Imagine you are on public transportation and someone pinches you.
You survive the pinch but you react or notice or, since this happens every time you ride the bus or train or subway, retreat more into your own world while becoming more disdainful of your fellow riders, the pinchers.
How much difference is there between an essentially harmless pinch like this and the tiny annoyance of someone’s phone ringing on the subway? Or their playing a video on the bus? Or talking to their friend about the video they watch together on the train? As if they were both in their home?
What you might call “our zone of self” now extends as far as whatever the phone can pinch, the public space which once belonged to all of us together now belonging to each of us alone.
It would be silly to say this is as bad as Ukraine or Buffalo or climate change or a whole long list of other indignities.
But if the zone of self the phone carves out allows everyone to pinch each other I am not sure what argument is to be made against those who want to scream or masturbate or actually pinch you on a bus or subway or train, especially given how all those who refused to mask up in public space or who insist their guns makes public space safer can be seen as relying on that cultural space too: Indignity leads to indignity, I suspect.
And the first indignity, as deserves more consideration another time, is confronting loneliness.
Forthcoming:
More about this lonlieness thing
School As Workshop