Microprocessing

Folding Smartphones May Fix Your Distracted Mind

They’re slightly less efficient, and that’s a good thing

Angela Lashbrook
OneZero
Published in
6 min readMar 12, 2020

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The new Razr phone is displayed during the unveiling of the Razr as a reinvented icon.
Photo: Michael Kovac/Motorola/Getty Images

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today to give you a better tomorrow.

II miss my old Razr phone. It was a lavender-tinted pink, which at the time seemed very sophisticated, and because I was among the first in my 11th-grade class to get one, I experienced my own short-lived burst of cool as people crowded around me, oohing and aahing at the new technology. Though we all continued climbing the ladder each year into more complex mobile technology, I am still nostalgic for that little pink brick I could flip open with a snap to hammer out a T9 text.

The phone I have now, the iPhone XR, is… fine. It has a big screen, which I like. The battery life is impressive (if I don’t have the Twitter app installed, anyway). I am also hopelessly welded to it, married to it, in a way that’s kind of disgusting. All I need to do is hold the phone in front of my face and suddenly the whole world is a tap away. It’s so easy to consume a steady, consistent dose of rage and terror and Photoshopped influencers and work emails and animal

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Angela Lashbrook
OneZero

I’m a columnist for OneZero, where I write about the intersection of health & tech. Also seen at Elemental, The Atlantic, VICE, and Vox. Brooklyn, NY.