Can You Hear Me Now?

In the late 2000s, I got my first smartphone: a BlackBerry Curve. It was one of the ones with a trackball. I think it was an 8330, but I don’t fully remember. Whatever the exact model, I still feel like that phone was just about the best phone I’ve ever owned. I’ll freely admit: that feeling is at least 90% nostalgia. The more I think about that device the more I recall the problems and limitations it had; I couldn’t connect to WiFi and the cell signal would drop so hard that I had to pop the back off in order to reseat the SIM card more often than I would have liked. But even with all of that in mind, it did exactly what I needed it to do. I could receive calls, send texts, read my email, respond to IMs, and even browse the web with Opera Mini. Sure, smartphones of today can do all of that and more. I can now even use my preferred web browser instead of a stripped down alternative! But it’s most of the “more” that I have a problem with. While 90% may be nostalgia, the remaining 10% of that feeling comes from a desire for a return to simpler technology. Technology that just works how I expect it to and isn’t so clearly just a means to harvest my personal data.

Since the death of that first BlackBerry I’ve used a number of other devices, and with the exception of having to once resort to a Windows Phone and later a brief return to a BlackBerry during their QNX era, they’ve all been Androids. Including the worst Android/Android-adjacent device ever made, Amazon’s Fire Phone. Looking back, I’m not sure if settling for Google over Apple as the lesser of two evils when it came to mobile phones was the correct choice, but it was one I could justify. I’d rather be out in the open with the devil I knew than stuck in a walled garden with one I didn’t know, y’know?

And when BlackBerry began making Androids (like the BlackBerry Priv) that included additional privacy-protecting features, I no longer had any trouble justifying it. I could at least pretend that I was now insulated from the worst of Google’s data collection. But then BlackBerry stopped making new phones, and I was forced to return to stock Android without all of the features I had come to depend on. I wasn’t happy with this state of things, but I was on the verge of begrudgingly accepting it. At least until the “AI” bubble started to inflate.

If you’re unaware of my stance on things, let me state now that I am not a fan of LLMs or any other form of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” as they exist today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for a Butlerian Jihad (yet) and I do sincerely believe that if actually sentient artificial life were to be created, we should grant it personhood (just like I believe we should, at minimum and as soon as possible, grant personhood to other great apes and probably also dolphins). But what we have now is not sentient artificial life. Computer programs that can sometimes predict likely outcomes (what word or pixel comes next in a given pattern) are not alive. They may be an early step towards creating artificial digital life, but until we sort out the ecological and social impacts that these kinds of technologies have, I don’t think we should be developing or applying them so recklessly. Processing a large amount of raw text or finding hidden patterns in medical scans that can identify a disease super early? Great, sounds good, just run it on solar panels or something. Replacing your entire workforce with a chatbot or generating deepfakes of people you don’t like? Absolutely not; rm -rf --no-preserve-root your entire machine. Using LLMs and AI to supercharge mass surveillance and bring about the end of democracy? Go fuck yourself you lizard scum.

Speaking of lizards, if you actually bought into the Roko’s basilisk bullshit, I suggest going outside for an hour and looking at a tree while we still have them. Maybe then you’ll reconsider your doomsday cult-like willingness to bring about environmental collapse to summon your false machine god who will supposedly save us from said environmental collapse. Also go fuck yourself.

So why did my post about smartphones suddenly devolve into a rant about “AI”? Because, they (Google and Apple) won’t stop shoving “AI” into phones and I DO NOT WANT “AI” ASSISTED SEARCH OR IMAGE GENERATION ON MY PHONE.

Rule 39: CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL

Rule 40: EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER

Personal distaste for mass proliferation of this kind of technology aside, the embedding of “AI” controlled by privacy violating mega-corporations (who gleefully give access to privacy violating governments) into the things we carry around every day everywhere we go is just a disaster waiting to happen. I had already been on the metaphorical ledge for years due to the fact that smartphones, even without all of the “AI” bullshit, were terrible for my digital privacy, but now I knew I had to jump before it got even worse.

Dumbphone or PinePhone?

I was thinking about landing on the Nokia 8110 4G or a similar device running KaiOS. I wasn’t thrilled to be considering a closed source mobile OS, but my zealotry was softened a bit by the fact that KaiOS is based on Firefox OS and that these devices didn’t include all of the same bloat as Android smartphones do. I could still receive calls, send texts, and use a web browser with them; that’d cover like 75% of what I do with my current phone anyways. But there’s that remaining 25%. Email, IMs (do people still call them that anymore?), banking, and so on. Was I really willing to give up mobile access to these services and do them all exclusively on my desktop in exchange for less bloat, (potentially) more privacy, and freedom from “AI”?

No.

I wasn’t. I’m not. I won’t be.

I mean, I usually do only do those things on my desktop, but it’s nice to have the option of using my phone. Especially when I’m out of the house or when I’m traveling and only have my work laptop with me. And I don’t use my work laptop for anything personal (or my personal machine for anything work related). Stop using your work machines for personal stuff.

So then I started considering the PinePhone. It’s cheaper than the Librem 5, can run a full install of GNU/Linux, and with a little work to find and configure the right distro I could probably get Android apps like Signal (or their ports/clones/web apps/whatever) working. I ordered one and tested out a few different distros, but honestly could not find one that worked for me. Pretty much every one I tried was super slow and drained the battery super quick. PostmarketOS was probably the best of them, but it too was still pretty slow and pretty terrible on battery life. While I still appreciate the device and keep it around as something to occasionally test with, I just can not use it as my daily driver.

Google Pixel w/ GrapheneOS

I have been well aware of the various forks and spins of Android that have risen and fallen over the years, but they did not really come up during my option-weighing between a dumbphone and a PinePhone. Most required specific devices that were either outdated or out of my price range. The security-focused GrapheneOS is the one that stood out to me the most, but I didn’t delve to deep into it after reading that it could only be installed on a Google Pixel, which was super out of my price range; if I couldn’t justify spending the money on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone Pro, I could not justify spending the money on a Google Pixel. I have a tendency to brick or otherwise break phones often (ask my wife about the week I spent at the American Legion Boys State if y’all ever meet), so spending real money on a phone is usually out of the question for me.

But then certain geopolitical events forced me to more deeply consider things like obtaining a second passport (which is no longer an option thanks to changes in the laws of a certain EU country concern citizenship by descent) and keeping my personal data secure at border crossings. So I started thinking that maybe I couldn’t afford not to spend the money on a Google Pixel so I could install GrapheneOS.

Of course, I waited until Google was about to put out the new Pixel 10 series so the 9s went on sale before I actually did spend the money. I bought one for myself and another for my wife (who is less concerned with privacy than I am, but is just as anti-“AI”) and flashed them both with GrapheneOS. They have been our daily drivers for about 3 or 4 months now, and while there have been a few speedbumps (like the horror of having to use Reddit via a web browser rather than the app), none of them have been so detrimental as to outright make the device unusable. 99% of the apps I use work fine, and in fact, even with all of those speedbumps, I find GrapheneOS even more usable than stock Android. It doesn’t come with all of bloatware usually included on a device (I do NOT want TikTok installed by default) or the “AI” slop. I love having greater control over what does and does get installed. The improved user profiles are amazing too, and allow me to really separate my personal stuff from my work stuff without needing another device. Sure, I may be doing things wrong by running the various Google services on my actual primary profile and not setting one up specifically for Google stuff and pushing what I need over to other profiles, but with all of the sandboxing and other security features included by default in GrapheneOs, doing that is still a lot more safe and more private than it would be on any other Android. Maybe I’ll reconsider how I set things in that regard if/when I properly/fully DeGoogle, and while I may be on that road, it’s still quite a ways down.

If you’re looking for more privacy and/or less “AI” for your mobile device, but don’t want to give up the convenience that Android offers, I can’t recommend GrapheneOS enough. If you’re fine giving up the convenience, try a tin can and a string I guess.