If you are as excited about the Librem 5 as I am, you will want to show it to all your non-techie friends and family. “Look, it’s a Linux phone!”, you’ll say. They may be briefly impressed with the terminal, which evokes The Matrix to the uninitiated, but after brief fiddling, they will fail to share your joy. “Why,” you may ask, “why don’t they get it?”
That’s because there’s a chasm of understanding between you. I was on its other side once.
A long, long time ago, I met an owner of a Jolla phone at a conference. I had never seen it before, and I was excited to try it. But after I swiped around, tried out a few apps, and when the novelty of the user interface wore off, I ended up unimpressed. Yes, it was a phone. Yes, it had apps, just like mine. But I didn’t come across anything exceptional. What went wrong?
On the way back home, I realized that nothing went wrong: on the surface, the Jolla phone was just a phone. That’s what I saw then, and that’s what your family will initially see in the Librem 5. But the amazing thing about it takes longer to discover: its personality as a Linux phone.
Think of it as of dating: what you can see on a first date is how attractive someone is. But it takes longer than that to learn what really matters about them, before you commit to a relationship. And oh dear, look at the relationships people have with mainstream phones and apps! If apps were people, it wouldn’t fly at all. Here’s how I would translate some common behaviors:
Read more, including a fun series of analogies comparing phone apps to dating someone here:
I believe there are quite a few here like me who are with “John Galt” attitude who are not really interested in impressing others with what they have. At least for me, who cares what others think about your phone, you know what you have is way better than their’s.
If mainstream phones and apps were people that we were dating, we would be taking out a restraining order.
It isn’t a big issue for me whether anyone else is impressed but I guess it will help sales if they are.
For me that question will come back to the “killer app”. It might not be an app as such, just something that can be (and is being) done on my phone that can’t be or isn’t practical to be done on a mainstream phone. It may take a while for that to emerge. Or it might already be there … in the form of the HKSs.
Another nice text humanizing the challenges of having such a screwed up ecology and culture of communication/consumption devices. I would have probably lean towards toxic or abusive relationship territory more but this opens up some of the issues too. The fishing gear though - how many dated stereotypes does that touch?
Let’s see what you’ll come up with for valentine’s.
If you’re not a hardcore Linux user, I can totally see how one might not understand what computing freedom even is, let alone why we want it on our phones. It’s hard to comprehend how much you can do on GNU/Linux that you cannot on other OSes when you haven’t even poked your head out of the cave yet.
I think it’s a bit premature to instruct us how to market your product to our family, friends and acquaintances. How about you finish making it viable as a daily driver first, then we’ll talk?
That’s the entire point of half the article: if you want to tell your family about your new daily driver, don’t waste your effort, they won’t recognize anything to be excited about without the context.
The second half explains how to approach it if you still want to.
