I was reading a post on Substack, written by a 20-year-old girl, lamenting how her generation did not know life before the phone and social media. She was longing for the 1990s like it was some bygone era where people actually engaged with each other and what must have that been like? This post received endless "likes," comments and public discourse, and I thought to myself, this is like going to the death dealer to complain about death.
These phones are magic wands for the uninitiated, and young people who have apprenticed with no wizard wield them with lethal force. It is a truly awesome power, a power that is purchased as opposed to earned. Mastery that comes with no process, and without the heavy time debt needed to master is always sketchy. To barely know yourself, and yet have the ability to zing yourself out to millions is not good for your soul. Nor is it good to want to and have no one care; a thousand red hearts, a delusion, no red hearts, a devastation. I'm over sixty and I can't really handle it, what the hell is a fourteen-year-old supposed to do?
I am not surprised by the current situation, be it global warming, the phone-induced misery plague, the very real threat (or is it a boon) of Artificial Intelligence or any of the other agonies of technological advancement. Stories of man's power and arrogance leading to his downfall have been around forever, the only difference now is reality has caught up with (if not surpassed) our imaginations. We have lost our humility as a race. Our scientific knowledge and technological acumen having obliterated whatever spiritual humbleness we once had. When the oceans are finally fouled beyond life, and the temperature 125 on a cool day, we will realize that it is far better to worship the moon than to fly to it. That exceptionalism, American or otherwise, is an arms race, and since the dawn of the industrial age it's been all guns blazing. We don't need nuclear weapons to vanquish ourselves, our desire for comfort and convenience (I think they call it “progress”) is doing perfectly fine on its own.
I am not complaining or saying we need to get our shit together, because we probably won’t. This is the plot of the movie and there will be no rewrites. There is still joy, intimacy, beauty, love, heartache, sex, the farmers market, Billie Holiday on vinyl. Whatever it is that gets you off, there’s still plenty to go around. But when I’m in a restaurant and see a family of five, all of them on their phones, I know something about the way we interact has fundamentally changed; the vastness of the human gaze reduced to a palm sized screen, and the lives we live, altered to fit into it.
There is something sad and truly profound about this article because it highlights what we have lost and continue to lose in the general rush to embrace all the instruments of "progress", including our iPhones. No words of mine can express better than your own last paragraph how these instruments are not only changing the very nature of human interactions, but are ultimately eroding our humanity.
" when I’m in a restaurant and see a family of five, all of them on their phones, I know something about the way we interact has fundamentally changed; the vastness of the human gaze reduced to a palm sized screen, and the lives we live, altered to fit into it."
And yes, thank God for Billie Holiday on vinyl, not to mention that young dude Mr. Dylan who is coming my way very shortly and has banned all iPhones in advance.
What you say is sad, but so true, and not only that, it changes young people into humpback creatures who can never look you in the eye.