This Is How You Log Off

0:00Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with the local station KQED. Lauren and I will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and we'll have a special guest joining us for a conversation that you will not want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We cannot wait to see you there. Lauren, how you doing? I am great. I made a little late night purchase last night when I was browsing on the internet. You made a late night purchase?

0:37Uh-huh. Do you want to know what it is? Yes. It's not what Reese talked about before on this show. Okay. What is it? I bought a brick. You bought a brick? Yeah. Do you know what a brick is? Yeah. It's a thing that they use many of to build buildings. Not that. It's a little silicone device that you attach to your fridge or some other surface in your home that's away from your bedroom. And then you tap your phone to it at night and it automatically disables certain apps that you've preset it to. So when you get into bed, you're not doom scrolling on your phone because you literally cannot access those apps.

1:11It's a physical block. So it bricks your phone? Bricks your phone. Well, that's cool. Yeah. I heard our colleague Adrian talking about it a bunch and I was like, you know what? I'm going to do it. So what happens if there's like an emergency? you die. But you know what? You're not scrolling Instagram reels when you do it. You wouldn't know because your phone doesn't light up. It's just bliss from, yes, you go to phone heaven. Well, that sounds very much on topic for today's show. It is. I really think we should talk about this because our phone addictions and our internet addictions are getting worse and we've got to figure out the future.

1:49We do. So let's get started. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we are talking about the future of unplugging. Going off the grid, being offline, whatever you want to call it, it remains an aspirational goal for many of us. Apps like Opal and even physical devices like Lawrence Brick, which temporarily block distracting apps from your phone, are becoming increasingly popular. Here's the thing with these products, though. They still put a lot of the onus on us, the users, when in fact, we're deeply locked into a much larger system that is designed to keep us completely attached to our technology.

2:30Technology is inescapable now, and we often read stories or report on them ourselves here at Wired about people going back to flip phones or landlines or the entrepreneurs who are determined to revive some early 2000s era of the internet, which we'll get into. But our question for this episode is, who really in the future gets to unplug? Does unplugging just become the ultimate luxury? And how do the rest of us do it? I'm Michael Kalori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent. And I'm Jason Kay, Features Editor. And all around Ubermensch. Thank you for being here, Jason.

3:09Jason is in the middle of closing the print issue of our magazine, which just means the The next two weeks are very hectic, and we really had to twist his arm to come into studio today. So we are super appreciative of this.

3:20Jason Kehe:And surely our beloved listeners have been clamoring for my return to the podcast. Yes. They have. Emails. And for them, at least, I'm happy to be here. And thank you for unplugging and coming into the room with us.

3:39So I want to start off by putting our cards on the table. What is everybody's daily average phone screen time, to the best of your knowledge?

3:48Jason Kehe:I actually checked this recently, and I'm so pleased to report mine is under an hour a day. Wow. I was in the company of, I think, three other people. One was at three hours, one at five, and another at nine. So I, of course, won. Wait, do you mean less than an hour on social media? So I checked the digital wellness setting or whatever it is. And it said average like 59 minutes for everything. and it showed me like 20 minutes on email, seven minutes on text or whatever it was. So yes, that is my daily average. How does that compare to yours, Lauren? I'm stunned. I don't know. I don't even know what to say.

4:20Well, I originally was going to say I refuse to answer this question, Mike, not because I don't love you both, but I just feel like no one really cares about my screen time. Mostly it's because I feel like what matters more is how crappy I feel after I have spent too much time scrolling Instagram and other social media sites. It's a qualitative analysis, not quantitative.

4:40Jason Kehe:But what is the quantitative number? I mean, I don't know. Hours. Hours holistically, not just social media, of course. Because I'm constantly reading online, and I'm constantly texting, and I'm constantly texting with sources. I mean, not just like friends and my mom, but like actual sources on multiple messaging apps. So it's a lot. What about you, Mike? How much time are you online? A little over two hours a day. This is like, sorry, I am going to look it up. Oh, my God. What is it? What is it? Oh, my God. On-air reveal. Eight hours and 43 minutes. Incredible. What? Daily average? That is a lot of time.

5:17It's mostly Safari Slack and messages, which tracks.

5:20Jason Kehe:Okay, but back to the conversation I was having with friends recently about our screen time. The one who is at nine hours, so the closest to you, was weirdly the most at peace with her phone use. I mean, I just recently subscribed to the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle so that I don't have to look at news on my phone. I'm really in an unbundling. I think we should disaggregate our technological lives. The phone wants to be everything, but what if you just re-atomize your life into dedicated experiences and devices? Like, buy an alarm clock. Buy a GPS for your car. Subscribe to a newspaper.

5:56Yeah. These are things that a lot of people are actually doing as solutions to the problem of spending too much time on their phone when, in fact, they were just what we did before we had phones. I mean, my screen time used to be a lot worse. I took active measures to curb it. And then I have this new thing now where whenever I'm eating a meal or watching a television show or something, I just turn my phone upside down. and it automatically like silences notifications, puts it to sleep and basically puts it into do not disturb mode. And then when I want to, I can pick it up. You're also one of the few people I know, Mike, who actually abides by those time limits that you set on Instagram.

6:33Yeah. Like sometimes I'll send you a meme and you'll say, I'll check it later because I hit my limit. Yeah. I use the digital wellbeing settings on the Android phone to give myself 15 minutes of Instagram a day. Yeah. But I agree with what Jason's saying because what you're describing, Mike, Like that is a very early 2020 solution. And we are wired. And what is the future of unplugging? Is it this disaggregation, as you put it? Because it's acknowledging we're not actually going to unplug. We're each going to have our own sort of approach to it. So how do we actually build a life then that feels meaningful in all the different compartments of the ways we use the internet?

7:08I have an answer. You buy a piece of technology to get you off of your technology. Yeah, like brick. Yeah, so Jason, you had a flip phone for an experiment for a number of months. Yes.

7:17Jason Kehe:Well, this was way back in 2018, I want to say. Yeah, it was before the pandemic. It was a full year, but yes. And Lauren, you went out and bought the Brick. I did. It hasn't arrived yet, but I'm so excited. There's also the Lite phone, and there's other products like it. I think Punk'd made one for a while. But basically, it's a phone that works as a phone and looks like a smartphone, but it has very limited features. You know, you can do things that you need a phone for, but very little else. So I'm just curious about the Brick and about other apps that you've tried. I know there's an app called Opal that a lot of people have been using.

7:52Lauren, what is your experience with these things? I haven't used Opal. Oh, okay.

7:58Jason Kehe:Nor have I. In fact, I think I kind of philosophically oppose the entire idea of using apps to get off apps or using technology to get off technology. I have to say that the apps to get you off of your apps have been very successful for me. I have used a couple of these things, like the digital well-being timers on Android. Clear Space is another one that helps you get all the clutter off of your phone and keep it away from you. And it's been helpful for me. But I mean, I guess my bigger problem is that I do think modernity has sort of conspired against the human will. To perpetuate these conversations about the addictiveness of phones is to totally remove the fact that we are human beings capable of making decisions from the equation.

8:40Jason Kehe:And I don't think it's as hard as people want to believe, and as the tech press, to a large degree, has contributed to. So I resist these conversations because I think whether or not you're saying phones are addictive, the mere fact of you saying it adds to their power and their grip and their hold over our lives. And we think our connection to them is inevitable and unbreakable. I'm so glad we brought you on today. No, I'm genuinely glad, though. Here's my thing, is that I think we've become beta testers. So there's this promise right now from the purveyors of technology that agentic AI is going to start doing some of these tasks for us.

9:15Like, I won't spend an hour shopping because I'm going to, like, put in a prompt what I need and then it's going to order it for me. In the meantime, that requires so much babysitting and so much hand-holding and so much authentication and all these handshakes between apps and stuff. It's going to be that way for a while. So it's still just sucking us in further with this promise that it's going to make our lives easier. And in the meantime, we're just, we're mired in it.

9:37Jason Kehe:Mm-hmm. AI will eventually kill the phone, or at least our understanding of what a phone is right now. Tell us about that then. What does that future look like? Well, if you look around at the ways people are engaging with AI now, I'm noticing that, you know, when I'm with friends and someone wants to ask ChatGPT a question, for instance, they hit the side button on their iPhone, which is reprogrammed to launch Chat's voice, and then they talk to it directly. You kind of want to have a conversation that's faster than you can type it. So I just think that's going to come for everything. That's an interesting observation because what we're talking about is all of the companies that are trying to get us away from technology by introducing barriers between us and the technology.

10:19This thing you put on your fridge, these apps that shut down your apps after a certain period of time, these are all things that are barriers to the technology that's harming you. But what you're talking about, Jason, is a complete erosion of the barrier. Just take the phone out of the equation and all of a sudden it just becomes you and the cloud.

10:37Jason Kehe:Yes. I mean, it's amazing to me that people speak of phones as if they are permanent. They will come and go as all technology does. The promise of tech, if it is a kind of seamlessness, the phone is all kinds of barriers. So yeah, maybe I'm kind of going back on my original position that friction benefits us in some ways, because the phone, I do think, provides some degree of it. well we do need to take a break and when we come back we're going to talk about the internet so we're going to expand beyond just phones and we're going to talk about how bad the internet is for us fun

11:20there's a reason millions of people start their day with morning brew daily each morning we break down the biggest news in business from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. All in a format that fits seamlessly into your day. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring. So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today, we're talking about brain rot.

11:54In the first half of the show, we talked about how terrible our phones are for us and why they're probably all going away very, very soon and being replaced by AI, as Jason outlined. In the second half, we're going to talk about the internet at large, because parts of the internet are amazing, of course, but there is still just so much toxicity online, and fixing it feels like a tall order, but it has not stopped some tech leaders from trying. One of those tech leaders is Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit. Earlier this year, he announced that he was partnering with his former competitor, Kevin Rose to relaunch Dig.

12:25That's D-I-G-G with two Gs. It's a social media platform from the early 2000s that was very similar to Reddit. Our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, recently spoke with Ohanian for the first big interview episode of this Uncanny Valley podcast, which you should all listen to. It's in your feeds. Alexis shared that he wanted this new version of Dig to be way less toxic compared to the other social media platforms. Lauren, I know you have thoughts about this? I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, on the one hand, I love Reddit. I do love those spaces in the internet that feel lightly or genuinely moderated and also provide some kind of niche value for the thing that you're looking for.

13:03Twitter has obviously changed so much in the past few years. I love the idea of some kind of revival of Dig in like another healthy space in the internet. I just don't see how this gains like a ton of traction.

13:12Jason Kehe:Yeah, has something like this ever worked when someone's tried to bring back quote unquote early internet glory day site? I mean, Blue Sky is a possible example because Blue Sky launched as a big open source, decentralized alternative social media network. And it got the influx of users after the 2024 presidential election when a bunch of people just didn't want to be associated with X or Elon Musk anymore. And it feels like blue state, red state vibes now, but it does feel like there's a toxicity that exists on X that does not exist on blue sky. Amendment. Yes. When I published the story about Vibe Coding, which we talked about on last week's episode, there were just a lot of really strong opinions, capital O, on Blue Sky.

14:02Most often, I think, from seasoned coders, developers, programmers who had a lot to say about the possibility of Vibe Coding leading to really low-quality code bases in the future and just creating a lot of bugs and breaches even. And they're not wrong. It was such a strong response. And then people who just kind of jumped to, you're an AI booster. And like, really kind of angry skeets, tweets, whatever we're calling them.

14:27Jason Kehe:And the early internet was, to use your guys' word, toxic too. I mean, I don't know where we're even going back to or what we think we're moving toward. But yeah, Blue Sky seems to me just as yucky as any place else. It just feels so insulated. It is. It's an echo chamber. It's a liberal leaning echo chamber. But of course, as we know, your experience, and I'm sure other people have had experiences that are similar, where you say the wrong thing or you step out of line or you express an opinion that is not close enough to the majority opinion and you just get excoriated. Jason, to your point, the early internet was toxic as well.

15:05Yes, I think we all remember chat rooms or forums in the early internet where you could just get completely roasted.

15:12Jason Kehe:Mm-hmm. but it's amplified to a level now where every platform has that on it. And I think that it's just overwhelming to too many people. In addition to that, you can't really go back to the way that the internet used to be. You can't have a nice internet unless you form a new community and you say, okay, the objective of this community is to be nice. And we have moderators and we have block buttons and we have all these mechanisms in place And it will be very nice until it scales up and then it just inevitably turns toxic. So I think there is an internet utopia community out there and it's the first six months of any new cool app.

15:53I disagree with the premise that it's going to happen in the way that the internet has scaled in the past. Like this idea that it scales and therefore becomes a cesspool. I actually think, at least I hope the future of part of the internet is, is that it spaces with a lot of taste, for lack of a better word. And I do believe that that's how more and more people are curating their internet experience. But then there's this underlying cesspool of really low-quality, memefied, totally toxic information. And that part of the internet is actually very, very good at multiplying and sort of promulgating their ideas.

16:29And so that is also going to continue to exist.

16:31Jason Kehe:Yes, I've started calling the thing you were formerly describing the prestige internet. And I would like to believe Wired is part of that. I think that a world exists in which someone can enjoy Emily Sundberg's Feed Me sub-stack as much as they enjoy Dylan Patel's semi-analysis on the semiconductor and AI industry. Like, I read both. And what I like about them is that people are putting a lot of effort and thought and sort of doing mental gymnastics around what they want to say to their audience. I want to continue to see that internet thrive. I think that sounds lovely and it's going to get a million page views.

17:07And then the guy who posts the video of how many Big Macs can I fit in my mouth at once is going to get 80 million page views.

17:13Jason Kehe:There will always be elevated media, to use Lauren's word, and then there's going to be everything else. But I do think in a world of AI slop, there will be more effort on the part of most people to seek out some kind of quality experience. And again, what you're talking about is putting the onus on the user, on the reader. As it should be. On the person to go out and find the things that are less toxic. And I think what these folks that we're talking about are trying to create is a platform where you don't have to do that extra work to find the happy place. The happy place is the platform itself.

17:51And maybe you have to find the work to get there, but then when you get there, you don't have to curate it for yourself. You don't have to join the right forums. You don't have to block the right people. You don't have to rely on moderators. It's just better all around because it's designed to be better.

18:06Jason Kehe:But isn't the whole point of being a person in the world exactly that effort to find, seek out, discover? I mean, that's the pleasure of consumption, I think, finding something that you think is your own or is special in some way. I don't know if anyone actually wants to be fed, you know, some sort of externally curated list of quote-unquote high-quality content. I think a lot of people do. When we were kids, didn't we like take pride in finding stuff? We had to work our way toward it, and then we felt ownership of it that still will always exist. Everyone has an impulse to be an individual, I think.