Retro phone accessories reveal digital divide in 'untethering' movement

A twenty-dollar gadget is selling briskly in Australian online stores these days. It's a coiled handset that plugs into a smartphone's charging port, transforming the sleek device into something that looks like it belongs in a 1980s kitchen—a chunky plastic receiver you hold to your ear, cord trailing, the way phones worked before they fit in a pocket. It seems like nostalgia, a quirky joke about the way we used to live. But the trend points to something more deliberate happening beneath the surface: after decades of drawing closer to our devices, more people are now trying to step back.

The shift didn't happen overnight. Twenty years ago, a Japanese cultural anthropologist named Mizuko Ito described the mobile phone as a "snug and intimate technosocial tethering"—constant, lightweight, enabling both connection and the freedom to move. Smartphones accelerated this intimacy. Since 2007, they've been engineered specifically for the human hand: touchscreens that respond to bare skin, weights and sizes calibrated to rest in a palm without strain, interfaces built for effortless scrolling and swiping. When I've asked Australian smartphone users in my research to hold their device and describe what it means to them, some rotate it slowly in their hands. Some close their eyes and hold it to their chest. "I'd be lost without it," one person told me. "It's my world," said another.

But something shifted during the pandemic lockdowns. In research I published with Ingrid Richardson on how people's media habits changed when confined to their homes, several participants described their smartphones becoming less appealing once laptops and desktops took over their lives. "I spend all day on my laptop, the last thing I want to do is look at a tiny mobile phone screen," one person said. Another reported her phone sitting on silent most of the time: "Often it's not even in the same room as me anymore." The hand-device tether could loosen, it turned out, depending on circumstances.

What's different now is that the loosening is becoming deliberate, collective, and designed into the world around us. Lockable pouches are standard at smartphone-free concerts and events. Schools across Australia and globally are banning phones from classrooms. In Amsterdam, a group called The Offline Club runs "reading raves" where attendees arrive with devices switched off and tucked away for the entire session. A company called Coilie sells a wall-mounted dock with a coiled cord that tethers a smartphone to a fixed spot in the home, mimicking the old landline. The marketing promise is direct: "give your phone a home, your mind a rest, and your nervous system a reset." One woman in my research told me she used to lock her smartphone in a drawer at work because she couldn't stop playing Candy Crush during her shift. She needed physical distance between herself and her device. Coilie is selling that distance through retro design.

But the ability to untether is not equally distributed. Much of my research has examined how Australian women use smartphones to maintain connection with trusted contacts when outside the home, especially at night. What emerged was a pattern of smartphones functioning as personalized "digital safety nets." This looks like routine practices: "text me when you arrive home," following each other's location on Snapchat's Snap Map, using apps like Life360 designed specifically for safety. For many of the people I've spoken with over the past decade, the smartphone provides a tether to family, partners, and friends that feels essential, not optional.

Asking someone to switch off their device, lock it away, or leave it in another room assumes a level of safety that not everybody can take for granted. The retro accessories and smartphone-free events are real, and the desire for distance from constant connectivity is genuine. But they raise a question that goes deeper than whether we should untether: who gets to, and under what conditions? The answer reveals a digital divide that runs along lines of vulnerability and trust. For some, the smartphone is a burden to escape. For others, it's a lifeline they cannot afford to release.