I love the little rant that opens Phil’s newsletter from two days ago, but this closing paragraph had me cocking my head:

Smartphones are so ubiquitous that even to hate on them, I now have to pick one up, open Notion, hit the little microphone icon, dictate a note with a particularly clever malediction upon them, and post that note later on here or on Bluesky or into the pages of a book manuscript. I mean I don’t “have” to, but the effort involved in doing it another way would feel like teaching myself to use only water that I draw from a well daily using wood buckets.

I don’t know, man. I don’t know what Notion is, I don’t use dictation, I don’t write online using a smartphone, I don’t have a Substack, and I’m not on Bluesky or Twitter or Instagram. I am on micro.blog—I’m writing on it now, on a laptop!—but I don’t have to be, I don’t just not “have” to be. It’s a decision, which is to say, contingent and uncoerced.

Let’s say a word well is a journal and a word bucket is a pen. I use one every day, as I assume Phil does. We both write online, and no writer can avoid the internet, but I think there’s more agency involved and less resignation necessary than he suggests here. And I’m the alarmist Luddite!