Graphene OS (via Anne Enright's Amstrad)
Anne Enright’s Amstrad
From memory, I first bought a Samsung Galaxy handset and installed Lineage OS in order to make use of a hotspot. I had moved into a new flat a few months before and, for the second time, had dragged my feet over getting wifi at home. I am instinctively resistant to anything that is considered to be a “no brainer”. There are situations where one is faced with a choice where one of the options is so much better than the others that to go for another might be an act of sheer willfulness. There are two problems here. firstly, it is seldom clear at a thoughtless glance which situations this is true of — there are far many occasions where people will tell you this is so. Secondly, situations change and in the absence of a sustainable demographic of the wilful and the sheer bloody minded, those situations generally agreed to be a no brainer may well rot until there is no way to choose anything else. Once one gets into the habit of thinking it a good thing that one needn’t trouble to use one’s brain, it can quickly get to the point that one uses one’s loaf as seldom as a bread maker bought on Ebay on an overcaffeinated whim.
Which is to say that I suspect the people who confront you for not having the internet at home, or not spending literally every minute of your life within one metre of a networked computer — typically in much the same way alcoholics in alcoholic societies confront those who have the gall to opt out of drinking on even a single occasion — might be forced to think ~again~ if they were to see a video of what they make use of with their time on the internet.
I found an article I remembered reading in an old copy of the London Review of Books and managed to dig it out of a shoebox. I won’t link to its internet simulacrum here since, if twenty people click through to this post from Mastodon, at least five would feel morally obligated to condemn me if I were to post a link to a paywalled article. I remembered reading it in a way that I seldom remember reading anything online (judging from how my millenial students talk, it is a common experience for hours at a stretch of internet browsing to be immediately sent to /dev/null like vodka blackouts). If you have a decent library which still stocks publications, you’ll find it on page 3 of the edition of 5th January, 2023. In it, Anne Enright writes about a Vintage reissue of Toni Morrisson’s The Bluest Eye which she first read sometime after “a series of small paperbacks” by the author arrived in Dublin in the spring of 1988. She writes about the book and, since we never step into the same river twice, about who she was and how she approached it, and the experience she brought to bear on the book the first time she read it “in the white monoculture of Dublin in the 1980s” versus how she approached it at a very different stage of her life two years ago. Inevitably, there is a lot in there about the different way she reads and reacts to a text now mobiles exist in the world and one can reach for a phone and see people posting pictures of the books they are reading. Or they claim to be reading. Because she doubts that we are talking about the same activity at all. “Fiction is, or should be, ’transporting’: this immersive state is not something you can enter and exit every two minutes to check dog videos and the progress of the war in Ukraine.”
My grandfather was from Donegal in the North West of Ireland and one of his cohort wrote a book entitled “From Silent Glens to Busy Streets”. My dad once told me he could imagine how I might one day write a book with the opposite title. It’s unlikely since the streets of Stourbridge are not, in fact, all that busy. Could I imagine myself in a cottage in Donegal with a half-decent library and a typewriter, an open fire and plenty of logs (or turf), ribbons and stacks of paper? Certainly, but that is not quite yet what I’m talking about and I would just as soon be in a half-decent flat in, say Antwerp, with a ThinkPad running Debian or Guix, an up-to-date installation of Emacs, cameras and audio recorders gallore, and even Kiwix with off-line Wikipedia (though an off-line stack of Britannicas and dictionaries would likely be better if it were still one of the options open to us to choose). In the Spring of 1988 Enright had “an Amstrad 8512 with a slow-blinking green cursor that slowed to a stop on larger files.” The kind of computer that waits for your input and does little or nothing without it.
It’s possibly just a misanthropic note H. Lin is going for in a cartoon in the January 27th, 2025 edition of the New Yorker. It depicts a woman tapping away on a computer that’s a few years on from Enright’s Amstrad. It’s set up on a table in what might be a garage sale and is almost certainly not plugged in. She’s saying “Oh, man, I used to love playing with these things before they got connected to other people.” If so, this tone is increasingly common and, frankly, forgivable given the interesting times we are living in: Till Lauer’s cover “Flames and Shadows” depicts the palm trees of LA as silhouettes backed by a smoky red sky because of the wild fires, gigafires which would be freakishly destructive even if they were seasonal. But I used computers for years before I ever had one plugged in to the internet and can confidently say that the one thing computers were never going to help us with was socialising. It’s one thing if people like myself, who favour small groups of people who are either experientially grounded (a craft or something by way of musicianship will do it, being in touch with nature in some way generally does) or who think and know how to converse, have periods when we think “hell is other people”, but something has gone truly wrong when the notion goes viral.
Uptime and downtime
In a recent episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Chris Gilliard spoke to Paris Marx about a book by his friend the late David Gombrovitch, “Cyberlibertarianism”. I first came across Gombrovitch years ago when I was sniffing around all things Bitcoin in a place downtown that sold anarchocapitalism and claimed edgelord credentials by borrowing a concept from a Pinochetophile “dissident” from the Charta 77 days. I had attended a conference — it would have been around 2016 — and heard one Bitcoin guru after another name drop Ayn Rand. I got a good sense of the grifters in the movement and moved on long before I would have made any money off Trump’s second or third act or wherever we are now. Gombrovitch had written a book called The Politics of Bitcoin. Apparently people bitched on it. I didn’t read about it. Neither did I read it. I suppose it didn’t take too long for the whole scene to stink so bad I didn’t feel like I needed to know much more.
At the end of the episode, Gillard sums it all up. “One last thing I would say, at the very end of the book, he talks about the assumption that so many of us seem to carry that we have to have these technologies […] that we have to live under them […] There's not really a way we can say whether they have been a net gain or loss, in terms of some of these technologies. But what is true is that they are not inevitable and that there's nothing that says that we have to keep them.”
Which reminds me of that quote of David Graeber’s: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.”
And when it comes to technology who was the world we now know made by, and who was it made for? Gombrovitch may well have been as much of a “dissident” as Václav Benda and the people we are to believe brought down communism by signing a petition, but if it’s by now no great surprise to us that even the people who write books are telling us they can no longer read books they way they used to, even the people who made and best understand these systems are frequently scathing about them.
Following a recent talk called AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s., Meredith Whitaker of Signal took questions. One of the first framed a question with the commonplace notion that we trade convenience for privacy. Whittaker was having none of it.
“Email’s not convenient. Being surveilled by facial recognition: not convenient. I think these have been sold as convenience technologies that often yank on our sleeve and take a lot more time than I know I spent before smart phones were the norm when I was working at Google… Convenience at what? At answering my email at midnight? I don’t want that convenience, thank you though… My life hasn’t got much more convenient or better now that I have fifty fricking apps on my phone that I have to check all the time.”
On Mastodon, “FOSS”-loving users have been ebullient about Signal being the top messaging app in recent days. Some of the people downloading it were at a community centre I was at the other day where we swapped numbers. It’s end-to-end encrypted, etc etc., explained the guy scanning us in to a group. “Some people say it’s run by the CIA” he added in passing. Most people agree it’s the best we have (those who suggest something else are typically grandstanding in a manner I’m not interested in going into and the CIA thing likely relates to the Amazon AWS host both organisations use for their data, something that ought not to be directly problematic if all things technology aren’t a good deal more fucked than we know).
Personally, I’m most comfortable, most alive, most myself, most “mindful” when I’m not near a networked computer. I am, granted, more distractable than most — my mind is busy, spinning out tangents on top of tangents — but I see people on the tram, interacting, their minds like packet routers. It would take a William Hogarth to do justice to what you see on the streets every day.
It takes a lot of work these days to mock up something that experientially resembles Anne Enright’s Amstrad. For the technically-minded, I am running Emacs in fbterm. I write using org-mode: text with some basic formatting using a handful of characters such as underscores, asterisks, and slashes. There are a handful of colours on my screen beside the black and white of my colour scheme but essentially, what I see is text: words on the screen. And, aside from the times I write a command, none of it except for the words I am writing and will eventially publish to Write Freely where you may read this on a website (ideally, you would see it somewhere else: on paper or an e-ink e-reader).
I was writing some of the above some time ago (I created the file I am writing into two weeks ago today) and I’m guessing I was offline when, having listened to the podcast I mention above on the same machine (a ThinkPad running Debian) and indeed found the video of the keynote speech I mention, I was unsure how to transcribe one of the words and found little help from my off-line dictionary, I decided to look it up. (In the Britain I knew, we say ‘frigging’ rather than ‘freaking’ or ‘fricking’). In so doing, I reached for my phone… and found out much more than I ever need to know, not even about the plane crash that, so we are given to understand, happened in Washington D.C. on the 29th January. My search for ‘fricking’ came only after all of the friggin’ convenience of this mental chlorine rinse of information.
We’ll get to the phone. There’s a command on my computer: “uptime”. When I am on form, I type it towards the end of the week. It’s Tuesday today and it’s output reads:
22:23:46 up 1 day, 9 min, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
On the same machine, I have a repeating task “Schedule sabbath”. A digital sabbath, that is. I find that the notion of a sabbath, a “šábes” in Czech, maps well to a natural need I have in myself. One which, if neglected, I am quickly out of shape. Ideally, what I do when I’m following my “sabbath protocol” is turn off the router, power down my computer, trade my smartphone for my Nokia, and, if I need an alarm in the morning, set up the alarm on my JVC radio alarm clock to either FM radio or the USB stick where I have a number of songs, audio excerpted from films, audiobooks, podcasts, documentaries, and my own recordings, and touch little but cooking implements, paper notebooks, magazines and books.
I did fire up the computer on both Saturday and Sunday as it happens. On Saturday, I was badly out of shape in the evening, as I will relate elsewhere (it will likely start out as notes on a Czech series called “Most!”, but you’ll likely want to radically downgrade your client to find it). On Sunday I was sceduling an email to send the next morning with a CV and a cover letter.
But the thing is, how many days a week are we able to get off the wheel like this? And how often do we need to?
Graphene OS
And so we get to Graphene OS. Which is or ought to be as close as possible to being a no-brainer of a choice of operating system if one is forced to have a smart phone. As many or most of us tend to feel we are.
I mentioned that I had been running Lineage OS. I had in fact rarely used pure Android. I had made do with old keypad Nokias and the like, using an iPod touch as my sop to phone-like functionality (Signal and the like) where I had wifi, had a Ubuntu Touch device as my first “smart” phone when that was a thing (2015, it seems), and only “upgraded” to a Samsung Galaxy when the Aquarius E4.5 when it was no longer supported and I discovered that one of two handsets my ex had dropped down the toilet two years before had dried out and started to boot.
Lineage OS was fine for my needs, mainly because of its limitations. I had a browser where that was required, had a client for ineptly interacting with “the Fediverse“, and used something called Orgzly Revived (via NextCloud webdav) for task lists. Throw in my favourite apps for podcasts and audiobooks, and I had everything I would ever need.
It was not, for the most part, that much hassle to set up. But Lineage is not secure, and is only tenuously de-Googled, which was the whole purpose of opting for an alternative operating system.
Graphene is much more secure. Indeed, it is reputedly one of the most secure mobile operating systems. It is also pretty consistent in its focus on adjusting the Android open source Project’s codebase to de-privilege Google and keep it, whenever possible, away from the user’s data.
The paradoxical — though, not entirely surprising — this whole endeavour is that, in order to install Graphene, one has to buy a handset from Google. This, I presume, was one of the reasons I didn’t originally go for it. In my opinion, when Google chose their financial model, they chose to drift ineluctably away from whatever attempts they had made to follow their ‘do not be evil’ credo. The degree to which Apple, making money from hardware, has different incentives, and tends to treat their users with greater respect, has often been exaggerated in my view, but then even if Google were now to make inroads on the hardware market, it seems to me it would be more in the spirit of Amazon-like expansion than a rethink of the whole surveillance capitalism thing. And so it did not feel good picking up a box with that famous logo, and I doubt it will ever feel good booting into a device that displays it as its first banner (honestly, booting into Debian via Lenovo feels a good deal less tainted).
There is a web installer, apparently. I used the command line as I had installed the tools for Lineage and the process is similar, though much slicker and easier with Graphene. Which, since Zsh makes a timestamp with every command, permits me to check that it took just shy of 45 minutes to install the OS over Android just over a month ago.
Now that’s not the end of the story since the user has to be aware of a handful of concepts in order to make full use of the security and privacy features. I set up two users, one of which would be used for apps installed from a sandboxed version of Google Play, for which I created a Gmail account under a false name.
I installed Signal and a handful of other apps without problems. Indeed, the only problem with Signal itself was that I had first set up my account on my iPod Touch by having a code sent to a landline… at my ex’s place (the one who kept on putting her phone in the tiny pocket on the back of her jeans after dropping one down the toilet). Fortunately, we’re still in touch, over Signal, and so she sent me the code once it was resent. (Kudos, incidentally, for Signal continuing with this service, which must cost some money.)
Location services took a little longer. I rarely use maps on a phone. It’s one no brainer I go out of my way to wilfully avoid, scrawling, printing out and annotating maps. Instead, the one app I was intent on making use of and not too grudging about giving some kind of location permission, was Merlin, one of two birding apps from Cornell Lab of Ornithology. There is a free and open source app along the same lines on FDroid, the FOSS app repository the Graphene devs seem to suggest is woefully insecure, but, though it tended to guess a good handful of common birds correctly, it threw up odd artefacts with no notion of geographical limitations. Merlin is pretty and seemed, those times a friend held it up to a chattering tree, to be so accurate that I worried it might take the pleasure out of birding. And so I installed it and walked through the Botanical Gardens the one day (there are two, and one is free to enter), and then, less glamorously, along the Botič, a decidedly downmarket stream. The first few days, before I looked into the settings a little, it refused to identify birds, to let me choose a location from a map, or to install the most appropriate corpus of bird calls. There is, or should be, some granularity to the permissions that can be passed on to an app but from memory, I couldn’t get Merlin to listen with only approximate location. Whatever, it seems safe enough.
Overall, I can’t fault the phone, except for one thing. The first time IO spoke to her, my girlfriend complains that she hears her own voice as an echo. A problem of the handset (a Pixel 8A) no doubt, though she never said anything similar with either the Nokia or my cheaper Samsung Galexy. Having Signal on a telephone for once at least means that she doesn’t have to try and figure out when I’m online or can only receive SMS.
Still, the biggie remains whether I have a smartphone at all. Can I imagine living without one? Certainly. And I keep a simcard in that Nokia, which I take with me now and again. In these times in particular I would say it doesn’t do me much good to have not only access to The Guardian, but also a Mastodon client. Because just as Mastodon is, in terms of choices if not the technology, downstream from Twitter and, wherever we are right now, we are all of us a long way down the road from Anne Enright’s Amstrad and, in the technology we use, far closer to cyberlibertarianism than I would personally like to be.