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How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras (sfgate.com) 45

Posted by EditorDavid from the staggering-genius dept.
A few weeks ago on a bike ride "inspiration struck" for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate... Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he's arguably the city's biggest proponent of the written word... Now age 56, Eggers' latest book is called "Contrapposto"...

On writing days, Eggers bikes to his sailboat docked near the Golden Gate Bridge. He writes using a hefty 1998 Mac that has never been connected to the internet. On the boat, he keeps "banker's hours," working 9 to 5 without any meetings or interruptions except for the occasional wildlife visit. "You're there with the cormorants and the occasional porpoise and sea lions and seals, and when you want to take a break, you walk around and you're in the thick of it, one of the most beautiful spots on Earth," he said. "Especially coming from the Midwest, it never gets old."

Given Eggers' decidedly low-tech existence, it's not surprising that the current state of San Francisco gives him pause, but there's a streak of hope that underlies his concerns. He abhors the growing surveillance technology that's gripping the city, refusing to get into Ubers that use recording devices, but he feels a well-written ballot measure about Flock cameras could potentially save our dwindling privacy. ChatGPT's effects on the art of writing are demoralizing, but he welcomes that teachers are re-embracing pencil and paper, with cursive making a big comeback. The wave of artificial intelligence ads blanketing bus stops imploring companies to stop hiring humans are so over the top, they'd sound cliché if he were to include them in one of his dystopian tech industry novels like "The Circle" or "The Every," but tech philanthropy has helped many of his projects flourish.

Case in point, Art + Water, a new art space scheduled to open next year on Pier 29 funded largely by art world donations... Co-founded with the artist JD Beltran, the space is slated to operate as an old-school apprenticeship system, hosting 10 artists in residence mentoring 20 students, all free of charge... The ultimate goal is to break down the financial barriers that keep students from pursuing art.
Thanks to Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
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How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras More

How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras

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  • Banker's hours... (Score:5, Informative)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Saturday June 13, 2026 @09:51PM (#66191042)
    Are 9-3, not 9-5. Traditionally, this gave the staff 2 hours between 3 and 5 to balance the books before going home.
    • Isn't it actually supposed to be 10 - 3? Isn't the whole point of the idiom that it's a short working day?

  • If you've ever visited Disney World, one of the things you might've noticed is that there are quite a few talented individuals working for theme park wages (which if you weren't aware, are fairly low). Very, very few people make what could be considered a good living drawing, dancing, and/or singing for their supper.

    There tends to be more than a bit of a survivorship bias among those who've "made it" in any sort of creative endeavor. Yes, if you're one of the lucky few, it is true that you wouldn't have s

    • Re:Does the world need more starving artists? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wickerprints ( 1094741 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @01:07AM (#66191160)

      I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

      And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

      The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

      So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

      I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

      • AI can lead to a post-scarcity world where people are free to do what they want, including being an artist without having to worry about making a living off of it. Think of how many artists had to give up the profession because they could never financially get off the ground. Because AI trained on humanities collective knowledge, that is a good argument that it is publicly owned, support people like Bernie Sanders to make sure we actually head to a post-scarcity future:

        I will soon be introducing a bill to g

        • AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the atte

      • Yes, the drive to create art is there, but that doesn't mean everything that people create has value. Your artistic expression may only have any meaning and value to you. Everyone else might just see worthless crap. Artistic expression that only the artist values is, by definition, without value for anyone else. So, why should that be treated as valuable for everyone?

        It shouldn't. If you try to make a living off of making and selling something nobody wants, starving is a sign that you need to do som

  • East Texas (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 )

    There are some places in the hills of East Texas, where people actually believe that Y2K destroyed civilization. If you want to avoid internet access and Flock cameras, there are plenty of places in those hills to hide.

  • But a lot of people do.

  • >"Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers,"

    Um, if he has a "dumb" cell phone at all that is on, it is tracking his location, essentially the same as a smartphone with GPS off.

    He could carry a computer tablet with no cell modem and save stuff to internal storage or SD. It will enable a large on-screen keyboard and with option to voice type/edit of

    • Clicked on the link to his book. Leads to Amazon. Available on Kindle. Espousing connectivity, but makes money off of it. Is that like a drug dealer smart enough not to use his own product?

    • >"Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers,"

      Um, if he has a "dumb" cell phone at all that is on, it is tracking his location, essentially the same as a smartphone with GPS off.

      He could carry a computer tablet with no cell modem and save stuff to internal storage or SD. It will enable a large on-screen keyboard and with option to voice type/edit off-line. Or a smart phone with no SIM card/data plan and GPS off. There are options.

      A Nokia 3210 from 25 years ago could type a sentence faster than that. The most charitable explanation is that it's hyperbole. The guy is a writer, so it's either hyperbole or he is full of shit.

      It's easy to live 99.9% of your life without a smartphone. Turn the damn thing off, put it in a drawer and only get it out for the rare occasions when you need to validate your banking or something.

      • I have been living without a sim card for like 7 years now, it's doable but many services still require sms for 2FA. Slowly they are adopting the ability to use software tokens but there are still services that don't.
    • Oooooor... a pen and paper. If he forgets or doesn't bother to take a pen and paper, he would likely do the same with a tablet.
    • Or even better, why is he complaining at all about the position in which he decided to place himself? Why should that self-inflicted problem be worth publishing in a paper?
  • I donâ(TM)t like flock or surveillance or the proliferation of irresponsible AI use either. But Iâ(TM)m not quick to take notes from anyone who is blessed to live such an idyllic life where they bike to a boat in the morning. Most of us would pick that life if we could.
    • After looking him up I will put some respect on his name. His family life had a lot of early tragedies.
    • So make it happen. Get rid of your car today and start biking. Save all the money you put towards your car (really all of it; the maintenance, upkeep, insurance, registration, gas and/or charging, parking, tolls, the car itself if you're paying a note or whenever you would have replaced it, washing if you pay for that, etc.) and it won't take long to have enough to get a used boat.
    • Bike? What am I, 15? I stopped doing that the day I got my learner's permit.
  • I'm pretty sure I don't like Flock, but I'm equally certain this self congratulatory back patter will be suggesting bringing back Latin as an entrance requirement for college next.

  • Wait for it.... (Score:3)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @12:06AM (#66191142)
    Read the summary. Some guy wants to be an urban hermit. Where's the news for nerds?
    • Looks like a local artist profile published in a local paper. I guess it's kinda nerdy because he's a sci-fi writer, but I'm not familiar with him and, like you, fail to see why we should care.
  • How did he get it without a smartphone?

  • Modern smart devices offer awesome quasi-magical advantages over my very first computer which was a mobile pocket handheld computers I brought when I was 16, sporting Basic and 1.2kb RAM.

    However, the distraction and mental load that comes with these devices and services these days is larger than any single human can reasonably consume in their life. The idea of ditching the smart devices and going back to paper notebooks and dumbphones the size of which I can _actually_ handle has been quite enticing to me

    • Then again there's Google Maps, Communications, Notes, an ultra high end Digital camera, automatic sync and Backup, times and alert, notes, checkliste, calendar, groupware

      I've been almost* smartphone free since 2021. Yep, I carry a paper notebook and a pen. If I am traveling I also carry a digital camera that is just a camera. The one thing about smartphones that I miss is if I am in a new city and need to navigate. OpenStreetMap comes close (I use Organic Maps as the front end for the OpenStreetMap data) and the offline version is sufficient as long as you are organised enough to download the maps beforehand. The upside is that after a few days in a new city I can get aroun

    • I feel lile disabling notifications all together should be step 1 for everyone. Instant gratification is hard to overcome but not constantly being alwrted and only checking things when you feel like doing so is a step in the rigth direction. Sure you can still leave them on for timers and calendar events, maybe sms; however, the more you fee obliged to respond rigth away the more it seems to re-enforce instant gratification.
  • Those items that he's avoiding can be very obnoxious, but also very useful. Use them smartly. Is he also going to avoid modern medicine, because it can be obnoxious, not to mention outrageously expensive?

  • Why not saying Alexa, GMail, Netflix, Youp0rn etc?

    Clickbait?

  • Not sure why my brain wanted to see it that way at first glance, but I thought it amusing enough to share.

    Besides, I'm sure there's a phone app to help people manage graveyards. If there isn't, someone should make one. And give me a taste of the profits.

  • In other words, like me, he has a flipphone. Oh, Ghu, why not just call and leave yourself a voicemail?

    When I was still working my day job, I sent myself a ton of emails on the current WIP.

  • Keep brining back cursive (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Monday June 15, 2026 @05:33PM (#66194434) Homepage
    Don't just bring it back, teach penmanship! Every student should be proficient in Spencerian cursive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], and be able to write it beautifully with all the curves and details clear, and with the right flow. There should be a penmanship requirement to graduate primary school, outside special cases, and if you can't measure up, you don't graduate grade 8.

    Does anyone else remember being told "If I can't read it, you fail!", or something to that effect? There were kids in the 90s who invented a new English form, it wasn't intelligible, it wasn't scribble, or shorthand, it was basically hieroglyphics. Speaking of shorthand, how many people do you know who can write in shorthand? Do you know anyone? If you can't write with a pen, and paper, you can't communicate, and that's a major issue. Years ago one of my neurologists used to submit prescriptions in medical shorthand, he refused to use the computer. The pharmacists couldn't read the prescriptions. My wife is a nurse, and occasionally, rarely, will get a medical shorthand order, and she is the only nurse at the clinic who can read them. Not one of a few, the only one.

    We're at a point where people can't sign their names, they can barely print them in block letters. 90%+ of the forms I fill out, have to be printed, or done on the computer to be accepted, why? Years ago I submitted a letter to the CRA (I'm in Ontario, Canada), and I cursively wrote on the form, and it was denied for being unreadable. Unreadable? I take my penmanship seriously, I drill and practice my Spencerian cursive, it's pretty damn nice, and the only reason you couldn't read it, you can't read.

    The last medical form I had to fill out, required capitalized block letters printed, so not in cursive. In grade 1, over 30 years ago, we had to print in block letters that were capitalized, and we've come full circle. On another ridiculous note, if you try to put a cursively written cheque into any of the ATM's in town, it will either spit it back out, or, keep it and mark it as fraudulent cheque. I've had to speak to a teller because it marked a cheque as fraudulent, and when she pulled it up, she immediately told me to print on the cheques, the OCR won't accept a cursively written cheque, are you actually f'ing kidding me?

    Okay, fine, the OCR is messed up, but try to cash it with a teller, and you'll probably get told you need to rewrite the cheque. I had the manager come over and tell me they couldn't accept cursively written cheques because the tellers couldn't read them. How did you hire a teller who can't read? This is serious, how did you do that? Frankly, I think all interviews should require a writing test, if you can't write, you can't communicate, and a phone, or computer is not going to fix that. People will say when is the last time you had to write in cursive? Had to? No idea, but let's assume grade 12, but, how often do I write in cursive, daily. My logbook is 30 cm from me, my favourite fountain pen is also ~30cm from me. Why do I write things down? Helps me remember, helps me build my day, and helps reinforce what I need to work on, and, importantly, keeps a safe backup of what I work on.

    If Clockify goes offline today, I can rebuild my entire work history from my logbooks, can anyone else?

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