They'd rather have dumbphones than brain rot

Growing up, artist Chris Mendoza was "quite online." He spent hours as a teenager scrolling forums and message boards from his family computer. He knew what it felt like to get lost inside the internet. 

When "smarter" phones emerged in the late 2000s, the sleek glass devices promised unfettered connectivity and a bottomless toolbox of apps that could do seemingly anything. Mendoza felt hesitant to join in. He wasn't sure he wanted to become so permanently online. So he resisted. 

And he continues to resist.

Today, the 33-year-old Torontonian uses a small LG flip phone he purchased in 2017. He can't participate in group chats, he gets lost sometimes and he needs to ask others to look things up for him. He's become adept at typing in T9. Still, he feels that his "dumbphone" (a term he's ambivalent about) provides him the "guardrails" to avoid an addiction he sensed early on. One which has become pervasive.

READ MORE: Canadian artists predict the cultural trends of 2025

"I'm conscientious of the fact that those tools are very much designed for continuous engagement," he says. "You can just scroll forever."  

Although his art — mainly sculpture, drawing, performance and public programs with a proclivity for site-based projects — has never broached the subject of connection directly, the motivating ethos threads through his work. He is always more interested in engaging people IRL.

"I would say my experience of having been pretty online in my teens and early twenties, at least at some implicit level, likely feeds a desire for facilitating projects that take place in person, are collaborative and include people coming together in a physical space."

While Mendoza might once have been an anomaly, he could now be considered a trailblazer. In 2023, nearly 100,000 dumbphones were sold in Canada — up 25 per cent from the previous year. It is a trend that is only expected to continue as, increasingly, people look to detox from their devices, seeking a simpler, more manageable experience with technology. 

When CBC Arts recently surveyed Canadian artists on what everyone will be talking about in 2025, "dumbphones," to our surprise, came up again and again. The chunky plastic bricks and clamshells are a fitting emblem for a general mood that permeated so many other survey responses, too. You could characterize it as a growing distrust for the algorithm, artificial intelligence and social media, as well as a desire to disengage from their influence. It is no wonder that "brain rot" was named Oxford's 2024 word of the year not long after "doomscrolling" won that same recognition in 2020. Respondents describe wanting to disconnect from the screens in their pockets — and the digital worlds they tether us to — and reconnect instead with other sources of enrichment, like culture, community and the land. For many, the dumbphone now signifies a kind of resistance.  

Over the past few years, representations of such nostalgic tech have been used as symbols within contemporary art. Montreal sculptor Shanie Tomassini, for example, has cast incense into the form of a BlackBerry and burnt it, reflecting on the quasi-magical rituals we perform with our devices. Laura Moore has carved soapstone reproductions of every cellphone she's ever owned in tribute to these personal repositories that go obsolete every couple years. Brandon Celi, meanwhile, cartoonishly paints worn bricks in the guise of old Nokia and Samsung handsets, rendering the objects as inert as skipping stones, which only seems to emphasize the ways we fetishize our devices. 

The image of the dumbphone has been used as a shorthand — and sometimes a punchline — for thinking about the recent past. But as it experiences a genuine revival, the humble dumbphone becomes a means to talk about what we want and what we don't want in the present as well as in the future.

Asked what must-have item will top everyone's wish list in 2025, photographers Saty + Pratha responded: the dumbphone. "Thus far it's only been the super cool hippies doing it, but at some point soon, the rest of us are gonna figure out these things are rotting our brains and we don't need to be that connected to non-humans that much of the time."  

We've reached a precipice with respect to the way our attention is being farmed, Saty says. "Given that A.I. is all new technology and it's only going to get better at spoon-feeding us exactly the shit that we like the taste of, it's a really dangerous era."

The dumbphone, then, is a kind of political response, says Pratha. It's a way of saying, "No, you don't own my attention."

While the fashion of Y2K and the early aughts may be enjoying a resurgence, the dumbphone is not only the perfect accessory to complete the look, they say, but perhaps it also tells us something about a moment in time that we're yearning to return to. 

"[The millennium] was imbued with so much optimism," Pratha says. "There was technology, but then there was also connection. It was the beginning of [MSN] Messenger and community on the internet."

"And the internet was really sweet at that point," Saty adds. "You thought it was going to potentially do good instead of whatever shit hole we're in now."

Responding to a survey question about what people will do with their leisure time in the year ahead, Diana Lynn VanderMeulen told CBC Arts, "Read books. Actively engage with others. Disconnect from tech and reconnect with nature." It is a curious response for an art maker who, in the past few years, has perhaps become best known as a digital artist.

"I am not anti-technology," she says. "Technology is natural. A seed is technology." She just wants to be more mindful with her habits, escaping the "content consumption spiral" to return to what she calls "the wormhole," where you "[follow] ideas from a spark into the unknown." 

VanderMeulen recently began living part-time on the family farm where she grew up. She's started growing food crops there, and learning about soil, microbial biology, seed saving and heirloom techniques. She bought a scythe and has found a new thrill in the action of clearing the ground. It's not exactly a "back-to-the-land" moment for her, but rather, it's about striking a balance between the sources where you find a charge. The artist, for instance, has also begun documenting her farm crops inside her signature 3D-modelled landscapes. And she intends to make bioplastics for her work from the corn she grows.

Another survey respondent, Camille Rojas, says she herself is ready to disconnect. She's tired of being addicted to her device. So she's done the research, she's joined the community of enthusiasts and she even has a model picked out. In the new year, the artist plans to buy a dumbphone. 

"We're all coming to the realization that we're watching ourselves rot and seeing our dopamine receptors just go to total shit."

Rojas recalls a time in the early 2000s when she had a healthier relationship to technology. "When my phone was just for talking and texting," she says. She remembers when our electronics were more like tools, and their functions were well-defined, but limited, so we could use them with purpose and then turn them off once we were finished. "I want to go back," she says.

"I really want to dumb everything down to get that good, healthy, valuable dopamine again." As opposed to the cheap hits served by shitposts and reel binging, Rojas says we derive "valuable dopamine" from "sustained, intentional interactions," like reading a book, watching a film or learning a language. "Not mindless consumption."

Her desire for this deep focus is so strongly felt that it's begun to filter into her artwork. She's at the start of an analogue animation project inspired by machine learning. Working with a grid system used to enlarge images, Rojas is drawing faces sourced from her own photographic archives by transposing small fragments one by one. She repeats each drawing over and over, dozens of times, to improve her accuracy. She will then animate the results, so that the face appears to "morph" into itself. 

She's trying to "embody the machine," she says, by doing something a computer can now do instantly that is painstaking for her. By pouring her attention into the process, she is mounting another kind of resistance, reclaiming the work in a slower, more imperfect, but meaningful way — which is also a more human way.