Putting Your Phone In A Leather Coffin

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. As you read this, I’ll be wrestling new rescue chickens from the British Hen Welfare Trust into the garden coop. Chickens are living fossils. They’re tiny theropod dinosaurs. Imagine telling someone you rescue dinosaurs from farms to give them a better life outdoors.

In this letter:

• Untethering

• Humble Bundle

• You were never going to get a jetpack

• Cinema Historian

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

UNTETHERING

I read a thing the other day about how the younger generations are experimenting with dumbphones. And getting into arguments on dates because they can’t call Ubers home with dumbphones. Aside from having a chuckle at the idea of people feeling stranded because they don’t have access to Uber - Uber isn’t even allowed to operate in my town - it’s interesting to see cohorts attempting to untether from smartphones, and therefore the full internet.

There was a photo circulating last year of Daniel Day-Lewis in high-end workwear sitting on a New York bench peering at a flip phone. People went nuts over that.

(Also the outfit, but I’m sorry, a limited edition Carhartt barn coat is still a fucking barn coat)

Yesterday I got an email alerting me to Roterfaden, makers of luxury notebook covers, offering tailored leather smartphone sleeves. So, to get at your phone, you have to literally pull it out of a sheath. Which is an interesting signal. It means either your life is so together that you’re okay with unpacking your phone to get at the screen, or that you have an expensive smartwatch for your alerts and can keep your phone in a leather coffin all day.

I covet Roterfaden notebooks, which I’ve previously termed the real stealth-wealth notebooks, and these sleeves have a similar semiotic. “I’m so successful that I only look at my phone when I really want or need to.”

TikTok metrics alone tell you that most people are not imprisoning their phones. I will not allow that app on any of my devices, even though it’s probably the future of “television,” because I need to protect my time and it’s clear I would vanish into that app and never come out, because that’s what it’s designed for (the basic format “unit” of TikTok is, however, really interesting to think about - between 21 and 34 seconds.). But, in other ways, there’s a new rise in people trying to check out of connected life, and perhaps reserving things like TikTok for what used to be television time.

But here’s a though: what if you grew up with the internet and now it’s a source of anxiety? And you’re wondering what it would have been like to not be hyper connected at all times? I see Gen Z “gardening influencers” online and they all radiate anxiety and poor mental health, and they all talk about those things all the time. The thing about gardening is you can’t do it with a phone in your hand. I read somewhere that THE REPAIR SHOP has a significant base among younger viewers, and I wonder if it’s because you see artisans doing work you can’t do with a phone in one hand.

Evidently OpenAi and Sir Jony Ive are getting ready to release an AI companion device that will have no screen and will be designed to be with you always, listening always. I imagine it will be astonishingly expensive. The idea is that you will talk to it, and be weaned off screens. Zuckerberg is talking about all of us needing AI friends, which is happening already with certain species of chatbot. Are “friends” electric? You won’t need to hold them in your hand. You’ll just carry a little coffin with a ghost in it that talks to you.

I have no idea if polls work properly any more. It might ask you to log in with your subscription details. Who knows? Robots are still basically dumb.

OPERATIONS

HUMBLE BUNDLE

Image Comics have teamed with Humble Bundle to offer a bunch of works of mine produced with Image as a digital package. It’s for charity, benefiting the Book Industry Charitable Foundation:

Because a society without proper bookshops is no society at all, and even a little bit of help is better than none at all.

There are a couple of books in that bundle that never really found their audiences on their release: SUPREME BLUE ROSE and CEMETERY BEACH. I love them both, and, if you never read them, maybe this would be a fun way to try them. One of the bundles also contains a digital version of the fancy new DESOLATION JONES remaster executed by JH Williams.

Here’s the link!

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Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

ORBITAL

NO JETS

Designer Jericho Vilar sent this over with the stated hope that it would “get a chuckle out of Web 1.0 survivors such as yourself.” Bastard. How very dare you remind me I am that fucking old. Click through to the product page to see it in detail, it’s nicely done. I used to covet a T-Mobile Sidekick.

Longtime comrade of the newsletter, artist Mia Wolff, has a new book coming out this autumn. Can’t find a pre-release page yet, but this is a hell of a cover:

Here are the other books she’s released with Fantagraphics.

I’m late posting this, but the April 27 edition of Angela Winter’s ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ASMR radio show is up on streaming, and we always stop everything to listen to that.

And Madeleine Cocolas gifted me her sublime new record SYNDESIS. You can currently stream one piece of it at this link. It’s like taking a tour of someone else’s memories in a dream. One of those records I close my eyes to listen to.

If you’re making or doing something that you’d like to bring to a wider audience, hit reply. Let’s share the new things and weave the web a little tighter.

OPS

MONTAGE

OPS (Orbital Piloted Station) was an unbuilt space station. (Actually, a series of them.) These are all the unfinished things circling around my desk in bits this week:

Picked this up last year during a period of interest in Godard, finally opened it this week.

Technically. it’s a book about “the monumental, labyrinthine cinema history series Histoire(s) du cinéma. This is simultaneously a set of essays on the history of cinema and television; on Godard’s life, and his place within that history; on the history of cinema in the context of the other arts; on the history of film thinking; on the history of the twentieth century; on the interpenetration of cinema and that century; and on the impact of films on subjectivity.”

Yeah, it’s dense. Some of you fell asleep just reading that bit of text. Here’s Godard’s simpler version of his thesis:

“Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so,” he suggests simply, citing Robert Bresson.

Anyway. Sometimes I’m just in the mood for something rich and technical.

Because… well, there’s an interview with Tom Cruise doing the rounds where he talks about how, if you’re going to be a screen actor of any note, you need to understand how lenses work. You need to talk to the tech people, be in an editing room, and grasp how lenses and framing alter the parameters of a performance and a narrative. And the takeaway is, for most of us in the arts, you need to understand your available tools as deeply as you can. So, sometimes, it’s really useful to read (or read about) someone who has taken an insanely deep dive into some of those tools and learn what they brought back.

(UK) (US)

(I say most of us because some people are just geniuses who can use every tool instinctively right out of the box. I’m not one of them.)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day (did you know Neal Stephenson is on Substack?)

HOB’S LANE: new this week, parts 6 - 10.

The Dogme 25 manifesto.

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There we go. That’s me for this week. Now go and sit by the light and do something nice for yourself. Hold on tight. See you next Sunday. Thanks for sitting here with me.

W