Cell Phone Seduction

The picture here at the top of the post is the cell phone that my wife and I have been using for the past five years. (Well, not this cell phone, but the same model, a Nokia 5120, and we each have our own.)

Pretty old and clunky, huh? They've worked great for us. It may not be surprising to hear this from a guy who is interested in "free" software, but I can be frugal about a lot of things. (Cheap! My friends and family might say.) And these phones and our plan have been fairly cheap. They were free through a corporate discount plan and then $30 per month total for both phones and 60 anytime minutes each. We probably average about 5 minutes per month. They're just for emergencies or very brief calls to each other or for long distance calls.

Most of the time, they're turned off. We're just not big phone talkers. I look down with scorn at all these people yakking away on their trendy new cell phones, so busy fetishizing the latest models.

Copping this superior attitude helps to bury the shame of a geek using such outmoded technology. I mean, I really don't care. I'm not impressed by the cell phones people have. I'm just happy to be saving money and getting by with as little as possible for something like this. Yet still, there was this strange sense of failure on those rare occasions when I needed to carry or use the phone in public. I projected embarrassment on to others, that they would be pitying me (when not mocking me).

This could have gone on for some time. At one time when I made a plan change, I had gotten another two phones for free, so we had backups. But then Cingular sent me a note telling me how wonderful they are because they spent $6 billion upgrading their network and oh-my-god are they going to offer us super service now, but there was this small detail of eliminating the service we were using. Our old plan would go away by early 2008, and in the meantime they'd start charging us an extra $5 per month per phone because our current service is just that lame.

Investigating options revealed that we would be looking at about $60 per month for the cheapest plan with two phones. For someone who uses five minutes per month on average, do you think it made me feel better that I would have hundreds of minutes at these rates? That I could carry minutes over from month to month? The answer is no. But we needed to have something. By now I didn't like the idea of either of us being without a phone "just in case."

I would have been quite frosted to have to pay an extra $300+ a year to help Cingular recover on their $6 billion investment, but fortunately my investigation also turned up the idea of pay-as-you-go plans. And these seem to be perfect for how we use our cell phones.

For $83 at Radio Shack, I picked up two Virgin Mobile Oystr phones, two car chargers, and a belt clip/holder thing. Went with the $0.18 per minute plan. With a minimum $20 every three months for each phone, I'm guessing we'll spend about $15 per month instead of the $30 we have been paying.

Sure, there's the rush of saving some money that brings joy to my accountant heart, but just as much, I've been propelled by events in to the geek joy of having better technology. I know these things are just average when compared to the dreams of avarice that modern cell phones can fulfill, but you have to realize I've just leaped five years from the past in to the present. It has a color display. Holding this little device in my hand, I can feel the pulse of modern mass-produced technology and sense the possibilities of the future. Flipping it open... the Enterprise is waiting to beam me up.

It makes me think of what I've heard from Eben Moglen in a couple of speeches: we could have a free network that uses the public spectrum to move bits around, where devices like this cell phone would be the nodes. We can be the network. Did I mention it would be a free network? This little cell phone could be the server hosting movingtofreedom.org. And that makes me think of Manfred Macx walking in to a bar...

The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his coke in a mad rush for the door.

Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he's about to be slashdotted.

[...]

Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"

-- Charlie Stross, Lobsters
Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2001 *

This little Oystr phone can send me in to the future, but in the meantime it's really just a piece of junk that charges me by the minute and ringtones cost $2. And there doesn't appear to be a standard, easy way to do the simplest thing like load phone numbers on to it from my computer and periodically back it up. Bah.

* (The Manfred Macx stories are about the singularity and are collected in Accelerando. A quick search shows that the book is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license at www.accelerando.org.)

Related

• Another instance of bargain hunting behavior and technology frustration.
• More inspirational words from Eben Moglen.