You might enjoy N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The setting at first appears as fantasy, but there is a sci-fi-like depth to everything. The climate and periodic catastrophic Seasons, the tectonics, orogeny (humans’ magic-like abilities to manipulate heat and tectonics), and “high-tech” of the world’s past history.
I was interested in these “light” phones for a bit, but they seem a bit gimmicky and expensive. I understand not having a browser on purpose, but for communication, none of them (AFAIK) support Matrix or even XMPP (even some old feature phones had a Java Jabber client). Punkt MP02 supports Signal though.
Android phone with custom ROM (Lineage, /e/, Graphene, DivestOS…) is a possibility, and would be usable until hardware is incompatible with the phone/wifi networks.
If you have a patience of a saint, PinePhone and Librem5 are Linux phones, both in fairly early stages.
Hype still sells and we still idolize people though. Businessmen such as Steve Jobs or (early) Elon Musk curate an image of themselves as a “genius”, which leads to popularity of their products and influences trends and opinions in specific fields.
Really though, no single person did or invented anything alone. Every well-known and highly regarded scientist, inventor, or businessman built their work as a small increment on top of hundreds of predecessors. The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good pop-sci book that carries that point throughout.
Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn’t make it:
Series plug-in hybrids that can run on battery (Chevy Volt, Honda Clarity, Prius 2024) are IMO better than both. They effectively operate like electric vehicles (regenerative braking and all), and one can drive them for months without burning gas. Their batteries are about five times smaller (~30-50mi range vs full EV’s ~250mi range), and thus lighter, and the gasoline engine is usually a small, efficient one (~40ish mpg on gas)