I Made My Smartphone Dumber

My cell phone was running my life. So I tried my best to hack it into submission

- Jamie Lauren Keiles

ON MOST DAYS, I come home from work and sit on the couch and play on my phone for an hour, first catching up with the tweets of the day, then scrolling through my Instagram feed, then reading over a couple of last emails. My goal, I think, is to wipe my brain clean, to indulge in some lazily social form of chatter.

But once all the notifications have been cleared and all of the tweets have been read, I find some demented part of my brain is still empty. So I return to the cycle, opening apps to diminishing returns, until I’m knee-deep in photos of big synthetic butts and footage of teenagers fondling slime and updates from people I’ve never met − an endless feed refreshing itself, over and over again.