Vitalik Buterin Details a 100-Day Airplane Mode Phone Experiment

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined changes to his social media and phone use on Oct. 31, arguing that simpler tools and local AI can give people more control over their digital lives.

Buterin has posted mainly through Firefly this year. The app lets him continue using X while also reaching Bluesky, Farcaster and Lens. He began using it to support decentralized social networks without leaving conversations on X.

Firefly lacks X’s recommendation algorithm, which Buterin suspects helps explain why he prefers the experience. After several months of use, Buterin wrote, “I feel much better using it.” He suggested that people who find social media distracting could spend less time on it or try another interface.

Buterin also described a 100-day experiment in which he kept his phone in airplane mode and connected through Wi-Fi. He made one brief exception to receive a code needed to maintain his phone plan. The change gave him more time away from the internet, he said, although tasks requiring text-message verification became harder. He has since used cellular service occasionally.

Buterin also discussed offline knowledge apps that could retrieve information stored on a phone. He helped fund a development bounty for apps with that purpose. Buterin said most bounty entries that relied on on-device language models took one to 22 minutes to answer a question.

Buterin favored searching the stored material first, then using a smaller language model to turn the result into a plain-language answer. That approach would reserve AI for explaining retrieved information instead of making a model work through the entire question on its own.

The preference for smaller, separate tools also shapes Buterin’s approach to crypto web apps. He has used an AI-written command-line utility to update an IPFS hash associated with ENS and kohaku-cli to make payments through privacy protocols. He argues that AI could let people operate such tools with ordinary language instead of learning programming commands.