Market Research: Light Phone 2

The Light Phone 2 is for a specific type of person. I suspect I am not this type of person. I am a debt-addled journalist from the midwest with an Instagram account for her dog. When I received the Light Phone 2 in its luxe black packaging inscribed with promises of a better mode of being, I wondered how long I could handle toting around a minimalist phone when my life is simply designed around having the standard-issue maximalist option on hand. (Look, I like being able to answer work messages while walking said dog.)

The matte black square gadget belongs to a gallerist with a buzzed head and perfectly symmetrical face. A middle-aged celebrity wintering in Santa Fe with his third wife, acupuncturist, and second-favorite daughter. A retired tech billionaire who fobs philanthropic responsibilities off on a well-compensated assistant to savor his twilight years at a dive camp in Sihanoukville mastering the art of free breathing. A former club kid who inherited a deceased ex-boyfriend’s co-op in the San Remo and now spends afternoons dictating their memoirs on the terrace. It’s for all of those people, if they were real and not examples I just made up to illustrate the general level of lifestyle eccentricity and disinterest in staying connected necessary to be The Light Phone 2’s target audience. People beyond phones, who have transcended a desperate need for convenience. Intentionally pared-down, less than four inches long, with a display screen smaller than a pinky finger. It can make and receive phone calls, it can send or receive text messages, it can tell the time and provide an alarm clock. That’s about it. No maps. No camera. To leave the house with it means accepting that you cannot double-check directions, order a rideshare, take a photo, or look up any of the information we’ve become accustomed to having access to at all times. Not only does it not have apps, it exists to repudiate the idea of an app. (It can, however, function as a Wi-Fi hotspot, and there’s an option to add a basic music and podcast player.)

Originally, the Light Phone was even more stripped-down; the first version offered only 2G connectivity. Its creators, artist Joe Hollier and designer Kaiwei Tang, raised over $400,000 on Kickstarter to bring their vision to life. It made and received calls, nothing more—as hard-core ascetic as a burlap sack. “The Light Phone is designed to be used as little as possible,” its promotional materials insisted. But when it started shipping in 2017, the device soon proved to be of too little use to too many users. Hollier and Tang retooled the concept to include texting, clock, and better connectivity, and launched a second crowdfunding campaign the next year. The idea of a phone for people who hate phones still held broad appeal; this time, they raised over $3.5 million to create the Light Phone 2.

At $350, it is far pricier than basic plastic flip phones offering the same functionality. This is a straightforward observation, not a critique. It’s not for people who want basic plastic flip phones. It’s for people who want multitudes: an art object and conversation starter that occasionally functions as a phone. In fashion-speak, you might confuse it with an elevated basic, but this isn’t like a $100 James Perse t-shirt that looks exactly like a $5 Hanes t-shirt. No, no. The point isn’t reaching for an apex of heightened, streamlined functionality. The creators of the Light Phone speak with the common vocabulary of digital detoxes and unplugging retreats, heavy in neo-Luddite maxims, like: “There is no infinity, just intention.” Their phone doesn’t enhance the everyday, but rather offers an intentionally austere, openly affected alternative to our hyper-connected normal.

Phones have been fashion statements all along, anyways. Designers have known this for years, from Kimora Lee Simmons collaborating on a quilted Pepto Bismol-pink Baby Phat flip phone encrusted in .4-carat diamonds for Nokia in 2004 to Dior’s 2011 Reveries phone, an Android covered in crocodile skin sold for $26,000. In 2019, Supreme dropped a $70 burner; it sold out quickly, of course. The Light Phone 2 does something beyond branding a pre-existing device, though. It exists to recontextualize the idea of a phone, from a ubiquitous, constantly-upgradeable accessory to something best carried around sparingly. The statement it makes is about restraint. Most phones are designed to keep themselves stuck fast in the hands of their users, to drive forward a lifestyle where constant connectivity is a given, where logging off is a disadvantage. The Light Phone 2 is a reminder that this particular lifestyle is not especially sustainable or luxurious, that smartphone culture can be a psychic burden, a pathway to tedium—a task master disguised as a toy. Holding the featherweight Light Phone 2 to my ear as I chatted with my mom one evening, I felt like a parody of fashionable types—the phone is so small, it made me look like Zoolander. I think you’re supposed to feel hyperaware clutching it. All the more reason to put it down. Its value is more apparent when it’s hardly being used.

But it had its moments. “Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in a New York Times book review in 1984 headlined “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” The Light Phone is a gesture at mystification. It asks the cats to please get back into the bag and to stop taking photos of their meals and checking their emails in the litter box. Walking my dog on a snowy Sunday with only the Lightphone in my pocket, I couldn’t take pictures of the way the snowflakes dusted his little honey-colored snout, or video of the way he bounded across the park. But it was easier to notice how beautiful the slate roof of the church across the street looked, how the boughs in the holly tree near the park’s entrance stood out, their robin-bright red topped with white. For a quiet moment that would never be memorialized, uploaded, or shared, I understood the appeal of a phone that encourages me to exist without one.

Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago.