You wouldn’t expect to find a product review on this blog, but variety is the spice of life! Then again, your digital life may be a little too spicy, overcooked, and out of control. If so, the Φ Phi Daisy may be just the phone for you. I recently purchased one—indeed, snatched it up the moment I learned of it. At this writing, it hasn’t arrived, and I haven’t set it up. But that’s fine because this is a product review in principle, not actual experience. The Φ Phi Daisy is a great phone in principle.

You’d expect the technology blog of a Washington, DC, think tank to focus on (in rough order) policy, economics, and culture. But let’s come at them in the other direction, which is not backward. What do we want our lives to be like? How do we want to relate to others? How can we individually craft our experiences and society? A different phone can make a difference.

The Φ Phi Daisy offers a wonderful selling point: focus. It is here to “assist you in focusing your attention on what matters to you most.” I find interesting and persuasive the problem statement in its marketing copy.

Like you, we were tired of constant notifications, private photos being uploaded to who-knows-where, installing yet-another-app, and doom scrolling social media for the next dopamine hit. Worse, kids copied our behavior. Then, we read more news about BigTech treating us as “The Product” and coming AI automation being added to a phone we already had in our home, and that was too much.

The solution is control.

A controlled smartphone is where all third-party services are disabled by default. There is every attempt to keep you in control of your ability to make calls, use data services, or use apps if you want them, in a secure and private way. And, if you want to dive deeper into making your controlled smartphone more private or secure, you may do so with a deeper level of verification or customization.

I like this critique of “you are the product,” and I’m content with much of what transpires in the information economy. But I think it’s desperately important for people who see the world in such terms to avoid being the product, should they so choose. As I tweeted (Xed?) mere moments after learning of this device, “Using a phone doesn’t have to commit you to one of two corporate ecosystems.”

That’s the world our phones hold out for us. You’re either an Apple user, paying dearly for devices and living in Apple’s product, app, and data ecosystem, or you’re an Android user, paying less and living in Google’s (Alphabet’s) ecosystem. A lot of what drives these ecosystems is data, about you, your use of your phone and apps, where you go, what you buy, and so on. There are terrific benefits to be had! But if participation is not optional, these ecosystems can seem almost as coercive as the governmental systems that actually are.

What if you don’t want to be in an ecosystem? You’ll pay a price in convenience, but you can also gain control, and repose. You might recognize that much of your social and media life was developed for you in the same sense that cotton candy was developed for “you”—your impulsive, thoughtless, uninformed child self. Maybe you want a phone that keeps you in communication on terms chosen by your contemplative, present, spiritual self.

We’ve backed into economics. As noted, I’m perfectly fine with much of what goes on in the information economy. I often naysay the naysayers. My colleagues and I spend much time defending the modern information economy against those who seem to want to stop it or control it. That makes it easy to forget that the world doesn’t owe anybody a business model. We were not placed on this earth to provide data to economists either.

In terms of policy, the consequences of phones like this are manifold. Because they put users more in charge, they reduce the need for (and false promise of) top-down, episodic privacy legislation. Such phones help protect people from the problem of warrantless government searches through data that we lodge with third-party service providers. We digital denizens currently suffer massive insecurity under the Supreme Court’s improvised “third-party doctrine,” which worthwhile academic commentary continues to hollow out.

These are extraordinary policy benefits that arise from having the ability to take personal responsibility for one’s data and privacy. So ahead of actually using my Φ Phi Daisy, I am happy to report very good results indeed.

Learn more: Privacy and the Double-Bureaucracy Redux | Bitcoin as Babel—and Other Religious Metaphors | AI Regulation, Preemption, and Democracy | Creating a New American Surveillance State