These days, most of us are using our phones for everything but phone calls. And yet, for some reason, several new apps are trying to make actual, out-loud telephony cool again. Cord, made by former Google employees, lets you record voice messages and send them to individual friends or groups. And the aptly-named Talko allows you to integrate text and photos with real-time voice communication. The idea, according to Steven Levy’s in-depth recent article for Medium about Talko, is to “restore the human voice to primacy” because of all the nuance that is lost in text: “concern, pain, urgency, empathy, clarity, seriousness, confidence, anxiety, trust, strength, accountability, anger, fear, stress, confusion, doubt...”, according to Talko’s founder, Ray Ozzie, who maybe does not consume literature.

Let me be explicit, since some folks – including Ray Ozzie and probably at least some of the couple zillion people who shared that Medium piece – are apparently having a hard time interpreting the subtleties of the written word: This is dumb and I hate it. Do not send me a Cord, or Cord me, or whatever. Do not Talko me. And definitely, definitely do not call me.

I would actually pay extra money for a smartphone with no telephone capabilities, and extra EXTRA money if someone could guarantee that my phone wouldn’t run any newfangled apps that allow people to talk to me out loud. I have remained tolerant of the internet for 20 years, despite its many many flaws, primarily because it gives people multiple ways to communicate without me ever having to listen to them force air through their meat-tubes. If I wanted to listen to voices, I’d go talk to people, in person. I wouldn’t be sitting here on the internet with my headphones turned all the way up to drown out your unwelcome mouth-typing.

The beauty of the internet is that it relies on a purer, more civilized form of communication – one that is searchable, linkable, copy-and-pasteable, and can be consumed and responded to at your own pace. And, I’d add, one that has been expressing concern, pain, urgency, empathy, clarity, seriousness, confidence, anxiety, trust, strength, accountability, anger, fear, stress, confusion and doubt pretty handily since approximately Cuneiform.

To be fair, despite the obvious superiority of text, there is much to be said for face-to-face conversation. (It is, for instance, currently the only form of conversation that can lead directly to kissing!) But phone calls are not that.

Phone calls are face-to-face conversation minus body language, minus facial expressions, plus an imperfect connection that often spurs you to accidentally interrupt, mishear, or get distracted and lose the thread. Or they’re text conversations minus an easy way to record and quote, minus the ability to send direct links, plus time pressure to respond right away and avoid dead air, plus dithering and needless preliminaries and mush-mouthed conversational partners who make you say “what?” all the time. The phone is the worst of both worlds, a perfectly fertile breeding ground for rudeness, misinterpretation, frustration and generally no actual communication getting done.

Enabling video on an app like Skype brings some of the benefits of face-to-face communication back in, sort of – you can see people’s facial expressions, often for 30 seconds or more at a time because the screen freezes. Fully half of most video Skype chats I’ve been on have ended up being about Skype, and whether it’s working, and whether it’s working now. Even worse, Skype is what’s called “half-duplex”, which means it works like a CB radio; both parties use the same channel, so if you both try to talk at one time, one of you will get shut out. Cellphone conversations often feel that way to me – it’s hard to know when the other person is going to talk, so you wind up with either weird pauses or interruptions, and it’s hard to talk and listen at the same time in real life let alone over a phone. But with Skype, it’s actually built in.

I’m not saying there aren’t situations where a phone call will do. (I talk to my grandma on the phone every week, for instance, since I don’t have a choice. My voicemail message says, “Please just text me, unless you’re my grandma.”) There are even situations where it’s sort of charming, in a retro way. But there are situations where a horse and buggy ride is sort of charming, and that doesn’t mean I want it to be my main mode of transport. Anyone who said, “Hey, I know horse-drawn carts are slow and inconvenient and involve wading through a lot of crap, but people are nostalgic for a simpler time, so let’s call off the race to make a greener car and replace it with a buggy revolution” would be laughed out of Elon Musk’s office.

I did once try out a new telepresence technology, which involved going to an office that had been specially tricked-out with an enormous, nearly wall-size video screen. People in another room on the other side of the country appeared full-size on the wall as though they were sitting across the table from you, and the angle of the cameras allowed you to make eye contact just like you would if they were there (as opposed to the awkward “I’m looking at you but that means I’m not looking at the camera” Skype thing). Once we dealt with the uncanny frisson of having our interlocutors be slightly flat, we were able to converse as if we were all physically in a room together. In the brief shining moment after everyone in the developed world has one of these in their homes, but before we all get eaten by the lions that come out of them, I will take your call. Until then, please just text.