no phone
Confronted with the possible loss of all those images—those memories, in the parlance of iPhoto—I swung back and forth between something like mourning and weightlessness. I knew the last time I transferred my photos to my computer was before New Year’s. What if this whole spring were lost? I’d taken to printing out a few dozen photos each year and pasting them into my notebooks. What if I had none for half the year? Part of me couldn’t get over the loss—of commemoration, of marking the passage of time. But part of me thought it was welcome, almost instructive. Is the undocumented life not still lived? And what percentage of those hundreds of photos were even fit to print? And who were they for, who would see them, who fucking cares? Tropical Storm Alex was dumping rain outside the window. It wouldn’t stop for over a day; parts of the city would flood. A massive, mounted TV in the AirBnb played telenovelas. I muted it and sat there waiting for the others. I thought of paper notebooks, printed photographs, broken phones. All things swept away.
Between malfunctions, I slowly imported batches of media onto my laptop. 60 photos, crash. 100 photos, crash. Minutes after I salvaged it all, my phone finally failed for good. I was relieved, a little lightheaded. I set the phone on the table. Here was an apparatus made of electricity and rare earth metals, imbued with my very existence, reduced to a totally useless thing.
Over-reliance on smartphones is one of those things that has been talked and thinkpieced to death in recent years. It’s one of the primary symbols of modern American culture: the doomscroll as a metonym for our insecurities, addictions, anti-sociality, hyper-curiosity, malleability, distractedness, apathy; for the surveillance, financialization, game-ification, misinformation, and manipulation we’re subjected to each day. Much of this is messily and lazily referred to; hardware conflated with software, dependence with habit or convenience. But anyone with a smartphone has felt its power, the need to check for notifications, to flick it unlocked while waiting in line or for a friend, while sitting on the subway or the toilet. The blue glow of the phonescreen, the heads bent from regarding it—the smartphone, whatever else it is, is a portal into the hallucinatory torrent of postmodern life.
I was surprised, however, that most of my anxieties over being phoneless had nothing to do with social media or a craving for my newsfeeds. Sure, I pulled out my broken phone a couple times out of habit, trying to check Twitter or my email before remembering I couldn’t. But mainly I felt suddenly dependent, as if parts of my brain had suddenly blinked out. I was stripped of powers I had so long relied on. There were things I wanted to know but could not find out. Predicting the weather, summoning a car—these were things I’d convinced myself that I could do. But it was my phone that did that. I was just the operator, the input. For systems beyond my control.
Rather than going into some kind of social media withdrawal or feeling off the grid, I felt even more enmeshed in it, reliant on other people’s phones and more cognizant of my complacency. Life can be easily lived without a smartphone, but its sudden absence creates gaps in other places, like clamholes that appear on the beach as the tide recedes. Had I remembered everything, did I know where I was, could I get back to where I’d been? I hadn’t been paying enough attention, I hadn’t prepared for this. My navigational sense, my second memory—how would I recalibrate them myself?
In other ways, I felt freer and keener, leaving my phone behind. The weekend passed pleasantly; traveling with friends, I had nothing to worry about, could rely on the phones that they constantly pulled out. I never tried to check the time. I had to bribe a bouncer at one point because I’d left my ID behind too, but for the most part it was a useful re-attunement with the world. I still wished my phone hadn’t broken, but I started to hope that, once it was replaced, I wouldn’t need to take it everywhere I went.
Back in New York, unable to call an Uber or Lyft, I waited for almost an hour in the taxi queue at LaGuardia. Without my phone and no watch, I had no way of knowing how long I had waited until I got into the cab. I could only measure time in pages of the book I was reading, in the frustrated travelers creeping slowly around the stanchions toward the automatic doors.
As it turned out, the cab was much cheaper than an Uber. I had my keys, I had my credit card, I knew where I lived. I told the driver the cross streets.
“Brooklyn, right?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Sorry, what number?”
I told him. He pulled out his smartphone and entered my address slowly into the Waze app. We drove off. My phone like a stone in my pocket.
ben tapeworm