How to Escape the Curse of the Phone's Constant State-Switching

Portability and constant connectivity let the phone connect you to the world with great ease. System notifications, recommendation systems, ads, red badges, clickbait — every design actively summons your attention, trying to occupy your time. Because it is online anywhere, anytime, the phone has become modern people’s biggest source of distraction.

The phone is a multi-mode device that switches state and scene frequently: one moment it turns into a shopping mall for you to shop in, the next into a café for you to chat and read celebrity gossip. One of the core technologies of computing devices like the phone is multiprocessing and multithreading, but the human habit of allocating time is not time-sliced polling.

Imagine a scene from before the internet: I want to read a book, so I have to set aside a particular stretch of time, find a quiet place, take a paper book and read it — maybe even make a special trip to the library to find the book. If while reading I hit a passage I find especially interesting and want to share it with a friend, I can only memorize it or note it down, and then when I have arranged time to meet the friend, tell them about it. Here, reading and socializing are separate and independent.

Now it is very convenient. I read with the phone beside me, see something interesting, snap a photo of it at once, and send it to a friend. Very convenient, right? Here you have actively mixed reading and socializing together. Worse, you may switch without noticing to short videos, or to Taobao and Pinduoduo. The moment you pick up the phone you may be drawn in by shorter, flatter, faster information, and it takes a lot of willpower to finish the reading. The human attention mechanism means we are in fact poorly suited to switching states this often.

The earliest smartphones were called PDAs — personal digital assistants. After decades of development, smartphones have completely failed to deliver the originally expected effect. Instead of becoming our personal assistants, phones became the field where the big vendors run their horses over our attention; we must respond to others at any moment, or hunt for dopamine on the phone at any moment.

AI is advancing by leaps and bounds now, and I think this time we may have a shot at really turning the phone into a personal assistant — one that, according to our needs, presents a different state in different scenarios to help us rather than distract us. But who knows whether things will just get worse. At least before that ideal state arrives, we still have a lot to do ourselves to manage our own attention.

Going back to single-mode devices

Going back to pen and paper — current AI is a big help here. When reading and taking notes, for instance, you can stay entirely away from the phone and the laptop and go back to pen and paper. After you finish the book, take out the phone and photograph your notes; today’s AI can recognize what you wrote quite accurately. That way we avoid reaching for the phone at every turn without giving up the convenience of digitization altogether.

Or: the bedroom is for sleeping, so you probably need a more traditional alarm clock, instead of using the phone to check the time and set alarms. Then the phone can get out of the bedroom.

Make good use of screen-time management apps

Phones and computers today have plenty of time-management software — iOS’s Cape, for example. Such apps can generally group your apps and disable groups during different time windows. That gives us a rough version of scene switching: put entertainment apps in a group and enable it only during specific periods. To be honest, though, with today’s phone operating systems this area is still very crude, far from actually reaching the level of scene switching. Third-party screen-time apps can only paper over the cracks. But at least it is an initial attempt. I think this should be a direction for how phones and phone software evolve in the coming intelligent era: software and features should appear only when I need them.

Turning off feature modules inside apps

Some apps do a bit better here. WeChat, for example: in its Discover page, Channels and Moments can both be turned off according to your needs; Alipay likewise lets you turn off its short-video module. But WeChat and Alipay still have a vast number of features you cannot turn off. Most apps, especially domestic ones, are actually terrible at letting users customize on demand, and that is probably determined by their business models. Every app can scroll short videos; every app can push high-interest loans. We ought, while our heads are clear, to be able to decide which features of an app we need, but reality is grim; we can only dance in shackles.

Exploring rebuilding the information feed with “Lobster”

All the so-called personalized recommendation systems today do not actually recommend according to your wishes. They amplify the fragile, lazy part of your nature and optimize for metrics like click-through rate. In this era of fast-developing agents like “Lobster,” there is in fact an opportunity to rebuild the information feed. While our heads are clear, we can tell our own agent what kind of thing we want to see, and let it do an initial round of filtering, playing the role of a real assistant. In theory that should greatly relieve information overload. Some companies are already exploring this direction — Bluesky’s Attie, for example.