James McCann

That's why I got the small phone, to help me wean off being on a phone.

I don't want to be on it.

I mean, not really.

I got a black and white one that just didn't work very well.

It had like a Kindle screen and a, you know, it just, you do need a phone to function.

Right.

This is, do you know Ivan Illich?

Yes.

He wrote Tools for Conviviality.

No, ah, yes, the same name as the Tolstoy story, but it's also a...

Also a writer who writes about, he's dead now, but he wrote about technology and that a tool can be good in the first phase.

You know, you hit the car and that's great.

And then you build a society for the car and that's dreadful because we're all in traffic and we've changed the way that everybody lives.

So the tool can get out of control.

New polity, shout out.

Mark Barnes, he introduced me to this idea and they got a great magazine on it.

But the phone, at first the phone is great.

You can do everything with the phone.

And then we build the whole society for the phone.

You can't get from A to B without a phone.