My friend David asked me what I thought of the BlackBerry Playbook. I wanted to give my ideas time to percolate before jotting them down:
Sack the marketers – what does ‘professional-grade’ mean in with regards to a BlackBerry Playbook tablet? It’s the kind of weak nebulous marketing speak like ‘leading’, ‘best-of-breed’ and ‘solutions provider’. I thought that we’d left all that back in the 20th century? Obviously the memo got dropped somewhere outside Waterloo, Ontario. Whilst we are on about flaunting its professional-grade awesomeness, why was there no idea of what the BlackBerry Playbook battery life would be? There wasn’t even the usual over-optimistic numbers that manufacturers try and spin – this looks shady
The name – I know that business people like to use sporting analogies to try and imbue themselves with the kind of sporting prowess they have in fact lost as a desk jockey more used to putting away expense-paid lunches than points on the scoreboard; but BlackBerry PlayBook smacks more of of a kindergarden or Friday Night Lights, lineament, jock straps and sweaty changing rooms than the board room
Sack the industrial designer – Whilst Darth Vader black may be hip in the losers end of the college dorm, maglite black might be hip for the career shopping mall security guard or 80s black may be an ironic design nod to black ash flat pack furniture; the packaging of the BlackBerry PlayBook didn’t impress me at all. Colour ironically could have been a great way to differentiate the design from the Apple iPad. How about differentiation through the tactile experience of the device? It would be nice to have a tablet that didn’t feel as slippery as a bar of soap in the shower
Memories of the Palm Foleo – One of the most interesting aspects of the BlackBerry PlayBook was the tethering relationship with its older BlackBerry messaging device siblings. There seems to be a degree of integration BlackBerry applications as well, this reminded me of the Palm Foleo project that Ed Corrigan killed off some three years ago. I will be curious to know whether RIM would also allow carriers to pair the device with a 4G modem like Sprint have done for the iPad in the US, or if the PlayBook is a giant BlackBerry messaging device accessory? This subtle differentiation is key as on its own, positioning-wise, the PlayBook reminds me of a slightly larger version of Nokia’s N900 but with no keyboard or mobile connectivity – its a clumsy communicator device
Finally an upgrade for my 3Com Audrey – back in 2000, I worked agencyside on the Palm account and some of my colleagues were working on 3Com. I was bricking myself because 3Com had their smarts together and partnered with a software company called QNX to create a hot new internet device. In comparison, Palm had some products that were ok electronic address books and a technology roadmap that you could have flossed your teeth with. Fortunately the 3Com industrial design team went for a kitchen appliance versus the Jetsons look and the 3Com Audrey became probably the most under-appreciated device in tech history. Move forward ten years and RIM has managed to capture the software goodness of QNX (with a polished front end) into a mobile device at last. Whilst the industrial design sucks, the underpinnings of QNX’ real-time OS is a geek wonder to behold. More gadget related content here.
The Washington Postalleged that the British government had served a technical capability notice against Apple in December 2024 to provide backdoor global access into encrypted Apple iCloud services. The BBC’s subsequent report appears to support the Post’s allegations. And begs philosophical question about what it means when the government has a copy of your ‘digital twin’?
What is a technical capability notice
A technical capability notice is a legal document. It is issued by the UK government that compels a telecoms provider or technology company that compels them to maintain the technical ability to assist with surveillance activities like interception of communications, equipment interference, or data acquisition. When applied to telecoms companies and internet service providers, it is usually UK only in scope. What is interesting about the technical capability notice allegedly served against Apple is extra-territorial in nature. The recipient of a technical capability notice, isn’t allowed to disclose that they’ve been served with the notice, let alone the scope of the ask.
Apple outlined a number of concerns to the UK parliament in March 2024:
Breaks systems
Lack of accountability in the secrecy
Extra-territoriality
Tl;DR – what the UK wants with technical capability notices is disproportionate.
Short history of privacy
The expectation of privacy in the UK is a relatively recent one. You can see British spy operations going back to at least the 16th century with Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham had a network that read couriered mail and cracked codes in Elizabethan England.
By Victorian times, you had Special Branch attached to the Metropolitan Police and related units across the British Empire. The Boer War saw Britain found permanent military intelligence units that was the forerunner of the current security services.
By world war one the security services as we now know them were formed. They were responsible to intercept mail, telegraph, radio transmissions and telephone conversations where needed.
Technology lept forward after World War 2.
ECHELON
ECHELON was a cold war era global signals intelligence network ran by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. It originated in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, the ECHELON project became formally established in 1971.
ECHELON was partly inspired by earlier US projects. Project SHAMROCK had started in 1940 and ran through to the 1970s photographing telegram communications in the US, or transiting through the US. Project MINARET tracked the electronic communications of listed American citizens who travelled abroad. They were helped in this process by British signals intelligence agency GCHQ.
In 2000, the European Commission filed a final report on ECHELON claimed that:
The US-led electronic intelligence-gathering network existed
It was used to provide US companies with a competitive advantage vis-à-vis their European peers; rather like US defence contractors have alleged to undergone by Chinese hackers
Capenhurst microwave tower
During the cold war, one of the main ways that Irish international data and voice calls were transmitted was via a microwave land bridge across England and on to the continent.
Dublin Dame Court to Holyhead, Llandudno and on to Heaton Park. Just next to the straight line path between Llandudno and Heaton Park was a 150 foot tower in Capenhurst on the Wirral. This siphoned off a copy of all Irish data into the British intelligence system. The Capenhurst tower wasn’t that secret, word got about it in the area after it had been built and pretty close guesses were made as to its usage.
Post-Echelon
After 9/11, there were widespread concerns about the US PATRIOT Act that obligated US internet platforms to provide their data to US government, wherever that data was hosted. After Echelon was exposed, it took Edward Snowden to reveal PRISM that showed how the NSA was hoovering up data from popular internet services such as Yahoo! and Google.
RAMPART-A was a similar operation taking data directly from the world’s major fibre-optic cables.
US programme BULLRUN and UK programme Edgehill were programmes designed to crack encrypted communications.
So privacy is a relatively new concept that relies the inability to process all the data taken in.
Going after the encrypted iCloud services hits different. We are all cyborgs now, smartphones are our machine augmentation and are seldom out of reach. Peering into the cloud ‘twin’ of our device is like peering into our heads. Giving indications of hopes, weaknesses and intent. Which can then be taken and interpreted in many different ways.
What would be the positive reasons to do a technical capability notice?
Crime
Increasing technological sophistication has gone hand in hand with the rise of organised crime groups and new criminal business models such as ‘Klad‘. Organised crime is also transnational in nature.
But criminals have already had access to dedicated criminal messaging networks, a couple of which were detailed in Joseph Cox’ Dark Wire . They use the dark web, Telegram and Facebook Marketplace as outlets for their sales.
According to Statista less than six percent of crimes in committed in the UK resulted in a charge or summons in 2023. That compares to just under 16 percent in 2015.
Is going after Apple really going to result in an increased conviction rate, or could the resources be better used elsewhere?
Public disorder
Both the 2011 and 2024 riots caught the government off-guard. Back in 2011, there was concern that the perpetrators were organising over secure BlackBerry messaging. The reality that the bulk of it was being done over social media. It was a similar case with the 2024 public disturbances as well.
So gaining access to iCloud data wouldn’t be that much help. Given the effort to filter through it, given that the signals and evidence were out there in public for everyone to see.
The big challenge for the police was marshalling sufficient resources and the online narrative that took on a momentum of its own.
Paedophiles
One of the politicians strongest cards to justify invasion of privacy is to protect against nonces, paedos and whatever other label you use to describe the distribution of child sexual abuse images. It’s a powerful, emotive subject that hits like a gut punch. The UK government has been trying to explore ways of understanding the size of abuse in the UK.
Most child abuse happens in the home, or by close family members. Child pornography rings are more complex with content being made around the world, repeatedly circulated for years though various media. A significant amount of the content is produced by minors themselves – such as selfies.
The government has a raft of recommendations to implement from the The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. These changes are more urgently needed like getting the police to pay attention to vulnerable working-class children when they come forward.
Terrorism
The UK government puts a lot of work into preventing and combating terrorism. What terrorism is has evolved over time. Historically, cells would mount terrorist attacks.
Eventually, the expectation of the protagonist surviving the attack changed with the advent of suicide tactics. Between 1945 and 1980, these were virtually unheard of. The pioneers seem to have been Hezbollah against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
This went on to influence 9/11 and the London bombings. The 9/11 commission found that the security services didn’t suffer from a lack of information, but challenges in processing and acting on the information.
More recently many attacks have been single actors, rather than a larger conspiracy. Much of the signs available was in their online spiral into radicalisation, whether its right-wingers looking to follow the example of The Turner Diaries, or those that look towards groups like ISIS.
Axel Rudakubana’s actions in Southport doesn’t currently fit into the UK government’s definition of terrorism because of his lack of ideology.
I am less sure what the case would be for being able to access every Apple’s cloud twin of their iPhone. The challenge seems to be in the volume of data and meta data to sift through, rather than a lack of data.
Pre-Crime
Mining data on enough smartphones over time may show up patterns that might indicate an intent to do a crime. Essentially the promise of predictive crime solving promised in the Tom Cruise dystopian speculative future film Minority Report.
Currently the UK legal system tends to focus on people having committed a crime, the closest we have to pre-crime was more intelligence led operations during The Troubles that were investigated by the yet to be published Stalker/Sampson Inquiry.
There are so many technical, philosophical and ethical issues with this concept – starting with what it means for free will.
What are the negative reasons for doing a technical capability notice?
The UK Government supports strong encryption and understands its importance for a free, open and secure internet and as part of creating a strong digital economy. We believe encryption is a necessary part of protecting our citizens’ data online and billions of people use it every day for a range of services including banking, commerce and communications. We do not want to compromise the wider safety or security of digital products and services for law abiding users or impose solutions on technology companies that may not work within their complex systems.
Extra-territorial reach
Concerns about the US PATRIOT Act and PRISM saw US technology companies lose commercial and government clients across Europe. Microsoft and Alphabet were impacted by losing business from the likes of UK defence contractor BAE Systems and the Swedish government.
The UK would likely experience a similar effect. Given that the UK is looking to biotechnology and technology as key sectors to drive economic growth, this is likely to have negative impact on:
British businesses looking to sell technology services abroad (DarkTrace, Detica and countless fintech businesses). They will lose existing business and struggle to make new sales.
Britain’s attractiveness to inbound investments be it software development, regional headquarter functions or infrastructure such as data centres. Having no exposure to the UK market may be more attractive to companies handling sensitive data.
You have seen a similar patten roll out in Hong Kong as more companies have moved regional headquarters to Singapore instead.
The scope of the technical capability notice, as it is perceived, damages UK arguments around freedom-of-speech. State surveillance is considered to have a chilling effect in civilian discussions and has been criticized in the past, yet the iCloud backdoor access could be considered to do the exactly same thing as the British government opposes in countries like China, Hong Kong and Iran.
Leverage
The UK government has a challenge in terms of the leverage that it can bring to bear on foreign technology multinationals. While the country has a sizeable market and talented workforce, it’s a small part of these companies global revenues and capabilities.
They can dial down services in the UK, or they can withdraw completely from the UK marketplace taking their jobs and infrastructure investment with them. Apple supports 550,000 jobs through direct employment, its supply chain, and the iOS app economy. In 2024, Apple claimed that it had invested over £18 billion over the previous five years.
In terms of the number of people employed through Apple, it’s a big number, let me try to bring it to life for you. Imagine for a moment if every vehicle factory (making cars, tractors,, construction vehicles, race cars and wagons), parts plant, research and development, MOT station, dealership and repair shop in the UK fired half their staff. That is the toll that Apple leaving the UK would have on unemployment.
Now think about how that would ripple through the community. Less goods bought in the supermarket, less pints poured in a pub or less frequent hair cuts given.
Where’s the power in the relationship between the tech sector and the government?
Precedent
Once it is rumoured that Apple has given into one country’s demands. The equivalent of technical capability notices are likely to be employed by governments around the world. Apple would find it hard not to provide similar access to other 5is countries, China, India and the Gulf states.
Even if they weren’t provided with access, it’s a lot easier to break in when you know that a backdoor already exists. A classic example of this in a different area is the shock-and-awe felt when DeepSeek demonstrated a more efficient version of a ChatGPT-like LLM. The team had a good understanding of what was possible and started from there.
The backdoor will be discovered, if not by hackers then by disclosure like the Capenhurst microwave tower that was known about soon after it went up, or by a Edward Snowden-like whistle-blower given the amount of people that would have access to that information in allied security apparatus.
This would leave people vulnerable from around the world to authoritarian regimes. The UK is currently home to thousands of political emigres from Hong Kong who are already under pressure from the organs of the Chinese state.
From a domestic point-of-view while the UK security services are likely to be extremely professional, their political masters can be of a more variable quality. An authoritarian populist leader could put backdoors allowed by a technical capability notice to good use.
Criminal access
The hackers used by intelligence services, especially those attributed to China and Russia have a reputation for double-dipping. Using it for their intelligence masters and then also looking to make a personal profit by nefarious means. Databases of iCloud data would be very tempting to exploit for criminal gain, or sell on to other criminals allowing them to mine bank accounts, credit cards, conduct retail fraud.
It could even be used against a country’s civilians and their economy as a form of hybrid warfare that would be hard to attribute.
In the past intelligence agencies were limited in terms of processing the sea of data that they obtained. But technology moves on, allowing more and more data to be sifted and processed over time.
What can you do?
You’ve got nothing to hide, so why worry? With the best will in the world, you do have things to hide, if not from the UK government then from foreign state actors and criminals – who are often the same people:
Your bank account and other financial related logins
Personal details
Messages that could be taken out of context
I am presuming that you don’t have your children’s photos on your social media where they can be easily mined and fuel online bullying. Your children’s photos on your phone could be deep faked by paedophiles or scammers.
Voice memos that can be used to train a voice scammer’s AI to be good enough
Client and proprietary information
Digital vehicle key
Access to academic credentials
Access to government services
So, what should you do?
Here’s some starting suggestions:
Get rid of your kids photos off your phone. Get a digital camera, have prints made to put in your wallet, a photo album book, use an electronic picture frame that can take an SD card of images and doesn’t connect to the web or use a cloud service.
Set up multi-factor authentication on passwords if you can. It won’t protect you against a government, but it will make life a bit more difficult for criminals who may move on to hacking someone else’s account instead – given that there is a criminal eco-system to sell data en-masse.
Use the Apple password app to generate passwords, but keep the record off them offline in a notebook. If you are writing them down, have two copies and use legible handwriting.
You could delete ‘important’ contacts from your address book and use an old school filofax or Rolodex frame for them instead. You’re not likely to be able to do this with all your contacts, it wouldn’t be practical. If you are writing them down, have two copies and use legible handwriting.
Have a code word with loved ones. Given that a dump of your iCloud service may include enough training data for a good voice AI, having a code word to use with your loved ones could prevent them from getting scammed. I put this in place ages ago as there is enough video out there on the internet of me in a public speaking scenario to train a passable voice generative AI tool.
Use Signal for messaging with family and commercially sensitive conversations.
My friend and former Mac journalist Ian Betteridgerecommended using an alternative service like Swiss-based Proton Cloud. He points out that they are out of the legal jurisdiction of both the US and UK. However, one has to consider history – Crypto AG was a Swiss-based cryptography company actually owned by the CIA. It gave the intelligence agency access to secure communications of 120 countries including India, Pakistan and the Holy See. Numerous intelligence services including the Swiss benefited from the intelligence gained. So consider carefully what you save to the cloud.
if you are not resident in the UK, consider using ‘burn devices’ with separate cloud services. When I worked abroad, we had to do client visits in an authoritarian country. I took a different cellphone and laptop to protect commercially sensitive information. When I returned these were both hard reset by the IT guy and were ready for future visits. Both devices only used a subset of my data and didn’t connect to my normal cloud services, reducing the risk of infiltration and contamination. The mindset of wanting to access cloud services around the world may be just the thin end of the wedge. Countries generally don’t put down industrial and political espionage as justifications for their intelligence services powers.
What can criminals do?
Criminals already have experience procuring dedicated secure messaging services.
While both dark web services and messaging platforms have been shut down, there is an opportunity to move the infrastructure into geographies that are less accessible to western law enforcement: China, Hong Kong, Macau or Russia for instance. A technical capability notice is of no use. The security services have two options to catch criminals out:
Obtain end devices on the criminal:
While they are unlocked and put them in a faraday cage to prevent the device from being wiped remotely.
Have an informant give you access to their device.
Crack the platform:
Through hacking
Setting the platform up as a sting in the first place.
If the two criminals are known to each other a second option is to go old school using a one-time pad. This might be both having the same edition of a book with each letter or word advancing through the book .
So if you used the word ‘cat’ as the fourth word on line 3 of page 2 in a book you might get something like 4.3.2, which will mean nothing if you don’t have the same book and if the person who wrote the message or their correspondent don’t use 4.3.2 to signify cat again. Instead they would move onwards through the book to find the next ‘cat’ word. A sleuthing cryptographer may be able to guess your method of encryption by the increasing numbers, but unless they know the book your feline secret is secure from their efforts.
Above is two pages from an old one-time pad issued by the NSA called DIANA.
The point is, those criminals that really want to evade security service understanding their business can do. Many criminals in the UK are more likely to rely on a certain amount of basic tactics (gloves, concealing their face, threatening witnesses) and the low crime clearance rate in the UK.
Instead of a technical capability notice, these criminals are usually caught by things like meta analysis (who is calling who, who is messaging who, who is transferring money etc.), investigative police work including stings, surveillance and informers.
Why?
Which begs the questions:
Why Apple and why did they choose to serve it in December 2024?
What trade-offs have the UK government factored in considering the potiential impact on its economic growth agenda and political ramifications?
The who-and-why of the leak itself? Finally, the timing of the leak was interesting, in the early days of the Trump administration.
I don’t know how I feel about the alleged technical capability notice and have more questions than answers.
Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.
Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.
A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.
For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.
On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.
By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.
A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.
When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.
I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.
I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.
The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.
Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.
That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.
Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.
Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.
Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.
Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.
At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.
Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.
My Nokia N95
Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:
Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.
Parent and policy voices.
The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:
Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
(Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).
The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.
There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.
Under-supply.
While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.
HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.
Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.
Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:
People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.
Punkt.
A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.
Switching off as a choice is a relatively new phenomenon. A few blogposts ago I talked about how consumer internet usage started for me 25 years ago. Back then going online was an active choice. In my case I would have to travel to an internet café. Later I would have to dial-in to an ISP or log into a wi-fi network.
Confluence of always-on elements
Wireless home broadband allowed seamless connectivity around the house or the workplace. The next thing that changed was laptop battery battery life improved to the point that one could realistically work for a 8 hours on writing or emailing at a conference or coffee shop without a power cable. Social media became a thing, first it was a positive influence, but gradually it had a more complex social impact.
Finally there was smartphones. Nokia, BlackBerry, Palm and Microsoft smartphone attempts gave way to a duopoly of Apple and Alphabet’s respective eco-systems. I went back to an old presentation that I did a number of years ago. Here’s a chart from it, that I pulled together of publicly available active user numbers by time from December 1997 to April 2016.
The dramatic take off in Gmail email accounts in 2011 and beyond is down to the rise of the Android operating system. By 2013, smartphone users were engaged by a series of compelling always-on applications to counter switching off.
Ged Carroll for IMM Conference, Hong Kong (August 2013)
Switching off became important. ‘Crackberry‘ – a light hearted take on smartphone addiction and an ability to turn off peaked as a thing as far back as September 2009 according to Google Trends. 12 months later the Crackberry book advised us on how to put down our smartphones. Four years later, the self-help books became more strident in their exhortations: Put Down Your Damn Phone Already: A (loving) rant about your obnoxious cellphone use being a case in point.
The biggest concerns now, seems to be about two things where correlation if not causality supports beliefs about:
From a professional perspective and increasingly a personal perspective, consumers have become smartphone human cyborgs.
Class as a determinant of switching off
Switching off is also about culture and behaviour. A discussion that I had with a friend about phones being turned off and put in a box before a night at the opera, reminded me of how ‘class’ in its widest sense can be one of the biggest determinants of switching off. You see it in homes that put phones away before a family dinner, or cinema-goers who are happy to turn their phone off before the main feature starts.
The bulk of people may have the devices as always-on pacifiers. This quietens children and is seen as a continued source of confidence and validation rather than switching off.
Secondly, we’re also seeing a small proportion of people choosing to use feature phones as a way of disconnecting. This might happen all the time or at the weekend, when they don’t want to be bothered by Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp messages.
The world’s last internet cafes – Rest of World – Internet cafes were more than just places to log on. They emerged in the waning years of the 20th century — a post-Cold War moment full of techno-optimism. Sharing a global resource like the internet “was going to bring different people in different cultures together in mutual understanding,” historian and author Margaret O’Mara told Rest of World. It was an era in which, both physically and digitally, “people were moving across borders that before were very difficult, if not impossible, to cross.”
