Steve Hilton is more connected than ever before

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For years, populist pundit Steve Hilton raved about the zen-like pleasure of living without a cell phone.

Hilton, the former Fox News host, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and policy adviser to British ex-Prime Minister David Cameron, ditched his mobile device a dozen years ago and, seemingly, never looked back. Hilton was more relaxed, carefree and happier.

“When people discover this fact about my life, they could not be more surprised than if I had let slip that I was actually born with a chicken’s brain,” Hilton wrote in the Guardian in 2016. “‘But how do you live?’ they cry.”

Turns out, he doesn’t — at least not anymore.

POLITICO made the surprising discovery that Hilton is again with a cell phone after a happy hour this week in Sacramento, where the Republican sipped prosecco while touching on his increasing involvement in California politics. On Tuesday, Hilton’s Golden Together, a group aiming to restore the California Dream of fast success that began during the Gold Rush, released its second policy paper, this one on ending the housing shortage and ushering in an era of “housing abundance.” While leaving for a dinner date, Hilton pulled out the phone, perhaps inadvertently, then held it up after realizing he’d just made news.

“Well, there’s a story there,” Hilton acknowledged, before mugging for a photo with his Kyocera flip-phone, which was stamped with a Verizon logo.

Hilton’s cell phone-free lifestyle had become luddite lore. It started after he moved to Atherton, a community of billionaires in Silicon Valley, in 2012. (A New York Times Style section cover photo from 2017 showed him recreatingwith his pet chickens, his favorite of which was a brown hen named Hermione). When he had to yak with humans, Hilton communicated via landline and email, and a few times a month resorted to asking friends to hail him an Uber or Lyft.

Hilton, bald and charmingly puckish, found the idea that everyone should be connected and contactable all the time not just bizarre, but menacing. In a 2018 segment on Fox Business Network, about Google tracking smartphone users, he gloated about how wise his decision was.

So, what changed? How did a bloke so strident in his abstinence start toting a phone again?

First, Hilton has only partially succumbed to the modern era. He rarely shares his number. He has between 10 and 15 contacts stored in the flip-phone, he said, an amount that’s small by comparison to most people, but exponentially larger than… zero. Hilton also owns an iPhone with no SIM card that he calls his “camera,” which he uses on occasion to take pictures and upload them to Google.

He explained that the flip phone came into his possession years ago when he started to travel to the East Coast to appear on Fox. He says he never gave out the number and only used it to wish his children goodnight without racking up enormous long-distance charges with hotels. The rest of the time, it sat in a drawer at home and the Hiltons joked that it wasn’t a phone so much as a “Family Connection Device.”

Then, two years ago, his closest friend had a tragedy so he shared his number so they could communicate by text — the way the friend preferred to stay connected.

“But for years, literally no-one else had it,” Hilton stressed about his mobile number.

The big change came just this year. Over the last couple months, he’s been on the road in California two or three days most weeks, enough to feed the rumor mill with grist that he has his eye on higher-office in 2026, perhaps California governor. Hilton said he does get asked about running, but offered little else. As for the phone, he’s found it impossible to make his schedule work without a faster and more efficient way of staying in touch with people given road traffic and last-minute meetings.

Hilton reports that he isn’t any less happy, but conceded it’s annoying when the cell goes off at home. If you’re still wondering about the prosecco, Hilton, known for his Cinco de Mayo parties, wanted a margarita, but enjoys them “too much,” and worried he couldn’t stop imbibing.

On a more serious note, he’s genuinely outraged that more businesses and services require smartphones for things like accessing events via QR code only. He agrees with Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff’s recent warning about the “dangerous implications” of AT&T dropping landline services. He maintains his hatred for phones with email and apps that track—as well as distract—users. And he still believes in encouraging less smartphone use, not more.

Concluded Hilton: “I am determinedly insisting I will not get a smartphone!”

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