To your left, a man is holding a giant stick of San Miguel cans. To your right, people are doing drugs off the keys to their Vauxhall Astra. In front of you, a sea of pink cowboy hats bobbing along to the music. When people-watching at a British festival, very little has the capacity to shock you: all of this is uniform.
What you don’t expect to see as you turn to exit the crowd, in search of greener pastures? Someone standing there, music blaring, crowd jostling, completely immersed in a game of snake on their Nokia 2660 flip phone. More specifically, that’s what you would have seen if you’d have been in Maceo’s bar at 3am on day three of Glastonbury this year.
“For Glastonbury last year I just took my iPhone, which has horrible battery life even though it’s the latest version,” says 28-year-old music manager Sophie. “The signal was so bad, there was one day where I got all my messages through at 6pm and everyone thought I was mad at them because I hadn’t replied.” Adding that “it was so hard staying in contact with people.”
As such, in an effort to avoid that frustrating reality this year, Sophie purchased a hot pink Nokia flip phone, and signed up to a different network to her iPhone. “I’ve got O2 on my iPhone and Vodafone on my burner, so I’m covered on battery life and separate networks.” Alongside it being practically beneficial, it was also a massive icebreaker. “People would come up to me and be like, ‘is that a flip phone?’ And they’d ask if they can snap it shut. There’s something really satisfying about ending a phone call and snapping your phone closed.”
Despite having her iPhone with her, Sophie decided to use the flip phone for pictures at the festival to see how it turned out. She got a friend to help her export pictures from the Nokia and posted them to Instagram, a photo dump which she said “definitely overperformed” compared to her other posts. “A photographer pal said to me, ‘do you know how many people ask me to edit photos in this 90s, grainy, 0.3 megapixel style? It’s ridiculous,’” she laughs.
The phone was such a success at keeping Sophie connected during Glasto (and creating a vintage photographic effect) she became a complete convert. “Hand on heart, I have it in my bag right now,” she says, “I only have ten numbers in it but I know if everything goes tits up I can just call them with that phone.”
Sophie’s Y2K methods may have helped keep her in touch with the world outside, but there’s other motivations driving the rising interest in going analog - and it’s more to do with getting off the grid than on it. Earlier this month, it was revealed that Superbad star Michael Cera was not part of the Barbie cast’s Whatsapp group chat, not because of some on-set feud or division, but because he has a flip phone. “[It’s] a conscious choice,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “because I feel a bit of fear about it honestly, like I’d really lose control of my waking life.”
While many may not look to Cera as a trendsetter, in this particular case his finger is firmly on the zeitgeist pulse. According to Nokia, daily search demand for ‘Nokia flip phones’ was up by 243 per cent in May alone, and they believe it’s the result of a trend stemming from the US, where Gen Z-ers are looking to limit their screen time for their own mental wellbeing. Videos of young people switching to non-smartphones, which they’re dubbing “#dumbphones” have over 16.3 million views on TikTok and the popularity has surged so much that Nokia’s newest flip phone, a re-release of their 2007 Nokia 2660 (the same phone Sophie brought to Glastonbury), has sold out in both colourways. Nokia is having to order in new stock to keep up with demand.
US Vogue contributor and fashion journalist Liana Satenstein is one of the many young people who has attempted to get off the grid by purchasing a burner phone. Writing in The New York Times last month, Satenstein likened one outing when she left her smartphone at home, observing a bunch of roaming deer while she was outside, as a “religious awakening.” Satenstein then walked into a local store and asked for “the phone that old people use,” but retained her iPhone for work purposes only. This dual phone lifestyle, like the one Sophie has adopted since falling for her flip phone, has helped Satenstein stay up-to-date without being “extremely online”.
There’s also a secondary motivation behind buying a cute little Y2K burner phone, partially driven by aesthetics. Going analog has become trendy recently thanks to its callback to the year 2000s, leading to the creation of Instagram accounts like @wireditgirls, a visual archive dedicated to female celebrities who are spotted out and about wearing, you guessed it, wired headphones (now a novelty in place of the ubiquitous AirPods).
Similarly, digital cameras and camcorders have come back into fashion, thanks to the likes of influencers from Emma Chamberlain and Bella Hadid being pictured holding them (maybe even using them). Burner phones are merely the latest drop in the now-stalgia ocean, but their mental health and practical benefits might actually mean they’re here to stay.
Time will tell, of course, but in the meantime I’ll be trying to beat my high score on snake.
