Dumbphones are having a moment... and it's worth $5 billion.
Plus, DIY: Join all the cool kids and turn your smartphone into a dumbphone.
hello, future. it’s me, kev.
My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. Listen to my iHeart Media show HELLO FUTURE via iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here. The day is 135. The planet is Earth. The planet has complete 36.99 percent of it orbit annual around the sun.
Back to the future…
This week I was at The Kennedy Forum, a group co-founded by Patrick and Amy Kennedy to tackle mental health parity. Patrick and Amy Kennedy have done serious, unglamorous work on mental health parity. During one session Amy said something that stuck with me: “Why do parents have to pay to make their phones safer for their kids?”
It’s a brutal question. We built devices engineered for addiction — infinite scroll, variable rewards, social validation loops — then acted surprised when we all got hooked. Now the consumer demand is surging for new products — not with more features… but with less.
This is the dumbphone moment. And this edition of my newsletter is focusing on something that I think is grossly underreported: the rise of dumbphone demand.
Yes, I am a futurist enthusiast. But that doesn’t mean that I want tech ruining our lives in the future and re-wiring our brains! I want tech and a future that lets us be more human… more American… not less!
DUMBPHONES ARE AN UNTAPPED $5 BILLION MARKET. A growing part of our culture is opting out of smartphone addictive doom scrolling. The analog economy — vinyl, film cameras, dumbphones, physical books — is already a multi-billion-dollar category, and dumbphones are one of the fastest-rising segments. Nostalgia is part of it. Mental health is the bigger driver. This isn’t fringe nostalgia — it’s becoming a measurable economic trend estimated at at least $5 billion, with clear momentum behind it.
—> GEN Z IS VOTING WITH ITS ATTENTION — AND THE DATA IS STRIKING. Pew Research shows 48% of U.S. 13-to-17-year-olds now view social media’s effects as mostly negative, up sharply from 32% just two years earlier. Meanwhile, 44% in this age group have actively cut back on smartphone use. Searches for Y2K aesthetics have exploded 891% since late 2024, reflecting a deeper longing for less optimized, more grounded ways of living.
—> THIS IS CREATING REAL COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITY BEYOND SIMPLE NOSTALGIA. The analog economy spans vinyl, film cameras, physical books, crafting, “analog bags,” escape rooms, live events, and digital-detox experiences. One UK operator of tech-free cabins scaled from a handful of locations in 2020 to over 50 by 2026. Even the tools that help people go analog are booming — the global social-media-blocker app market is projected to grow from $1.47 billion in 2025 to $5 billion by 2035. Source: Kavout and Fortune
DIY: MAKE YOUR PHONE A DUMBPHONE (WITHOUT BUYING A NEW ONE). You don’t have to go full Light Phone to reclaim your attention. Here’s how people are actually doing it:
Switch to black and white. Learn how here. Grayscale mode kills the dopamine hit from colorful app icons and notifications. It’s the single highest-ROI change most people make.
Add app restrictions and parental controls. Use Screen Time (iOS) or Digital Wellbeing (Android) aggressively. Set hard limits on social apps. Turn on Downtime. Treat your own phone like it belongs to a responsible 12-year-old.
Go full dumb. Devices like the Light Phone and BRICK are designed for this. Minimalist by default. No app store. No infinite scroll. Some people use them as a secondary phone; others go all-in. Early reviews suggest they actually work for reducing compulsive checking.
The goal isn’t purity. It’s friction. Make the addictive stuff slightly harder and the real world slightly easier to access.
SOURCE: CNET | Wired | Consumer Reports | The Telegraph
FLASHBACK: TECH IN THE WHITE HOUSE: FROM ONE PHONE LINE TO A BLACKBERRY IN 132 YEARS. The speed at which technology reached the most powerful office in the world tells a clear story about how fast connectivity transformed American life.
--> 1877: THE FIRST PHONE IN THE WHITE HOUSE: President Rutherford B. Hayes had the very first telephone installed in the Executive Mansion. His number was simply “1,” and it only connected to the Treasury Department. For decades, the president still relied mostly on messengers, letters, and telegrams.
--> 1929: HOOVER PUTS A PHONE ON THE OVAL OFFICE DESK: Herbert Hoover became the first president to have a telephone installed directly on his desk in the Oval Office. Before that, there was no phone in the president’s personal workspace — staff had to answer calls in the hallway. It took over 50 years after the White House first got a phone for it to reach the Resolute Desk.
--> 2009: BARACK OBAMA BECOMES THE FIRST PRESIDENT WITH A SMARTPHONE: Barack Obama was the first sitting president to use a BlackBerry. He fought the Secret Service to keep it, insisting on staying digitally connected in ways no previous president ever had. In just 80 years after Hoover got a desk phone, the commander-in-chief was carrying a pocket computer.
Now, Washington culture frequently bans cell phones in secure briefing rooms… Blackberries are a thing of the past… think Smartphones can’t become like the Blackberry???
SMARTPHONES ARE THE NEW CIGARETTES? We’re now in the early “Surgeon General’s warning” stage with smartphones. Not outright prohibition, but growing cultural permission to say: maybe I don’t actually need one of these in my pocket every waking hour.
—> THE PARALLELS RUN DEEPER THAN MOST PEOPLE WANT TO ADMIT. Both products were sold with the promise of connection and convenience while quietly extracting attention, time, and well-being at scale. Just as society eventually had to confront the real costs of widespread smoking, we’re now seeing the first widespread reckoning with what constant algorithmic engagement has done to focus, mental health, and childhood.
—> THIS IS CREATING SPACE FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIP. For the first time, opting for a simpler phone is starting to feel like a reasonable, even responsible, decision rather than an eccentric one. Source: The New York Times
REVENGE OF THE ANALOG — YOUNG AMERICANS ARE DITCHING SMARTPHONES TO RECLAIM THEIR BRAINS. Across the country, a growing number of young people are quietly stepping away from their iPhones — or radically scaling them back.
—> SOME ARE GOING FULL FLIP PHONE… OTHERS ARE USING MINIMALIST DEVICES TO CREATE FRICTION. Another person described ditching their smartphone for a Light Phone after watching The Social Dilemma. The device handles calls, texts, music, and maps, but removes the endless scroll and addictive features. Many in this group aren’t going completely offline — they’re intentionally adding friction so they’re not mindlessly consuming content for hours.
—> THE GOAL IS RECLAIMING PRESENCE, NOT REJECTING PROGRESS.
Whether they go full flip phone or heavily restrict their devices, the motivation is the same: they want their attention and their real-world relationships back. Psychologists are calling this shift “the revenge of the analog” — a direct response to digital overload and the mental toll of always-on social media.
GET SMART FAST: This isn’t anti-technology. It’s anti-addiction.
Source: News4SanAntonio | Inlander
PARENTS TAKE CHARGE AND JOIN THE DUMBPHONE REVOLUTION. Schools and parent groups are moving faster than policymakers. Thousands of parents are signing pledges for smartphone-free schools. Not because they hate technology — because they’ve watched what happens when 11-year-olds get unrestricted access to the most powerful attention-extraction machines ever invented.
The movement isn’t anti-phone. It’s pro-childhood. And it’s gaining real momentum because the status quo — hand every kid a supercomputer with a casino in their pocket and hope for the best — is obviously failing.
SOURCE: Kent Online
MEET THE FUTURE: We spent 15 years telling people that more connectivity was always better. The data on attention, anxiety, and adolescent mental health got hard to ignore. Now the market and culture are course-correcting — not with regulation (yet), but with consumer choice and social permission.
Dumbphones won’t replace smartphones. They’ll exist alongside them as a deliberate counterweight. The people adopting them aren’t rejecting the future. They’re rejecting the idea that we have to accept every default setting the attention economy hands us.
The most radical thing some people are doing right now is making their phone less powerful on purpose. That’s not regression. That’s agency.
And, quite honestly, another sign that America’s technocrats would be wise to listen to their consumer base.
With gratitude,
Kev