Welcome to the Twenty-First Century: the reintegration of a former Luddite
And it’s done. Not half a year after bragging about using the same phone for five years, I have bought a new one, with a ten-gigabyte data plan to boot. Three years after writing about why the iPhone is the greatest invention of the twenty-first century, I have finally bought an iPhone.
Of course, I have my justifications. First of all, I held true to my word: my old phone was absolutely past repair and use: screen irreparably damaged to the point where it was affecting my use following a drop of three stories in Reykjavik and then a throw across a street in Tokyo. Not intentional. Battery would last an hour of calling, and much less video calling. Buttons damaged badly so I had to use gesture controls. Secondly, I was on the verge of grabbing an entry-line android phone, but there was a telecom provider trying to get rid of its iPhone 11 stock, offering a Black Friday deal of zero dollars upfront and a thirty-five dollar contract, which was only five dollars more expensive than my talk-and-text plan at that time. Of course, this plan was the minimum I could select to get the free phone, but came with ten gigabytes of data. And so, armed with a three-year old iPhone and the entry-level amount of data, I joined the twenty-first century.
It was justifiable! The savings were simply too good to pass up on, and I was in desperate need of a new phone. All the stars aligned well too: the iPhone 11 was better than my old phone in all regards, and the battery life would last me another five years I hoped. I didn’t need anything else the phone could do, I promised myself. Just like my old phone, I’d rarely use any of the features aside from the eReader, the camera, and its capabilities as a phone. And I could join my friends and family on iMessage. It would be fine.
Things didn’t go as planned. The drastic improvement from a six-year-old phone to a three-year old phone was too much for my atavistic brain. The battery life was the first notable factor: I went two to three days without charging my phone once to start. The Find My feature is interesting; I shared my location with a friend and coordinated hopping onto the same streetcar as him. I never used the step tracker on my old phone, because it had a separate waiver that required signing my life away to some Chinese company, but the terms of use for the iPhone included that apparently, so I’ve been happily allowing my phone to track my steps and where I go. I was scared it’d be painful to transfer my books over, but there was no issue with that. Looking for podcasts on the iOS native app was also much simpler than I had thought it’d be. Of course, the biggest change is the ten-gigabyte data plan. For someone who spends most of his time at home or at the office, that’s an absurd amount of data. Never would I have to start my eReader when I’m bored at a party, or ask the waitstaff for Wi-Fi to scan a digital menu.
There are growing pains. The keyboard is impossibly hard to type with: even after a month, it still hasn’t learned my habits. The lack of a headphone jack has proved a huge annoyance: short of spending a small fortune on AirPods, I guess I’ll be left to suffer my phone without headphones. I have no idea how iCloud works: I’ve been emailing pictures to myself to transfer them for time being. The biggest of course, is the amount of time I’ve spent on my phone. Previously, I spent an hour and a half on average: Duolingo, a brief Instagram scroll, checking my texts, and messaging friends when I was at the office. Last week, the number went up three times to four and a half hours, the growth mostly coming from Instagram and text messaging. I don’t even follow two hundred accounts on Instagram, and no one texts me that regularly. I’m beginning to feel like I am just incessantly checking the apps for no good reason. Importantly, also begs the question where that time is coming from.
The combination of better phone and a data plan has shocked me into significant phone usage during my downtime. I’m also reading less, as well as less present at work and at play. I no longer have to worry about my phone running out of battery if I’m using my phone while I’m out. There are no inhibitions to my cell phone usage, for me to be constantly connected to the digital world. I’ve truly joined the twentieth century. I’ve considered putting work apps onto my phone at this point, because why not? If the alternative is Instagram, perhaps it’s for the best. It is the future after all. A world where everyone is omnipresent, a cyberpunk nightmare that we live in, so much as we can be pre-singularity, and pre-post-scarcity. Get with the times or get left behind. Short of neuralink and microchip implants, a comprehensive Apple ecosystem is the closest melding of man and machine we can have.
But before that, I want to see if I can get back to where I was before. If despite having access to the entire world of knowledge at my fingertips, the ability to communicate with whoever wants to talk to me, I can move back to where I was before, constantly present, ignoring non-urgent messages until I arrived at home, and constantly reading. In this hyper-connected, attention starved, and fast moving world, perhaps there is an advantage of sorts to being slow. If certain abilities and traits are being lost to technology, then being one of the few who retain them, will confer an economic, social, or mental benefit. But it remains hard to do so, especially as the pull of technology grows more nefarious. Even now, as I write this during my descent into Vancouver, I’m compulsively checking my phone to see if I can get any sort of reception, to see what my friends are up to, and to make plans for the weekend. But for now, I will put down my phone and read over this piece again.
