A few days ago I was riding on the “silent car” of a Dutch train. But everyone uses their phone on those cars as much as any other and the ride on the train got me thinking (or thinking again), about what else may be permissible because of the way the Smartphone has changed public space.
Is watching pornography instead of Beyoncé or sports highlights (as so many people do on their phone on the train) permissible? Is it permissible, as I sort of considered in yesterday’s It Starts With Loneliness post, to pinch people around you and distract them as much as a phone conversation does? Does the phone begin to carve out new boundaries in public space such that soon you have more and more rights there? Will it soon be cool to masturbate on the subway?
It was something like that last question which I had intended to write about yesterday. But as often happens, the tone and subject changed as I wrote. I had thought the post would be satirical and silly (“Excuse me, is this the ‘No Jerk-Off’ car”) so as to make a point about public space and behavior, a perhaps tired rant about a subject I never tire of ranting about.
I got stuck in the writing, though, not so much because the rant is tired, but because I know it is lost. I am not the old man saying people lack manners and etiquette as they once did. In this fight, I am, like that Silent Car on the Dutch train, an anachronism. To ask people not to use their phones in public is like asking them to work on a typewriter. It makes no sense anymore.
So I started to think about how lonely we must be to be so into our phones. And lonely not just because of COVID or because human beings have always felt their alone-ness in some existential fashion, but because in the phone we have exactly the tool we imagine will deliver us from loneliness, and we have it at a time when everything else confims just how alone we are.
(I’ll speak to the first of those two things here and to the second tomorrow.)
What I mean by “the tool we need” is that the phone allows us to worship “connection” in a fashion that causes and reveals inner trouble, an assertion that will make more sense if you know David Foster-Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement address.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life,” Foster-Wallace says, “there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping:”
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. . . . Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
Could it be any clearer in how we use our phones that we worship each other? Or, as I am trying to argue here, the person who is not us? Who will rescue us from the fear of what it means to be alone? To be just ourselves? The person on the other end of that call or text or video to whom we can feel bound?
Out there is a someone who will take us away from ourselves enough so that we need not face who we are.
Out there is someone who, via pseudo-phone-connectivity, allows me to think I am pseudo-O.K.
Out there will deliver to me, given the binary of love and hate, a dopamine hit of love.
Out there is not in here.
It is common to say that the echo chamber of social media makes political discourse worse. And no doubt that is true. But it is also true that we would rather rage at each other than sit calmly with our own views, rather scroll the binary of pseudo-love than just be. When someone who has never met an immigrant from El-Salvador or Brazil froths about illegal immigration, they are saying they would rather be connected to a person from Central or South America through anger and hate than to be alone with themselves.
“Whoever is unhappy with himself is constantly ready to take revenge on that account,” says Nietzsche. The phone operates at the constant, always ready.
The phone is the culmination of technologies (T.V., movies, radio) that have allowed us to look out into the world and at how others look at it too. These technologies look to promise us in their way what money promises us in terms of security or sexual allure promises in terms of status, the unconscious worship making us impoverished or ugly or, with the phone, lonely.
An unprecedented ability to look out leads us to (or is where we practice) unprecedented avoidance of looking in, of seeing how the world reflects who we are.
Especially since, as I will try to take up tomorrow, the tool we cannot help but (mis) worshiping comes to us when human alone-ness in the here and now has never been clearer.
—ERM