An American Phone
Why we must reclaim the most personal device in our lives. And build it in America.
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” - John M. Culkin
The smartphone is the most personal device ever created.
It knows where we are. It knows what we think, how we work, and who we love. It holds our memories, our secrets, our bank accounts - and increasingly, our identities.
Apple has done a phenomenal job. We owe them the modern mobile era. Google too. And the many developers who created extraordinary applications that changed how we live, work, and play. The early iPhone gave us magic in the palm of our hands. It reshaped the world.
And yet, somewhere along the way, that magic was lost.
These devices - the ones that were meant to connect, empower, and inform us—no longer feel like they belong to us. They’ve been hijacked by business models that monetize our attention, strip our autonomy, and track us in the name of scale and convenience. What once felt like liberation now feels like quiet control. What once extended our minds now extracts our behaviors.
Today’s smartphone is not designed for the user. One could argue it’s designed against the user. And it’s not just software - it’s hardware too. These devices are physically built through supply chains that are brittle, centralized, and often run through authoritarian regimes. We’ve outsourced the production of our most intimate technologies to jurisdictions that do not share our values - and in many cases, actively undermine them.
We touch our phones thousands of times a day. Each tap is a reminder of how much sovereignty we’ve ceded - to Big Tech, to economic dependencies, to systems optimized for profit, not people.
And so I’ve come to believe that time to build the next great phone. Not as a nationalist stunt nor as a vanity moonshot, but as an existential imperative.
We need a phone that is designed, engineered, and manufactured in the United States. A phone that is proudly American - one that stands for freedom, privacy, openness, and resilience. A phone that reflects what this country can still do when it decides to dream again.
An American made phone is about the basic belief that America can, and must, build the tools that define the future. Not just use them. Not just import them. But build them, from first principles, right here.
We’re at a moment of profound technological inflection.
Foundational technologies don’t last forever. They calcify or reinvent. The smartphone has calcified. Its interface hasn’t changed meaningfully in over a decade. The app model is exhausted. Notifications are spam. Features pretend to be innovation - but really, they’re just distractions with a new coat of paint. The device itself has become a symbol of drift.
At the same time, AI is exploding. The age of apps is ending. The age of agents has begun.
We are entering a new paradigm - one in which computing becomes intelligent, contextual, and personal again. This new world demands on-device intelligence, persistent memory, real-time inference, and privacy at the core. It requires devices that are designed for understanding, not for scrolling.
And for this to work - it must be sovereign.
We cannot run this new world on infrastructure controlled by adversarial regimes. Today, 90% of smartphones are manufactured in Asia. The vast majority in China. One act of geopolitical coercion, one supply chain disruption, one decision behind closed doors - and we lose everything.
We cannot build the future on borrowed foundations.
An American Phone must be a fresh start. It must be rebuilt from first principles.
It should be agent-native. Not a grid of apps. Not a tap-and-scroll addiction machine. But an intent-centric experience. You speak. It listens. It understands and responds. You whisper, and it acts. You think - and it remembers. It’s not Siri 3.0. It’s something new. Something real. A true companion. An ambient intelligence that runs on our device, not in someone else’s cloud.
It should be sovereign by design. No dark patterns. No ad IDs. No telemetry traps.
Our data is ours. Our identity is ours. Our agent is ours.
This phone should be a vault. A secure surface for our memories, our communications, our credentials. A system we can trust - not one that sells us out.
It should be built to last. Designed like it matters. Because it does.
Minimal. Iconic. Crafted. Durable. Made to age well, not expire. Something that feels right in the hand and right in the soul. A device that signals dignity, not dopamine.
And most importantly - it should be built in America.
Because we must own again. We must believe again. We must rally our designers, our factories, our engineers, and our builders to do something hard, beautiful, and meaningful - together.
Designed in California. Built in Ohio. Assembled with purpose.
An American Phone that is movement, not just a product.
What would this look like?
First, we build the stack. A new OS. Not a fork. A full reinvention. Privacy-native. Agent-native. Built for multimodal reasoning. A foundation for personal agents that live with us, not above us.
We design a new silicon - custom chips that prioritize edge inference and security. We make the device beautiful. Durable. Intentional. Rooted in aesthetic and ethical integrity.
Then, we launch a Founder’s Edition. Limited release. High trust. Like the Tesla Roadster - a proof of vision. A statement of belief. We chase possibility, not yet scale.
And then we grow. We expand to new SKUs. We open the SDK. We seed the ecosystem. Secure messaging. Identity. Payments. Agents. Sovereign services.
We build a platform. A new digital commons for a free people. Not just a phone.
The phone is no longer just a device. It’s infrastructure. It mediates education, healthcare, finance, creativity, community, and selfhood.
If we don’t own the phone - we don’t own the future.
Right now, our phone answers to ad-tech, dark patterns, upstream dependencies, and centralized app stores. It was not made to serve us. It was made to serve business models that do not share our best interests.
What if we made a phone that worked for us?
What if we made a phone that embodied our Constitution, not just our capital?
What if we believed - truly believed - that the world’s most powerful tool could be built by and for a free society?
This isn’t about beating Apple. Or escaping Android. It’s about reclaiming the personal in personal computing. The trusted in trusted systems. The American in American innovation.
An American Phone is a declaration, not nostalgia or nationalism.
It says:
We still dare.
We still believe.
We can still build.
A phone we all deserve.
Thanks for reading,
Yon
👋 Hello! My mission with Beyond with Yon is to ignite awareness, inspire dialogue, and drive innovation to tackle humanity's greatest existential challenges. Join me on the journey to unf**ck the future and transform our world.