Flipping Out

Fall 2023

Like Jesus, I decided to dabble in some resurrection this year by ditching my iPhone and exhuming the long forgotten flip phone. Not just any flip phone, by the way, but the whiz-bang ZTE Cymbal U, a slab of black plastic so inefficient at communication that sometimes I would do better to flap a blanket over a rooftop fire to transmit my messages. Yet the sticky buttons and staticky speakers only endear me more to it, sort of like your mauled childhood stuffed animal that you refuse to give away. Each scrambled text message, dropped call, and chunky photo attachment plants me back in an era when communication took actual effort, and where you weren’t a living mailbox for your friends and family to mercilessly stuff full every day. Call me crazy, but a life without “Top 10 SCARY Ghost Videos for TOILET Viewing!” and the TikTok “Skullbreaker challenge” sounds, if not less interesting, at least more restful and cranially secure.

When considering tossing your iPhone, your life starts to fill with possible constraints and questions. What would it be like to walk with your head upright, and not clamped down by the spectral hand of Steve Jobs? How does one listen to music, take photos, or catch up with the latest Snapchat News feature, “Sweating Egg”? Does the Rat offer carrier pigeons as an alternative to their mobile ordering system? How will you know if the ghosts specifically haunt the John, or only pop up when one engages in TOILET Viewing? With 9 months of experience under my belt (flip phone holster pending), allow me to help push those teetering on the edge of digital liberation. The first obstacle that many consider insurmountable when owning a flip phone is listening to music. While the accessibility of music nowadays can at times crowd into necessary periods of quiet and reflection, there’s sometimes nothing like popping in your trusty earbud and blasting your canals senseless while on the way to class. You could, of course, take the medieval route and experience music in the flesh; unbeknownst to many, there is a world-class conservatory right next door that plays host to hundreds of concerts and recitals every year. The problem, of course, is accessing music while on the move; and unless if you’re satisfied with the voice major serenades that carry across pretty much every inch of the campus, some technology might be of some use here. Might I suggest, then, the antediluvian iPod (or any MP3 player), to relieve any aural cravings one might have. Though ancient and hard to find, these relics are a great way to experience music; in my case, it can be a sort of sonic scope into the past, as I use my Dad’s old iPod with mixes that I listened to when I was little. What began as a constraint became a way to reconnect with the songs of my youth, back when I still had the cartilage to breakdance on the kitchen floor, and long before the schizophrenic world of Spotify, blitzing from song to song and being force-fed AI generated playlists for my pets.

Fully committing to a flippy also mires you neck deep in Oberlin’s numerous daily realities that are becoming infiltrated by smartphones. You’ll have to guard carefully your physical ID card, an artifact becoming ever elusive on this campus due to ResLife’s scorched-earth campaigns against them. QR codes start to be an eyesore, jumping out from flyers and webpages, and requiring you to put in some extra research or beseech your friends for the link that you manually type in. Ordering from the Rat also becomes a Sisyphean task; you might have to resort to begging outside the window, hoping some food scraps will fall into your mendicant hands. And of all the beasts that roam the cybernetic lands, none are more feared or loathed than Okta Verify. Save for reprogramming Okta’s mainframe, the only defense is a biometric Yubikey, a petite flash drive horrifyingly priced at $25 (and that’s not college subsidized).

What you’ll start to realize, however, as cameras and CD players and telegraph machines pile up around you, is that owning a flip phone isn’t a panacea to the troubling realities of modern life. No matter how much you wish to pancake phone-distracted students who step in front of your bike, or give the person next to you in class a healthy cuff to the neck for customizing Ferraris on their computer, the fact remains that many of our academic and social infrastructures are inextricably tied to technology. My life has become immeasurably richer after getting rid of my phone; my attention is less shriveled, being bored becomes a privilege, and I can go days without hearing of Kendall Jenner’s Tiny Floral Nipple Covers On A Yacht In The French Riviera, Of Course. However, I still have to use a laptop for schoolwork and applications, and sending a two sentence text without planning half my day around it would be nice sometimes. Essentially, one has to make many concessions when owning a flip phone in our modern world. For many, it simply isn’t possible; much of society increasingly relies on their smartphones for their livelihoods, so that owning a flip phone becomes a privilege. As much as I detest this dependency, perhaps we can look for ways to use our technology without sacrificing our interactions with the real world. Phones could become just another tool in our versatile modern box of appliances, there to help, but not to viciously shrivel our dopamine receptors. While we’re insulated in the Oberlin bubble, though, I say that if you’re considering getting a flip phone, grip it and rip it. Of course, you'll have to deal with the all-consuming pretentiousness that comes when owning a flip-phone, which if doesn’t become apparent after extolling the virtues of being unplugged within a liberal arts college alternative newspaper, will be after your closest friends start to vocally express their desire to skip your flippy across Lake Erie. Lucky for you, it will probably still work after that.