I Am Asking You to Count the Costs With Me
This brave new world was a mistake.
WHO KILLED THE WORLD?
— The Splendid Angharad
I have never owned a smartphone. I will never own a smartphone. Those statements should not be exceptional. Sadly, in the modern developed world, a 29-year old white American guy raised middle-class who has never owned a smartphone is considered an anomaly. I write this now perhaps merely as a record that you can be in your twenties and still have a profound ire against the technology of your time; to in fact have had that ire, for various reasons, a long, long time before now. It’s not a generational thing, man. It’s a human thing.
The way that people react when they learn I have never owned a smartphone has changed over the years. It used to be, “Why? That’s weird.” Or, “Is that your burner phone? Are you a drug dealer?” Or, totally missing the point, “I have an old smartphone I could give you.” That’s how it was for years. But more and more these days, with the growing understanding that people’s mental health is severely fucked up by these things, people are saying to me, “Wow! That’s so cool. I wish I could do that.” To which I always say, “You can.” And the response I inevitably get is something like, “Oh, but I need it for work.” “But it’s so convenient.” “It’s nice being able to check email.” “I couldn’t live without Google maps.” “But having the camera is really nice.” And then I understand that we’re not living on the same planet anymore.
At first, I didn’t get a smartphone because, simply, my Motorola flip phone worked perfectly fine. I could call. I could text. I could take crappy pictures. As a teenager, what more do you need? That’s how it was for a few years. But then something started to happen. More and more people were getting smartphones. More and more people were using them for more and more things. Chiefly, in terms of my experience with the things, all I saw was more and more people looking at their phones all the time. And that’s when my not having one become much more intentional. Admittedly, at the beginning, part of it was just wanting to be different. I did become more of an oddity, and therefore a source of attention, comment, and bemusement. But as I saw what these things were doing to people, to the the whole world around me, it really became much more dark. And sad. And I resolved that I would never participate in this madness.
As a kid, I would always roll my eyes at those people who made a statement about not having a T.V. in their house. Fricken hippies, man. I remember once as a child when some guy, a family friend trying to be funny I guess, said to me, “I’m so glad we don’t have a T.V. in our house. I call it the brain sucker!” He then proceeded to put one gesticulating hand over his head and make a loud sucking sound. This got no laugh from me. I was just annoyed and embarrassed for him. If that’s what not having a T.V. does to you, then I’ll keep the one in my bedroom, thanks.
But these smartphones are different, I swear it.
While it is true that there is a long, often hilarious history of people sanctimoniously decrying the degradation of morals in “kids these days” and explicitly tying that degradation to the advent of certain technologies and cultural trends — the satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons, violent video games, drive-in movies, disco music, smartphones, the printing press, and so on — we ought not brush aside the fact that people’s relationship to reality, most obviously in “modern” societies, has been radically altered from what it was just 20 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. People who accuse others of being Luddites are often missing the point of the critique of modern technology in our post-modern world. Luddites themselves made it clear that they weren’t against technology, but against “all machinery hurtful to commonality.” They were against the ends, not the means. A mechanical loom didn’t make better textiles faster. It put people out of work. The Luddites counted, and bore, all of those costs that never get counted. It’s not that the youth are going to hell in a hand basket. It’s that we, all of us, are being forced into an increasingly inhuman world, told it is progress, and nobody is counting the costs.
I am asking you to count those costs with me. Please.
Some costs are more obvious than others. There has been much talk about what Shoshana Zuboff coined as “surveillance capitalism,” the observation that with the neoliberal melding of public interests into private control, the corporate state uses their powerful tools of surveillance to describe, define, and determine the desires and tastes of every single human being within their realm of influence. That’s pretty scary and shitty. But it is perhaps merely a logical acceleration of trends that were ongoing for a long time with the advent of radio and television. As the late great novelist Russell Banks put it in an interview 30 years ago:
Something dark happened in the last forty years in small increments so that we’re barely aware that it was happening. … In some awful way we abdicated basic responsibilities toward our children. … It’s very related to having, in the 1950s, welcomed into the American home the most powerful selling tool known to man. We brought that magical blue eye in and sat it down in the middle of the living room. The altar of the gods. Historically, we’ve always been able to slam the door in a salesmen’s foot. And the home had a kind of sanctity to it with regard to the so-called free economy: the consumer driven, hucksterism of our economy, which is amoral and turns everybody into customers and doesn’t deal with them as human beings. So we’ve always had the home to exclude that, to use the home to protect the weakest members of our society who are least able to resist the blandishments of the huckster — until we invited the television in. … It’s a significant fact and it’s got an awful lot to do with the social psychosis we’re talking about here.
With the quite willing, even enthusiastic, acquiescence to a ubiquitous pocket computer on your person at all times, any notion of sanctity has been obliterated. It’s not just in the home. It’s everywhere. There is no private life, there is only connected. Every waking hour, every conceivable space, every inhabitance has been wrested from our control. As comedian Billy Connolly lamented, “You’re always get-able now.”
There is also of course the many ways in which smartphone apps have gutted once well-paying sectors of the economy and driven millions of people into undignified gig work, or what Vijay Prashad simply, and correctly, calls “shit jobs.” This is the new servant class. In his book, Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant likens this new economy to Mary Shelley’s classic creature: “Frankenstein’s monster — today a stitched-together mass of precarious gig workers, service-sector employees on the brink of automation, overworked manufacturing laborers, and a citizenry increasingly angered by the apparent unimpeachability and unperturbability of the big tech companies — is showing new signs of rage, and who can blame the monster?”
I distinctly remember the first time someone told me that they use a service that lets you order groceries and then someone delivers those groceries to your house and I wanted to slap them in the face. Instead I just laughed at them. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Just go get your own goddamn groceries.” “But it saves so much time,” they said. This was just one of the many little advances in our sad world that made me feel more alienated. More recently, I was walking around the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis when some thing rolled up to me. It was a little white robot on four wheels with a big safety flag coming out of it. I found that there was a whole fleet of these monstrosities rolling around, apparently with the purpose of delivering prepared food to fat ass college kids who can’t be bothered to leave their goddamn dorm rooms. The next robot that came up on me I picked it up and turned it on its side. It let out a loud siren scream for help as I walked away. I am not meant for these modern times.
But this kind of economic disruption, again, is nothing new. As James Stephanie Sterling has pointed out, the recently purported A.I. revolution is nothing more than a new version of the same old capitalist grift of making more and more workers superfluous. Going back to the fundamentals, Marx and Engels, with their evergreen prescience, described capitalism’s relentless drive to upturn and destroy, no matter the costs:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. …
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
All that is holy is profaned. Amen.
More odiously than the gig economy apps, for myself at least, is the presumption by many employers that everyone just has a smartphone. I’ve only worked one job that said I was required to have one and they were able to loan me a company phone, which never, ever followed me home and stayed locked in my workplace desk drawer outside working hours. But, working as part of various crews in the live theatre industry, I’m often the odd-man-out when it comes to the various chat software that crew heads like to use to communicate calls and task lists and (annoyingly) memes. Just tell me what time we’re in tomorrow and give me a to-do list on a piece of paper. And don’t expect me to have read any messages outside of working hours, thank you very much.
But it’s more than just your job. Increasingly, I am finding that the assumption of smartphone ubiquity is making it more and more difficult to live in this world. It’s seemingly little things, but added up they amount to a degradation of dignity. Restaurants don’t have menus, they have QR codes. I told one place I needed a menu and they had to let me borrow their tablet. I fucked around and changed the background on it to be a picture of my annoyed face. I tried to buy concert tickets to see The National perform in Minneapolis and you had to have a smartphone to get a ticket. The venue would not email you a copy to print out or allow for will-call or tickets at the door. Great, guess I’m not seeing that show. I saw a flyer in a café that read: “Are you single? Come attend this fun speed dating event next weekend! Scan QR code for details.” Cool, guess I’ll just die alone. Another flyer: “Join our occupational training event! Get the skills you need to be [some good paying vocation]. Scan QR code to register.” Cool, guess I’ll just be unskilled and poor. When I worked at a food bank, I was the one person reminding people when we were making flyers — flyers for people who are food insecure — that there needed to be some way besides a QR code for people to access information. But I guess even the homeless people have smartphones these days for Christ’s sake.
But this kind of thing is not relegated to QR codes on random flyers on the street or unessential activities like live concerts. Public services and institutions are beginning to assume smartphone ubiquity. It’s not just that social services and libraries and the DMV and whatnot are all offering digital and smartphone-based solutions, it’s that they are also wiping away the analog solutions. Never in my life have I seen such a profound, all encompassing assumption that everybody has a certain piece of technology. Forget that the technology itself is unhealthy, it’s the natural assumption of ownership of it that irks me to no end. I stopped in a public library in downtown Atlanta to ask for directions recently. First off, it was dystopic because you had to go through full-on airport security to get through the entrance. They wouldn’t let me in because I have a pocket knife and I couldn’t store it anywhere. And when I asked the guard for directions he just said, “Do you have a phone?” No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking for directions. He and the other guard then demonstrated that they had no idea how to give directions and weren’t even sure how to get where I was going to (it was another place in downtown.) Some people (me) don't have smartphones, have never had one, and never will. All organizations, both public and private, that assume the total ubiquity of personal technology are limiting access to and engagement with their services, some of which are essential for living.
Besides these personal indignities is the fact that smartphones specifically, and the internet in general, has been a disaster in many ways for our social movements. This has been tragically demonstrated with what journalist Vincent Bevins calls the “mass protest decade,” the decade of 2010 to 2020 which saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, uprisings throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and of all of those mass mobilizations ending in utter disappointment and deadly regression. Bevins is clear that the online-organized uprising is simply an ineffective and even dangerous tool if your goal is to effectuate lasting change in your favor. Moreover, it is simply a very different way of doing things compared to what has proven successful in the past. Bevins writes:
The inventions of writing, and then printing, and then the photograph — and finally the development of the ability to reproduce sound and moving images — were all technological leaps that profoundly transformed human society. … It is strange to remember this now, but for the vast majority of human history, we could only see what was directly in front of our faces, and the only language we could experience had to be produced by living vocal cords within a few meters of our ears. This is, strictly speaking, how our bodies developed to experience life. It made little sense to “demonstrate” to the entire country with a protest march if only a tiny percentage of the population was going to see it, and rulers could simply choose to ignore it.
Of course, people always had ways to react against ruling elites. These interventions were sometimes violent or imposed direct costs on the target — people got killed, property got destroyed, grain was seized by the population, and so on. …
In sixteenth-century France, [sociologist Charles] Tilly shows…that people would have never thought of demonstrating or organizing a rally or a strike in the way we do today. They did, however, know how to run a tax collector out of town, force down the price of bread…”
In other words, they didn’t do symbolism, they didn’t demand, they didn’t take to the void of social media to express their plight, they just fixed the broken thing with a kind of directness and immediacy that is unheard of today. If bread was unaffordable, they stole grain. If injustice was done, a posse was formed to punish the criminal. If machines were taking their jobs and forcing them into a life without dignity, they destroyed the machines and killed the machine owners. Pretty simple. They achieved, at least in the short term, with the most direct of direct action. They didn’t demonstrate. They just did. Oftentimes, it was through violence. Running a tax collector out of town is a polite way to describe tarring and feathering — itself a euphemism for scalding someone’s skin and rubbing difficult to remove material into their burning wounds. Righteous anger was not safely siphoned away through the tempting glow of a smartphone screen. It was acted out, in real life, with real consequences. The internet has perverted the very language, strategies, and repertoire by which we change our world.
I want to smash these machines. This is what the very real Luddites did. Can you blame me? I’m not saying this would fix anything. Any inchoate, or even organized, destruction of modern machines would likely end up today the way it did for the Luddites back then. With marginalization and death. Brian Merchant writes of the Luddite movement:
Scores of Luddites were killed by machine owners and the state. Many more were cast into poverty. Still more watched as their identities, occupations, status, and dignity eroded over the next generations. The Industrial Revolution shepherded millions into the dreaded factories — a working world built to suit the rhythm of machines, not people. And elites stamped the very definition of a Luddite into the cultural firmament as an epithet for a delusional malcontent who is anti-technology and anti-progress.
Moreover, as Freddie de Boer points out in his (totally not) manifesto for a supposed future anti-tech movement: “even if terrorists knock out the WiFi for 23.5 hours a day, your teenager will spend those thirty minutes staring into their smartphone, learning to hate themselves.”
I’m not saying we can change things. I’m saying that things used to be better. The internet was a mistake. It didn’t democratize anything. It created another, more pervasive nexus of mass social control. Today, we are seeing memeified war crimes. Nobody knows what’s true anymore. Our collective language is impoverished, perverted, and homogenized by constant connectivity. People’s versions of socializing involve sitting around a table playing an online game on their phones. Our collective mental health is in the toilet. People are painfully socially awkward. Anyone who’s just two years younger than me seems autistic. The forces contributing to these things are constantly whirling inside your pocket. I am telling you, this was all a mistake. Cast it into the fire. Destroy it.
Everything you just read is tangential from what I really want to say.
Those are all pretty big-picture problems I’ve laid out above. These always-online personal technologies have indeed been inimical to our social movements, to our occupations, to our human dignities. But what I’m really trying to express here, and which seems most difficult to convey to those who have been immersed in the smartphone revolution, is that you are all missing something that is at once much more finite and infinitely more vast than those bigger problems. What I am arguing is that you are missing the majority of everything. And that majority is, most simply, boredom.
I am bored most of the time. I consider it a sacred human duty to be bored. Boredom, in fact, contains most things. If you just push that sublime boredom aside with the easiest of motions in grabbing your phone, you are, not to be too woo-woo about it, shutting off every sense you have to the very essence of existence. When I say bored, I don’t mean idle. I don’t mean thoughtless. I don’t mean numb (though boredom certainly can be all of those things). What I mean is that boredom can be a state of profound emotion, unbearable emotion. Feeling because you have to feel because there is no other thing to feel. A state of watching. Watching because you have to watch because there is no other thing to watch. Of listening. Listening because you have to listen because there is no other thing to listen to.
I have spent years working jobs climbing trees and roofs installing Christmas lights in them all day, every day by myself and I am so goddamn bored all of those days. The lights are boring, the trees are boring, the birds are boring, the spiders are boring, the deer are boring, the rocks are boring, the dirt is boring. It’s all so boring. I don’t mean that I don’t like the trees and the birds and the bugs and the rocks, it beats being in a cubicle (the Christmas lights can fuck off, though). What I mean is that there is no other option besides being there with them. And this is the way it must be. There is no other way to go through life. That boredom holds everything. It is where thought emerges. It is where all noticing happens. It is where all plans are conceived. It is where play is acted out. It is where you must be, torturously, with only your brain. It is where you must confront your choices. It is where you must look the one-armed homeless person in the eyes and tell them, “No, sorry, I don’t have anything.” It is where you must see the tired mother pulling her son by the hood of his sweatshirt because he just won’t listen and he begins to cry. It is where you must stand enveloped by the din of the city streets, alone, and think that none of this was worth it. It is where you must decide if you are going to help up the smelly old drunk who just fell and smacked his head — hard — on the concrete at 3am. It is where you must hear the one side of that very loud person’s phone call in the otherwise quiet café. It is where you must look at a tree and have no thought whatever besides, That is a tree. It is where you must only see and hear what resides in that same physical space with you. To not look, to not listen, to not be there, to say no to that “must,” you might as well hack off your limbs, pluck out your eyes, and stuff up your ears. It is a dereliction of the duty each and every one of us has to witness this stupid, broken world that is ours.
You may have forgotten, but the world used to be full of people who were all bored all the time and who were all immediately accessible to and noticing of other bored people that they could reach out to and touch. Do you remember that? Do you remember what it was like? It gets harder every day. I am sick and tired of every single other human being in this modern world not being bored with me. I am ill with being bored in this world and, more and more, the only things I have to notice anymore are people staring at their fucking phones. I still have to fight the urge to scream at every person I see doing this. Do you understand that this feels like being in a world of zombies? Do you understand how crazy it makes you feel to see that no one else is noticing?
“But it’s so convenient. How would I know how to get somewhere without GPS?”
How can I explain to you that you’ve traded away the universe for baubles? How can I tell you that I’m still thinking, every day, about notions and sights and sounds and people and feelings — irreplaceable, forever unrepeatable, achingly fleeting, the biggest and the smallest of things — that I experienced, must have experienced, from fifteen years, twenty years, seven years, six months ago, from all the times I was bored and enraptured (being one and the same thing), while you’re trying to show me a worthless meme on your phone and telling me a joke using some new in-fashion slang phrase you saw on the internet yesterday that has zero meaning to me whatsoever? I promise you, you’ve lost the goddamned plot. It is all just noise. Sound. Fury. Yadda-yadda-yadda. Signifying nothing, and it’s getting blacker. T.S. Eliot saw this fragmentation of the world coming in The Waste Land. But much more succinctly, Percy Shelley provided a vision for it:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I am looking upon your works. There is much to despair.
Above all, know this: You can be shut out from everyone and everything, but you must, inevitably, deal with what is human, with every current in this broken world, with every being that is left searching. There are some of us who will not, cannot, and never could accept further man-made degradation of the world, or at least of the very last thing we can still control, our own bodies. If I am rigidly constrained to a backwards and inefficient way of being simply because I desire vibrant connection with those who sense like I do, then let me be the last thing in the universe which is left searching. Left sensing. Left giving determined and hopeful looks. Simple stupid things.
I am asking you to gaze upon this colossal wreck that has been bequeathed to us. If I could, I would also ask you to say no to all this, and then to do something to change it — for the better. But at this point, maybe that’s asking for too much. I just want someone to look up, again. To look at this wasteland with me, like the way it used to be.
Finally, the following is a poem I wrote about this Colossal Wreck back in 2016. In the intervening seven years, everything has gotten worse. Everything.
Razor
I’m the end of a finger,
yielder of questions,
I’m a goddamned center of conversation
and so all these end in laughter and head shakes,
amusement
confusion
“you don’t want a computer in your pocket?”
“that thing is a relic.”
“I haven’t seen one of those in a while.”
but you don’t realize that
every one of you who laughs is being
ridiculed
torn apart
roasted
not just by me,
the insects crawling through the grass
are pointing their digits with me
the birds in the air,
every seagull and crow,
hawk, owl, eagle,
and even the penguins and emus
are cracking up with me
the bum on the street corner,
the world war two veteran sitting in his wheelchair
in the living room,
they’re slapping their knees with me
for we all know that you’ve put your chips down
on the wrong hand,
the wrong table,
in the wrong house
miles away from the
winning city
looking at a door,
analyzing a chair,
staring at a roll of toilet paper,
noticing the stray hair
about to fall from that person’s head
is sublime
next to the unflattering beams of light
shooting from your hands
illuminating your face
arresting you from
seeing the pain
hearing the laughter
feeling the things soon gone
bearing witness to the movements that turn worlds
and bear all manners of children
I laugh along with these creatures
not out of discomfort
or solidarity,
but because
a fat body
grown thin and tired
has passed through each one of us
and we know that if we do not bite into its flesh now
and inhale through its punctured lung
then there will soon be
nothing
left
but
marrow-less
bones to
gnaw on
into
bored
eternity