The Blackberry Walk

I have bought a new phone. But not any phone - this phone is a Bigme Hibreak Pro, from the bright minds of Shenzhen. There is one unique selling point to this device, one which sets it apart from every other middle-of-the-range-spec Chinese smart phone: that being the e-ink screen. Screen addiction may be the most serious global ailment of our day. Now, I know, you've heard this trite message a hundred and one times, and hearing 'screen bad' is by this point tiring. Every health oriented YouTube channel talks about it, alongside some mytho-scientific worldview on dopamine. But some contrived theory on dopamine detoxes isn't needed to realise that screens are harming our attention and our minds. You just have to look around. To my mind the screen is a kind of external imagination. Now, what do I mean by that. The human mind, once the curtain of the everyday is drawn back, has a kind of cosmology to it - you can think of it as kind of like the sky. Regularly, during waking hours, the bright sun of consciousness fills this sky with light; but, once we head to sleep and the light of consciousness fades, night rolls in, and what's left is the starry night. Those stars, they are our imagination. Our imagination is always there, trundling along in the background without us noticing, for the sun is too bright, only to be noticed at night in vivid detail through our dreams. For so much of the day we are blind to our imagination, however, like the stars, our imagination is still present. At times throughout the day, our minds can dim, and we can lose ourselves in daydream, seeing the psychic constellations, and wondering. This is broadly speaking how I view imagination to operate. Only in the absence of external stimuli may we descend into the world of internal associations. So why do I say screens are a kind of external imagination? It is for this reason. Just as when a man wonders he dims his consciousness to see the constellated thoughts and images of his mind, so too can he dim his consciousness to see the images on an LED screen. It is similar yet different. Unlike regular imagination where you see the content of your mind, in staring at a screen you view the content of the screen, and this acts as a substitute, an outsourcing, of our imaginative faculties. Imagination and screens are somehow at odds. You never see, for instance, a phone nor use a phone in your dreams - at least I never have. The key to the screen is light. Families spent time staring into the fireplace watching the fire crackle and pop, and in our modern times this role has been replaced by the telly (only now for even the telly to have been retired too). Because they are both bright and ever changing, they attract our attention as a kind of focal point whether by intention or not. I'm sure you could relate. Sitting in the waiting room at the GP's and there's a small telly going. The content is either notices or a program to settle bored children; you aren't interested in the slightest, but keep finding your attention drawn to it like some kind of magnet. So, just as one can lose themselves staring into the fireplace, one can with their phone in that same mesmeric state, only with the telly or a phone, the light is a kind of Trojan Horse for the information being conveyed. What we have invented with the screen is kind of like a dream, a kind of hypnotic state; only instead of a dream lit by the light of consciousness, it is lit by LEDs. In other words, external imagination. Suffice it to say, I have a rather suspect view of screens. You can see them hypnotise people in public, on the train, children - they're used on children like dummies to keep them quiet as they stare wondrously into the phantasmagoria of the screen. It's madness! The full lifetime effects are yet to be understood, but whatever neural rewiring may be occurring, it's unlikely to be positive. Future generations will reel and cringe as they learn what we did to our young. It will be as if we gave them dummies dipped in laudanum. My purchasing of the Bigme Hibreak Pro was an attempt to claw back my imagination. In buying my new phone, I've made a departure from the LED screen, finally prying myself a little from its void-bound call. E-ink, for those unaware, is what the kindle uses. Instead of using an array of coloured glowing LEDs, e-ink uses small pockets of opaque white and black pigments which the screen may release or retract at will. It can be viewed more like a shifting sheet of paper rather than a glowing crystal. This means, for one, that the Bigme Hibreak Pro is in black-and-white - which it is, though other colour e-ink models exist¹ - and for two, that the screen has no backlight and doesn't glow. Regarding the greyscale, your mileage may vary. I balanced the scales of for and against and found that it was something I could live without. There are some difficulties however. The twenty megapixel camera is impressive, only you can't really see the pictures you take with colour nor clarity. The absence of glow, however: that is lovely. On a bright sunny day using the screen is simply marvellous. A regular phone with an LED screen, a translucent screen, would be fighting for brightness with the sun, a match-up in which the poor screen never really stood a fighting chance. However e-ink has no backlight since it is opaque, and on a summer's day looks as if you a reading a book. Like a kindle, there is a frontlight which skims the surface for dark spaces, two frontlights, in fact: one white, and another orange for reading before bed. As previously discussed, phone addiction is bad. But with an e-ink screen, it isn't as bad. I say 'as' because habits are hard to break, and I still find myself reaching for my phone if thirty seconds pass without stimulus. The e-ink display however feels different. It's as if the bread has gone stale and flavourless, as if the salt has lost its flavour. I reach for my phone, but it isn't giving me the 'hit' I'm expecting from it, and I'm left a little disappointed from it. Every now and then, I look back to my old phone lying dormant on my bedside table, and I get a slight pang to open it up again; a pang which I of course resist, but the very fact such a pang passes through me proves how entrancing it is. It's like a child who's grown up on junk food but now in order to reform his diet is given a plate of vegetables. Another interesting observation I've taken away from this experiment is that I don't respect my phone as much. Without so clear a screen, I find myself treating it a little more like a book or an object rather than a piece of tech. More importantly however, I don't respect what I read on my phone as much. I find myself browsing through Substack as I was, thinking half the stuff I'm reading is silly nonsense. Now, this could just be my feed has dried up for content, or that I've gotten bored with it, granted, but I reckon something deeper is happening. I reckon that without the mesmeric iridescent glow of LEDs, I'm not brought into the content of my phone to quite the same extent, and I'm less gullible to whatever wacky opinion-de-jour is floating around. The screen facilitates external imagination, as a kind of portal between this world, the world of matter, and the floating city of the internet; without it, the illusion of connectedness dulls. Not disappears, dulls. There is still a pull using an e-ink phone towards the cyber world, but through it's low DPI, black-and-white, papery screen, your feet are planted more firmly in this world. You feel a little more yourself. You aren't lost as totally in the screen. Much of what you see on your phone feels fake. Which is good, because it is. Will these phones become popular? It's hard to say. Not yet, would be my answer. Achieving the fidelity and refresh rates Bigme has is currently the bleeding edge of e-ink technology, and yet it still isn't perfect. Ghosting is a big issue. Ghosting is where previous images and screen-states aren't cleanly wiped off the screen before the current image is shown, leaving residues of what you've just been doing. This is a little irritating, though by using one of the programmable buttons on the side of the phone, I can now with a click refresh the screen to clear it away. Manual screen wiping won't be an easy sell to the general public, and appeal only to autists like myself who've been fighting with Linux for most of my life.² That isn't to say though that the technology won't continue to improve. I believe it will, and I believe also that interest in this technology will grow as fear of screen addiction spreads. The feedback so far I've gotten at work or from friends begins with "that's a good idea, I spend too long on my phone," but once they see it, is then followed by, "oh, I'm not sure about that." As it is, it's a hard sell. But I have every faith that once this technology grows, it'll be everywhere. Should e-ink become cheap enough, I can see e-ink billboards, e-ink adverts in corner shop windows, and e-ink in bus shelters. Wouldn't it look futuristic? It would be a future which values human attention, doesn't abuse our eyes with bright screens, and instead replaces them with the technology of shifting paper. That's a future I can be excited about. 1. The colour isn't true colour, you can find pictures for yourself online. The colours look rather dull. 2. I spent all morning yesterday recovering data after a bad shutdown from low battery. Home directory thankfully safe, but I had to completely reinstall Arch after my root partition was scrambled.