The smartphone tether: who gets to disconnect?

The retro handset that plugs into a smartphone's charging port sounds like a joke—a novelty item selling for about twenty Australian dollars in online stores. You attach the coiled cord to your phone, hold the chunky plastic receiver to your ear the way people did in the 1980s, and suddenly your sleek device is tethered to a fixed spot. But this small accessory points to something larger happening in how we relate to the technology we carry. After decades of phones becoming smaller, lighter, more intimate, more essential, a growing number of people are now deliberately trying to create distance from them.

The shift is visible everywhere. Lockable pouches appear at concerts and festivals, keeping phones out of sight for entire events. Schools across Australia and beyond are banning devices from classrooms. In Amsterdam, The Offline Club hosts "reading raves" where attendees arrive with phones switched off and hidden away. Melbourne has similar Book Doof gatherings. A company called Coilie sells wall-mounted docks with coiled cords—the retro landline aesthetic—promising to "give your phone a home, your mind a rest, and your nervous system a reset." What began as a fringe concern about screen time has become a deliberate, collective, and increasingly legislated movement.

This didn't happen by accident. Since 2007, smartphones have been engineered with extraordinary precision for human attachment. The screens respond to bare skin. The weight and size fit the human palm without strain. The interfaces are built for effortless scrolling, tapping, swiping, pinching—movements so natural they feel like extensions of thought rather than interactions with a tool. Research on Australian smartphone users reveals how deep this fit runs. When asked to hold their phone and describe what it means to them, people rotated it slowly in their palms, closed their eyes and held it to their chest. "I'd be lost without it," one person said. "It's my world," said another. The anthropologist Mizuko Ito, writing more than two decades ago, called this a "snug and intimate technosocial tethering"—constant, lightweight, enabling both connection and mobility at the same time.

But the grip has begun to loosen. During COVID lockdowns, when life moved onto laptops and desktops, some smartphone users found their devices suddenly less appealing. One person described spending all day on a laptop and having no desire to look at a tiny mobile screen. Another said her smartphone sat on silent most of the time, often not even in the same room. The hand-device tether, it turned out, could loosen depending on circumstances. What's different now is that this loosening is becoming intentional and widespread.

Yet here lies the crucial tension: not everyone can afford to disconnect. Much of the research examining smartphone use among Australian women reveals a different reality. Many rely on their devices as what might be called "digital safety nets"—routine practices of texting when they arrive home, following each other's location on Snap Map, using apps like Life360 to stay connected with trusted contacts. For these users, the smartphone isn't a source of distraction or anxiety to be managed. It's a lifeline. It's how they maintain connection with family and partners when outside the home, especially at night. It's how they navigate a world where their safety cannot be taken for granted.

This is where the conversation about disconnection becomes more complicated. The woman who locked her smartphone in a drawer at work because she couldn't stop playing Candy Crush had the luxury of that choice—a workplace where she could create physical distance from her device. The retro landline accessory works for people who want to tether their phone to a fixed spot in their home, creating intentional friction between themselves and constant connectivity. But asking someone to switch off, lock their device away, or leave it in another room assumes a level of safety that not everybody possesses.

The real question raised by smartphone-free events and retro accessories isn't whether we should untether from our devices. It's who gets to untether, and under what conditions. The ability to disconnect has become a privilege—available to those whose safety doesn't depend on staying reachable, whose work doesn't require constant availability, whose circumstances allow them the luxury of distance. For others, the tether isn't a problem to solve. It's a necessity to maintain.