Some of the most fun I've had while traveling is exploring a city without a phone. Just write down your home address and destination address on a card, and if you need a mulligan - a taxi can take you to either.
I went through a roller coaster of emotions reading this thread and clicking through all the way to the github repo, where it slowly dawned on me that this was not just layers of satire.
Related: this reminds me of the "paper phone" concept from Google: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/paper-phone