The Flip Phone Manifesto: Six Months Later

Lessons learned from publishing my first (and likely last) manifesto.

In October of 2023, I self-published The Flip Phone Manifesto: Why I Switched to a Flip Phone and You Should Too. As I went around placing paper copies of my manifesto across my university’s campus, I felt like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door. 

I have affectionately become known as the “flip phone girl” in my circles. Whenever I am seen pulling out my flip phone on campus I get, “Wait are you the one who wrote that manifesto?” Indeed I am. 

By the time this is published, it will have been six months since that fateful October when I first released my manifesto out into the world. It was a year and a half in the making—a product of intense writer's block and many summer afternoons spent writing by the waterfall in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I had no idea how my hard work would be received. 

Would I convince people of my cause? Or would I be ridiculed and scoffed at for making a choice most people in this day and age would find unfathomable? Luckily for me, it was mostly the former. 

Going into it, my expectations were not set very high. I knew my lifestyle choice was not realistically an option for many. My goal was simply to persuade at least one person to make the switch. This I accomplished. 

The comment rolled in late one night in early November via the contact submission form on my blog. For context, I have a QR code on the back of each physical copy of my manifesto. I won’t shun all technology if it helps increase the reach of my work.

The comment’s author explained, they were on my university’s campus to attend a conference when they found a copy of my manifesto and stashed it in their bag to read on the plane ride home. Once a flip phone-user many years ago, they were pressured into getting a smartphone due to their job requiring it. Since reading my manifesto and starting a new job, they have made the decision to go back to flip phone life when it comes time to upgrade.

Waxing poetic, this comment nearly made me cry when I read it. It filled me with pride and joy to know my work had a profound impact on someone and motivated them to make a major change in their life.

Later that month, I received another comment. This time from a classmate, saying my manifesto struck a chord with them. After gushing over their kind words I approached them one day after class and we went for a coffee. While we had slightly different experiences, it turned out we shared many similar beliefs. 

By far the most wonderful part of publishing the “Flip Phone Manifesto” has been meeting other like-minded individuals and flip phone-users. We are a small but mighty community. 

Kashmir Hill, a New York Times technology reporter and author of  “A Practical Guide to Quitting Your Smartphone” and “I Was Addicted to My Smartphone, So I Switched to a Flip Phone for a Month,” encouraged hundreds to ditch their smartphones as part of ‘Flip Phone February.’ 

“Clearly it's possible to live smartphone free (as you and hundreds of others have shared with me),” Hill wrote to me in an email correspondence.

During my trip home to New York for the holidays, I met with Liana Satenstein, author of the New York Times article “Done With Scrolling. Time for a Flip Phone” to compare notes. 

After our encounter, the former Vogue senior writer told me, “I read your manifesto. Very well written, very well researched. You tackled every point with precision and also humor, which is often hard to come by these days. Bravo. I laughed aloud a few times on the subway.”

Since I first got my flip phone in July of 2022, coverage by venerable news institutions like the New York Times and CNN has accumulated on the subject—forcing even my toughest critics (my parents) to admit I was ahead of the curve.

Although, not all feedback I have received has been supportive. One comment left on my blog questioning why I don’t use a “regular” smartphone and place limits on my apps and screen time, encapsulates the doubt at times cast upon my decision. 

To answer this commenter’s question: it is not a long-term, effective-enough solution. As many others I’ve talked to have concurred, it is too easy to ignore screen time warnings or to be sucked in by addictive social media platforms even after removing them from your home screen or deleting them altogether. This is why I felt compelled to take more extreme action. 

All things considered, contrarian points of view have not been expressed nearly as often as I would have anticipated.

Much has changed since last October. Most notably, I upgraded to a nicer model of flip phone. My Nokia 2780 has several surprisingly modern features: email, Google Maps, Youtube, a nicer camera, games, a weather and news app—just to name a few. 

At first I mourned my old, proper dumb phone. I was concerned that this new and improved version was too spiffy and posed a threat to the focus, attention span and skills I had honed. I’ve found this hasn’t been much of an issue. After growing so accustomed to not having these tools, I no longer reach for them and often forget I now have them at my disposal. 

Twenty one months and two flip phone models later, I’m beginning to think the peace of mind I initially turned to my flip phone for is unattainable in the digital age. All the same problems I was grappling with pre-flip phone have manifested in other tech. Tech that I unfortunately am unable to cut out at this present moment.

As a university student, my laptop is like my lifeline—it provides me with a wealth of information to complete my assignments and enables me to work just about anywhere. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that anything with an internet connection can fuel my procrastination and compulsion to waste time on social media. Albeit, the interface of these platforms on a computer is more difficult to use. This helps to a degree, but the same insatiable need for stimulation, scattered brain and mentally low feeling after usage are also a side effect of using my laptop. 

The flip phone does help. Think of smartphone and social media addiction as a turbulent waterway. Using a flip phone is like building a levee, but over time competing forces eat away at its defenses. 

I will have to wait until the summer, when I no longer have school work, to fall off the grid again. 

Alas, the reality of this waiting game is depressing and yet it doesn’t factor in the year-round pressure from our workplaces to be constantly reachable with work-related matters. The levee will always break, but only because tech companies and the profit-driven system as a whole want it to. 

Around their time of inception in the 1990s, the definition of a smartphone formerly entailed a tool for personal computing. With calculator, calendar and alarm functions, most flip phones do in fact qualify! 

In recent years, smartphones have evolved into something else entirely. They are no longer designed to serve their users, but rather threaten their health and happiness and to distract them from what is truly important in life, for the sake of profit. 

Until smartphones are once again created with the well-being of their users in mind, I will happily keep using my flip phone, holding out until it really becomes a barrier in all aspects of my daily life.

Illustrations: Valerie Cheng