stay on your phone

(within reason)

I’ve recently been hanging out with a lot of the No Phone People in New York City.

The No Phone Person is an elusive creature. They tend to be educated, upper-to-upper middle class, and endearingly pretentious. They’re off social media, will answer emails a few times a week, and usually have a “dumb phone” that can only take calls and texts. When they’re not at “phone free parties,” they’re probably frolicking in a meadow or something. Good luck finding them.

I’ve been interested in the No Phone People because they are the clearest manifestation of a cultural undercurrent away from the new media of algorithms and artificial intelligence. You’ll also see this in the resurgence of wired earbuds instead of AirPods; a renewed interest in record players and digital cameras; and a decrease in your friends posting on apps like Instagram. At the same time, the educated upper class as a whole is migrating to less algorithmic platforms such as Substack and Bluesky.

This seems like the only logical conclusion as social media grows increasingly enshittified with advertisements and AI slop. The originally exclusive vibe of algorithmic pseudo-niches has been replaced with feelings of deterioration and oversaturation; as a result, people are again turning to personal curation and elite human tastemakers.

As much as I hate to agree with a Silicon Valley billionaire, though, I think the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is correct in identifying this as a form of “reality privilege.” A blue-collar single mother working two jobs is not going to have the time or energy to seek out in-person events or alternative forms of media. She’s going to put her kids to sleep and have thirty minutes to scroll TikTok before going to bed and then returning to work the next day.

This disconnect is turning non-algorithmic time into an upper-class status symbol, which I find highly concerning.

For one, it’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and pretending like the algorithm doesn’t exist. Whether you like it or not, our culture is still being shaped by these platforms, and they won’t go away by themselves. All of our music and fashion aesthetics are either defined by or against the algorithm, which means that even the “countercultural” tastes of the No Phone People are necessarily influenced by it. Engaging with algorithmic media—in a limited, deliberate manner—is thus important to understanding your experience in society as a whole.

Not engaging, meanwhile, makes you vulnerable to being blindsided by sudden social or political shifts. Each Reddit argument and YouTube comment war is an epistemic basis for understanding the current state of cultural discourse. If you ignore those, you lose touch with reality as most people experience it.

More importantly, though, I worry that a class asymmetry in media consumption will divide us more broadly, making it harder to unite against our actual enemy (the Silicon Valley tech billionaires).

The No Phone People are definitely onto something. The modern state of technology is pretty clearly bad. But media literacy is also pretty clearly good, and it requires deep fluency across all forms of media, since each medium constrains you in its own way.

If you have “reality privilege,” and you care about society, don’t just disengage; use your privilege. Educate yourself, and stay online strategically. Broaden your being-in-the-world so we can eventually fight back. And then you should totally go listen to that new record you just bought.