Be Here Now
I’ve done a lot of things in the past year that I told myself I’d never do. I worked several 80-hour weeks in a corporate office. I joined a fantasy football league. I helped found—of all things—a blog. And most recently, I got an iPhone.
More and more I find the artifacts of the person I figured I always would be—an artist, an eccentric—creeping into picture frames and dusty shoe boxes: photos of me half nude living in a cabin in the jungle of Nepal, stacks of back-pocket notebooks filled with embarrassingly bad poetry, and yes, even my old cell phone. I used that phone—a prehistoric silver brick—for about six years. Its shittiness was a mark of pride—a kind of feeble, middle-class gesture towards nonconformity. Switching to the iPhone was like graduating from a tricycle to a space shuttle, ditching the Ninja Turtle tee and donning a black tie.
By now, the zombified smart-phone addict has become a stock character, and even though I caved into owning an iPhone, I swore I’d do everything I could to steel myself against walking those tropes. But already I find myself ear-plugged and drooling over a three-inch screen for enormous, unhealthy chunks of time. I’m distracted away from friends sitting right in front of me. I use my phone for things I could never have wanted to accomplish before. It turns out if you’re slaving away in a downtown office on a Saturday, squatting on the john and cursing your existence, and you remember you need to trawl the waivers in your fantasy football league because Michael fucking Vick is still fucking injured, well, there’s an app for that.
What the hell happened to me? Can I not even take a crap anymore without connecting to the Internet?
Thank god Microsoft is here to capitalize on my self-loathing. It just launched a new ad campaign for the Windows Phone 7, which, admittedly, employs the stock character of the zombified smart-phone addict to great effect:
“It’s time for a phone to save us from our phones.” What an incredible slogan. It perfectly illustrates one of the most insidious characteristics of smart-phone-era capitalism: even when the institutions of commerce seem to be encroaching on our most basic human interactions, those encroachments merely unearth new markets to capitalize. Moreover, popular critiques of capitalism are regularly commandeered for its advancement. Are you slave to your phone? Sounds like you need more phone in your life. It’s the same tact Microsoft took with its series of Bing ads. Are search engines turning us schizophrenic? Sounds like we need more search engines in our lives. When faced with the disquieting aspects of advanced capitalist society, our societal reflex is to advance capitalism further.
Yesterday morning, my girlfriend and I were sharing breakfast, listening to an NPR piece on how smart phones are destroying relationships. There was a whole segment on how the relationship counseling industry has dealt with (read: benefited from) a huge spike in couples suffering because of their mobile devices. “Of course,” I thought to myself. “One arm of the free market has us making monthly payments on a distraction box, while another emerges to charge us for advice on how not to become so goddamn distracted.” I considered saying something clever to my girlfriend, but I was already running late for work. Plus, she had her laptop open at the breakfast table, her face buried in her inbox, and I had unthinkingly pulled up the weather app on my iPhone—even though there was a fucking door 10 feet away that I could have easily poked my head out. My god. We are all in desperate need of counseling.
Of course, what’s the real cure? Ditch the digital world? Move back to Nepal? Take up meditation and mind-expanding drugs? It is somewhat ironic that the second ad Windows released for their phone ends on the mantra “Be Here Now”:
“Be Here Now” is also the title of the famous book on spirituality by Ram Dass, often referred to as the “counterculture bible.” (Again, critique commandeered for advancement.) Ram Dass, formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, is well known for a few things: 1) working with Timothy Leary at Harvard during the acid binge, 2) studying in India to become one of the first prominent Western-born yogis, and 3) having a central character in ABC’s LOST named after him. There isn’t a work week that goes by that I don’t fantasize about pulling a Ram Dass—just packing a briefcase full of peyote, getting on a plane heading east, and crash-landing the fucker on a deserted island.
Really, I just miss the hell out of Nepal. But I also remember, after spending months in the jungle, missing the hell out of the people I left behind. There’s the real rub: the things for which I’m most tempted to denounce the distractions and vapid, impersonal malaise of advanced capitalist society—love, companionship—are the same things that keep me plugged into it.
I work a less-than-satisfying job so I can share an apartment and more-than-satisfying nights with friends. I joined a fantasy football league, despite its wormholes of online stat-tracking, to share lazy Sundays with friends near and far. And yes, my friends are also the reason I spend so much time staring at a tiny screen, reading lengthy emails and dashing off thousands of texts. Just last week, while riding the L home at night, alone, I received a message from a close friend I lived with in Nepal, and it made me glad to have that sleek black goddamned gadget at my fingertips.
I suppose this is the constricting, irreconcilable satisfaction of being here now.
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Related:
Bowling Online by David Milton Brent
Hooray for the Everyday by Will Litton
Nice piece Will, and welcome to the iPhone community.
I use a few simple rules – no phone use during meals, at all. No phone use while crossing the street (I learned this one the hard way in a near-smushed experience).
Very interested to see how the Windows phone will attempt to save us from our phones. Sounds like what we really need is one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydV3hmz7a2o
You’re right. But you’re still a twat for owning an i-phone.
I don’t have one. There are too many ways for people to get in touch with me already and I’d rather just have a 300 dollar Netbook than pay those annoying data fees each month.
Yeah, there’s definitely an important point to be made about will / responsibility in regards to media / capitalism that I did a lot of thinking about and never really incorporated into the piece.
In one of the interviews in the NPR piece, a wife complains that she and her husband used to spend “quality” evenings watching TV, but now he just sits in front of the television and browses the Web on his phone. Ah, yes, we’ve descended from one asinine preoccupation to another. First the medium was on our wall, now it’s in our pocket, and soon enough it’ll be in our brain. As long as the profit incentive for media corps and advertisers is to command as much viewership as possible, any new popular medium that emerges will be, by and large, populated with content bent on monopolizing our attention and distracting us away from the things we really do/should care about.
But this is no reason to condemn the medium as such. Yes, a medium may have inherent qualities about which we can make judgments; but the more important point, as you say, is to understand our own will in how we utilize the medium–to not become lazy. I can use my phone to do a lot of great things and a lot of really dumb things. It’s on me to distinguish between the two and make those decisions. But are the ways commercial/capitalist forces occupy the medium ultimately things that I can deal with responsibly? I honestly don’t know.
Good point. Modern Technology is seductive in it’s instantaneous ease of use, world-wide reach and dizzying range of trivial applications. But seriously, blaming a phone for taking over your life is like blaming McDonalds food for making you fat. Plato wrote “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”
The points about exercising individual will over media are well-taken. But I worry about restricting our unit of analysis to the individual and ignoring structural concerns. It’s interesting that you bring up McDonald’s. What of the enormous power that corporation wields in terms of discursive production, and what of the socioeconomic circumstances that lead individuals to eat there? The Plato quote is true, to a certain extent, but taken by itself it’s a gross reduction of what it means to live in the era of the multi-national corporation. I’m not trying to discount the importance of personal agency, but “seeking one’s own direction” and “simplifying the mechanics of life” seem like increasingly dubious propositions in a world filled with complicated forces that transcend the individual.