I am currently working on a phone designed to reclaim the digital toolbox nature of the smartphone- access to maps, messages email etc, but with an e-paper display. There are some (albeit not so interface friendly) e readers with SIM cards, but I think there is great power in just having a screen that doesn't vibe with the oversaturated video and image based distractions we are so used to lugging around with us all the time.
One of the most interesting things about a hardware based restriction is that it entirely avoids the game of turning on and off apps or deinstalling them. Even if you want to respond to a message in your DMs in Instagram, it will work, but the temptation to pull up the Reels or For you page just isn't there when it's all black and white and choppy.
Mind you we are super early stages but the idea feels promising and by my own testing I have really found it to be a much more pleasant phone experience.
I'll post some links here if people are interested.
Haribo is from Bonn, not Solingen! The name states as much, in its quintessentially german Consonant-and-vowel aliteration technique: (Ha)ns (Ri)egel (Bo)nn. Much like Rimowa (Ri)chard (Mo)rszeck (Wa)hrenzeichen, or Leica (Lei)tz (Ca)mera.
That is a really good point. Determination without direction (or at least a misguided one) produces a lot of wasted energy. i guess the idea here of determination with lack of intelligenxe assumes some sort of intellectually elite group that can steer the determined work to some optimal outcome.
Kind of a moot point? Enforcing the law operates on a different level of desired outcome than the goods itself are worth. imagine you get your phone stolen and instead of retrieving it they bought you a new one creates a pretty perverse incentive structure!
I think Nassim Taleb used the analogy of studing an ant or a bee colony: it is not sufficient to study the ant or the bee in isolation, as it is the interactions between them and their respective colonies that shapes the behaviour. Shifting the level of analysis makes counterintuitive behaviours at the individual level (i.e. bees sacrificially stinging attackers) make sence when we shift the level of analysis up.
I have heard social media described as the attention slot machine.