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What Eddy Burback got wrong about his phone... [Discussion of Fediverse as an alternative within]
(videos.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I like Eddy. And at first I’ve liked this essay subject from other creators, but now I just find it shortsighted. The phone isn’t the problem, just like the television and radio weren’t the problem. It’s the content you put on it.
You can watch great TV shows—documentaries, masterpiece dramas, etc. Or you can watch slop.
You can do incredible stuff with your phone—get directions, listen to almost any song ever recorded, learn about the night sky, watch documentaries anywhere you are, write, create your own content, sky’s the limit. Or you can install slop and brain rot apps like Twitter.
You don’t have to pull a stunt like locking your phone away. Just delete the slop. Be more mindful of what an app and the company behind it are, and either limit your use of it or simply don’t install it at all.
I disagree. Yes there can be good intermediate steps, but deleting slop is not even half as healthy as locking a phone away.
Not just phone calls or texts, but things like typing an email on the phone and then seeing a text or having the GPS interrupt your train of thought by yelling "Continue straight for 5 miles". Brains hate interruptions. Those are still going to exist even when the slop is gone.
Turning off the dopamine machine (not eating candy) is one thing. But Eddy was showing something a lot bigger than that; deleting his access to the temptation. He didnt know the code to unlock the phone.
I feel like this kind of misses the point. To be clear: If someone absolutely cannot avoid installing slop apps and enabling notifications for everything, I can see their need for an ultra minimal device or other solution. But I also think that speaks to a larger, personal discussion about discipline and possibly addiction, but that’s outside the realm of this thread.
My point is we can choose which apps, notifications, features, and algorithms are allowed to get our attention. It’s easy to turn off all notifications or never even allow them in the first place—after all, apps have to ask for that permission in the first place.
But the choice is the point. If someone is traveling somewhere they probably want maps to tell them important information about the journey. Otherwise why turn on directions at all? That’s the entire point.
We even have the ability to disable all texting notifications but also choose to allow them from certain people if they’re important enough. These devices are simply tools and we have the power to choose how they operate. The device isn’t the problem, it’s our choices.
I'm saying one of the big downsides has nothing to do with self discipline.
Merely living in a world covered in advertisements, living next to a delicious smelling candy bowl, living 30 seconds away from memes, rage-bait, doom scrolling, sports gambling, and other slop -- just living next to those things are bad for our mental health.
Some sources if you're curious on the research behind it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4731333/
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301694
https://scholarworks.uark.edu/mgmtuht/31/