back to the dumb phone, starting a “movement,” as a claimed. This aired two months after a about a flip-phone “comeback,” which followed a very similar and a about self-described “Luddite” teens in Brooklyn, who spend a lot of time in the park with one another and their (dumb) flip

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