I'm vibe-coding my own prototype of what I imagine to be going on behind the scenes at DFOS, essentially a worker co-operative video game publisher that finances digital infrastructure needs for the creative scene, incorporating Bread Cooperatives' solidarity primitives to ensure rapid, even splits. The bottom of the document details instructions for those interested in participating or observing the brainstorming process.

In the last year, I have been delivered from the burden of carrying a smartphone outside the house. Despite occasionally getting caught out without directions to the next bus stop, or having my card decline and having to run home because I don't have access to mobile banking, I don't regret it. Perhaps I don't regret it because I also logged a cumulative watch time on Twitch (1,556 hours) that would call into question the distinction between me and "chat." Aside from being a huge recession indicator in my own personal touch-grass economy, this incongruency also spawned Dumbphone Deliverance. When I stand up from my desktop and walk away, I become exponentially less reachable.

The central tension here is that being online is awesome lol. But seriously, when I decide to go out and touch grass, that's it. Simon Reynolds discussed the internet and its ability to compress cultural development. The weight of the past is significant to Reynolds, but what's also significant is the weight of the present. The walled gardens of our digital infrastructure have contained the culture makers and unilaterally imposed, from the top down, a set of restrictions on exactly how these cultural producers can reproduce themselves and earn a respectable wage. Gaming the algorithm is a central consideration for anybody who wants to publish anything that they want to reach a significant audience.

There is a reactionary tendency to insist on an all-or-nothing solution to this bizarre post-humanist malaise: either you cast aside technology, or you spend your days lobbying Elon Musk on X: the Everything App (2025 X Corp) for fewer safeguards on Grok's Sexy mode.

Dumbphone Deliverance is a project that aims to reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable tension between our IRL and URL selves in 2025. Frankly, being online right now is a miserable experience (though it can be quite pleasant in some places, as we'll soon discuss). Where the URL was once a great place to escape some of the most biting realities of real life, enshittification has caused these places to become increasingly inhospitable. The use of the royal 'we' in this article is not a deliberate attempt to obscure the plurality of the authorial perspective. What follows was authored hastily by me, Simon Deutsch (@simonsiminsimo), on X: the Everything App (2025 X Corp). I'm a Zoomer from a middle-class background. I had a Facebook account in 4th grade. Unlike some of my peers in my age cohort, the incurable brain rot from MLG memes did not evolve long enough to land me in a comms role on Ron DeSantis' campaign. I represent an archetype that comes from asking daring questions: like, is it possible for a sensitive young white-boy to get a little esoteric with it IN OPPOSITION to fascism?

To be clear, Dumbphone Deliverance is an Independent Game Studio with the primary purpose of developing thoughtful interactive media experiences. It's hard to earn a living as a creative, and the rapid development of Agential AI has only heightened those pressures. Our belief is that robust, independent technological infrastructure and a healthy community are the most valuable resources we can leverage. We use political means to accomplish these goals, but they are the good ones. We are a centrist organization, honestly, ostensibly apolitical. Out of the seeming absurdity of it all, we adopt the trademark Gen Z sincere-irony to embrace deliverance within the crease of the most grayscale Nokia flip-phone we can find. Our first project will be a rogue-lite "pedal board-builder" rhythm game in the style of Guitar Hero and Balatro. It is still in its early stages (you can express interest in playtesting on our Discord server linked below).

I want these sentiments to define the North Star of the studio: a wider vision and the associated provocations that require exploration. If you're reading this article, then you're likely not the specific people we are targeting for this game in the first place, so I don't feel the need to promote it too heavily (it's really fun and the music is badass, though, if you were wondering). If you're reading this article, you likely clicked on it directly from one of the dark forests where I feel comfortable in this networked hellscape. In which case, I'd like to invite you to collaborate. The vision expressed herewithin is the result of years of curiosity and experimentation with emergent forms of sustaining creative communities. I've worked in and around the realms of crypto and politics, pop music, and library science. It's likely that everyone here came from one of these realms or another, and that some of this rambling has seemed coherent while the rest indecipherable.

This is a flare into the night of the so-called "dark forest" of the Internet. Dumbphone Deliverance is not a private project; access to the Discord server is not gated. Reasonably, anybody could stumble on this article and become a participant. What distinguishes this space from the major walled gardens is that our social and material relations are defined by explicitly different goals and political processes - ones that prize democratic participation and fostering of solidarity economies. The ideas I want to explore are too vast to be comprehensively summarized in a single article like this. Many things I touch on here may never be mentioned again within the Dumbphone Deliverance Discord community, but I'd be happy to carry on those conversations in the contexts where they're most suited for productive discussion. In the writing that follows, I will reference some key works and communities as I describe my vision for what Dumbphone Deliverance can become. Most often, these conversations are better suited for these communities and contexts, and I urge you to explore them further and engage with them in good faith, as they merit. I hope this article can facilitate an interchange between people in these communities, who may be able to see some of their ideas and concepts embodied in the Dumbphone Deliverance model, and the intended beneficiaries and stewards of DPD, who can provide invaluable insights and networks of solidarity as we try to challenge an increasing encroachment on the sovereignty of the global netizen.

Over the last two years or so, Joshua Citarella has put on a master class in leveraging the constraints and affordances of an algorithmically driven media environment to shape a message and cultivate a specific kind of audience. What works about this approach is the way it reveals how the internet facilitates the organization of Netizens into different types of interactions with a thoughtfully designed corpus of texts. Citarella has most openly revealed this program through his syllabi, but Doomscroll is a YouTube success that will remain a valuable resource for people of all political sorts. The syllabus is released once a year, following lively discourse facilitated through Do Not Research (DNR). Doomscroll has become critical community infrastructure. Citarella is not the only person behind Doomscroll. Collaborators on the show are also heavily involved in DNR. Success for Doomscroll then has a second-level impact on the productive capabilities of DNR. I'm not writing to speculate. What is challenging about sustaining an independent creative endeavour like podcasting is the fickle nature of monetization. You run into the same issue as musicians do, where the price of a listen is just not enough to pay the bills.

The world of independent video game development is different. Access to the largest markets (Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, etc.) often comes with a price (30% in the case of Steam), but the creator of a video game is given more direct leverage or agency in the exact price at which their work is valued. Musicians and podcasters have no such choice. Game development also synergizes well with a heavy investment in technical infrastructure and could reasonably be considered to steward an infrastructural apparatus for a collective of artists who rely on the infrastructure.

If you were to look into the future with a crystal ball, these markets will be able to demand less and less of a cut for condoning off their audiences. Consider access to Steam a great place to sell the game to a wider, popular audience, but hopefully converting them to an alternative platform like Metalabel in the future, where they can keep up with and easily access future Dumbphone Deliverance-related releases, even if they are not video games.

Developing video games for commercial sale presents an opportunity that the left has traditionally failed to take as seriously as it should be. To bring a well-crafted game to market requires the skill and collaboration of highly specialized and talented professionals with such a diverse array of skillsets that just about any person who dreams of pursuing an independent creative career possesses some type of skill-set that could be of direct use in game publishing (photographers, musicians, writers, programmers, etc.) If we're honest, the less glamorous elements of an independent creative career are often some of the most direct impediments to popular reach (there is not one person who really wants to spend their afternoon doing influencer outreach).

Next Steps

Individually, I am committed to the democratic distribution of any productive outcomes that result from the development of our first project. Any open proceedings for this next phase will be taking place behind the 'Verified' role in the Dumbphone Deliverance Discord server (button below). There are two ways to get the role:

1. Have a Mod vouch for you (you know them prior to joining, or you're a positive contributor to the open community)

2. Mint this article and have the $TRUTH01 token in your wallet.

Price: at least 1 $BREAD (higher contributions will not result in greater stake or participation in DPD's productivity)

The portability of a screen should be inversely proportional to the degree to which that device enables you to embody your post-humanist inheritance. - 12/18/2025