Shaun’s Palestine video from 1½ years ago encapsulates one of the best arguments against digital minimalism.
Evil foreign policy and arms shipments (along with climate denial and queerphobia) can thrive in a world where we just suddenly take away all phones without building other communication networks and approaches.
I could thrive as a phone-hater because when I walked away from phone it was after setting up other robust forms of communication:
So yes, throw away your glowyglowy but be careful about taking it away from others before they’ve set up another way of living.
Even then, to say I was “thriving” phoneless is an exaggeration because I quickly got pretty isolated when the pandemic first hit and slowly rebuilding a life has been pretty hard and some of the tools to fix that have been digital.
In hacking there’s this idea of “bootstraps” from the old joke about how you can’t lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your bootstrap. For example, if you wanna build a new OS, you’re working on an existing OS while you’re doing that, and if you’re making a new language compiler, you’re using an existing language compiler to do that usually.
Same goes for building a meaningful offline life.