The Freeeeedom!!! Phone

[drdredel]

Hi everyone!

The Bulwark ran another piece of mine today on the subject of the Freedom Phone.
thebulwark.com/the-freedom-phone-is-a-cynical-gimmick/

I had made a bunch of Braveheart references in my original that got tossed by the editors. SAD.

Nice to see you all here! 

-YS

[LFC]

Jul 20, 2021 18:55:44 GMT drdredel said:

I had made a bunch of Braveheart references in my original that got tossed by the editors. SAD.

Nice to see you back. And I don't mind the loss of the Braveheart references because, believe it or not, we never got around to seeing the movie.

[pnwguy]

Were your ears burning, Dredel? Welcome back.

talkradiosucks.proboards.com/post/4116

[goldenvalley]

Dr. D we saw! Congrats. And so nice to see you here. How ya been?

[RichTBikkies]

Jul 20, 2021 18:55:44 GMT drdredel said:

Hi everyone!

The Bulwark ran another piece of mine today on the subject of the Freedom Phone.
thebulwark.com/the-freedom-phone-is-a-cynical-gimmick/

I had made a bunch of Braveheart references in my original that got tossed by the editors. SAD.

Nice to see you all here! 

-YS

Welcome back, Doc. Nice to see you spinning for us again!

[drdredel]

Thanks all! Glad this thing is still in full swing!

[Traveler]

Yup, Pretty much all of the old crew still here. It's great. I miss J-CA though.

[AnBr]

Jul 22, 2021 14:33:19 GMT Traveler said:

Yup, Pretty much all of the old crew still here. It's great. I miss J-CA though.

Agreed. PW as well. At least Banty made it over, even if she has yet to post.

[goldenvalley]

Some background on the Freedom Phone creator...conceived by one of those millionaire boy wonders who made money playing with bitcoin.  He's the type that leads a number of young men to say "to hell with college, I'll just create something and become a millionaire."

It was a pitch tuned for a politically polarized audience. Erik Finman, a 22-year-old who called himself the world’s youngest Bitcoin millionaire, posted a video on Twitter for a new kind of smartphone that he said would liberate Americans from their “Big Tech overlords.”

His splashy video, posted in July, had stirring music, American flags and references to former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Donald J. Trump. Conservative pundits hawked Mr. Finman’s Freedom Phone, and his video amassed 1.8 million views. Mr. Finman soon had thousands of orders for the $500 device.

Then came the hard part: Building and delivering the phones. First, he received bad early reviews for a plan to simply put his software on a cheap Chinese phone. And then there was the unglamorous work of shipping phones, hiring customer-service agents, collecting sales taxes and dealing with regulators.

“I feel like practically I was prepared for anything,” he said in a recent interview. “But I guess it’s kind of like how you hope for world peace, in the sense you don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Why did he think he could do this?

In 2014, New York magazine profiled Mr. Finman as a 16-year-old from outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who had struck it rich when, a few years earlier, he spent a $1,000 gift from his grandmother on Bitcoin.

By 2017, his riches had topped $1 million and he was posting photos online of him posing with YouTube celebrities, getting on and off private jets, and lighting $100 bills on fire. But he tired of the cryptocurrency scene. “I actually hate talking about Bitcoin,” he said. “It’s like ‘Rolling Stones, play the hits.’”

He dove into politics. He said that by the age of 12, he considered himself a libertarian. (It was at a rally for Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate, when someone first told him about Bitcoin.) But his politics shifted when Mr. Trump arrived on the national political stage. “I drank the Kool-Aid in 2016,” he said.

Looks like he really drank the Kool-Aid.

Mr. Finman said he wasn’t surprised by the criticism, but he was taken aback by the sales. That left him juggling responsibilities he hadn’t planned for, including certification with the Federal Communications Commission and special rules for shipping devices with lithium batteries. He hired people from his hometown in Idaho to staff a makeshift customer-service center and he struggled to sort out sales-tax issues.
Within a month of the phone’s release, Mr. Finman had a solution: sell someone else’s phone and act as the branding frontman. Just as Mr. Finman’s political inspiration, Mr. Trump, has sold Trump steaks and Trump vodka without running a cattle ranch or a distillery, Mr. Finman unburdened himself of the difficult task of actually managing a company that makes phones.

“When the going gets tough, bring in the 50-something-year-olds,” Mr. Finman said in a recent interview. “They can be the ones with the sleepless nights.”

I guess we old folks live to serve the hot s*%t creators so they can focus on product and self promotion.

[indy]

Because of course the freedom phone was never anything but a grift...

Conservative influencers encouraged their fans to buy the phone, receiving a sizable cut of each sale for themselves. Even after The Daily Beast and other media outlets revealed that the Freedom Phone was just a cheap Chinese-made phone sold at a hefty markup, it was a hit, quickly selling roughly $4 million worth, according to court records.

“I’m holding a freaking phone that is not controlled by Apple or Google,” conservative personality Candace Owens said in an Instagram video. “We made the switch immediately.”

Two years later, though, Freedom Phone’s business is falling apart amid customer complaints. In a bitter, previously unreported legal battle that began in April 2022, the men behind Freedom Phone’s backers have accused one another of blowing their windfall profits—in one case, in a $10,000 shopping spree for video games. Finman has even sued to keep his face and name from ever being associated with Freedom Phone in the future.

www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-freedom-phone-backers-turn-on-each-other