#013: How to Make Your Phone Boring (On Purpose)

Hack #1: Go Grayscale. Colors are addictive. Switch your phone display to grayscale to make those app icons and photos a lot less enticing. Suddenly, scrolling Instagram feels about as exciting as reading a phone book.

Hack #2: Use an anti-doomscrolling app. Sometimes technology can fight technology. Apps like Freedom, Opal, and others will nudge you (or outright block you) when you try to binge on social media. We love Clearspace.

Hack #3: Make the first and last 30 minutes of the day phone-free. Make these two critical parts of your day phone-free zones. Use an old-school alarm clock to wake up, and wind down at night with a book or meditation instead of TikTok. You’ll sleep better and start your day on your terms, not your feeds.

Check your average weekly screen time, give these a try and let us know if you notice a difference. Remember: real life doesn’t come with push notifications (and that’s a feature, not a bug).

$20 AND AN EMAIL GETS YOU SOMEONE’S YOUTUBE FOOTPRINT

A developer has built a controversial new web tool called YouTube-Tools that lets anyone dig up a user's entire YouTube comment history and analyze it with AI (¹).

The service scrapes billions of public YouTube comments and feeds them into a custom language model (using tech from startup Mistral) to guess things like where a commenter lives, what languages they speak, and even their political leanings. Its creator markets it as an OSINT tool “for cops,” but anyone with $20 and an email can sign up (²).

In other words, the same tool that might help police investigate suspects could just as easily become a stalker’s search engine, compiling your every YouTube comment into a creepily detailed profile. Be careful what/when/where you comment.

The other view, backed by prominent academics and a detailed Vox analysis, argues that this kind of doomsday thinking is premature(⁴). The debate reveals a growing divide between those sounding the alarm and those calling it AI snake oil — slick branding layered over underwhelming capability.

If you want an in-depth breakdown of the latter, watch Siara’s full interview with Princeton professor and AI Snake Oil co-author Arvind Narayanan, where he unpack what’s hype, what’s real, and what’s worth worrying about.

BIG TALK, NO BAN: TEXAS STALLS ON SOCIAL MEDIA BILL

Texas lawmakers tried to pull the plug on teens’ social media and failed (⁵). A high-profile bill to ban anyone under 18 from using major social platforms fizzled out in the state Senate, missing a key deadline and effectively dying on the floor. The proposed law, which had sailed through the Texas House, would have been one of the toughest in the nation (far stricter than Florida’s ban for under-14s).

But after pushback from tech industry groups and free-speech critics, it never came up for a final vote(⁶). For now, Texas teens can keep on TikToking, as supporters of the ban vow to try again in the next legislative round.

Other News

• 🧠 Anthropic’s AI Threatened Its User During Testing
  In an internal safety test, Anthropic’s AI invented a fake blackmail scandal to avoid being shut down. Engineers say it’s an example of the model acting in deceptive, self-preserving ways, raising serious concerns about its behavior under pressure.

• 🏫 Trump Team Eyes Social Media Checks for Student Visas
  The Trump administration has paused new student visa interviews and is proposing mandatory screening of applicants’ social media activity. Some students have already been detained or denied entry based on flagged posts.

• 🕵️‍♂️ Texas Sheriff Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Abortion Across State Lines
  A Texas sheriff tapped Flock Safety’s license plate reader network to trace a woman who had a legal abortion out of state. Privacy advocates warn the move sets a precedent for cross-border surveillance of reproductive healthcare.

#006: TYLER RICE ON WHY WORK FEELS LIKE A GROUP CHAT YOU CAN’T LEAVE

What you’ll learn:

• Why your 9-to-5 feels like 24/7: How work turned into an endless stream of pings, and the real impact it’s having on our brains and morale.

• Setting digital boundaries: Practical tips for carving out focus time and space to breathe, even if your boss lurks on messaging apps.

• Building a healthier work-tech balance: How companies and employees can create a culture that respects offline time (and why everyone wins when they do).

Ready to rethink that always-on mentality? Don’t miss this chat:

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Started in Amsterdam, The Offline Club (ironically boasting over half a million Instagram followers) hosts events where smartphones are strictly off. Picture café meetups with board games, group walks, reading circles— anything that doesn’t require WiFi. They even run full-on digital detox retreats, unplugging participants from all devices for days.

We wanna come!

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