A Dumb-phone, Anthony Burgess, and One Last Sunset
Something about disconnection, about over-stayed welcomes, and learning to sleep
I once heard that a friend of a friend of a friend’s cousin’s sister once did it.
She cut loose, I mean.
Cut the cords.
Broke the chains.
Severed all ties.
Other idioms.
She did it — and because she did it, well, I figured I could, too.
She got a dumb-phone.
And it really is dumb. She can’t check her Instagram notifications waiting in line at Starbucks, she can’t send selfies while she’s at the beach, and she can’t walk down the street, bumping into people while texting. She can’t even connect her AirPods via bluetooth. Stone age, kinda stuff.
Her phone is so dumb she’s stuck looking at the pretty mom with her cute kids already seated and smiling, while she’s waiting for her coffee. It’s so dumb, her phone, that she has to watch the lake lap up the sand and the sun kaleidoscope in the froth. It’s so dumb she has to window shop.
Her phone is so dumb she has to listen to the birds and the wind and the whole world instead of Spotify.
Her phone is so dumb it inspired me to get one. A dumb-phone, I mean. I already have the pretty wife and the cute kids.
I wanted to see the diamond sun and I wanted to window shop to the orchestra of birds.
And so I pulled the plug.
Called it quits.
Kicked it to the curb.
Apple™, I mean.
Sayonara, Steve. Or whoever is president now.
Hello, Dumb World, it’s me, Josh.
1. Disconnecting and The Hierarchy of Importance
When you pull the plug, on your smartphone, I mean, the first thing you notice is the phantom buzzing. Your leg vibrates with echoes of bygone notifications. Hauntings of all the memes that could have been.
That stops soon, believe me.
The next thing you notice is a kind of anxious guilt.
Like you’re supposed to be reachable at all hours of the day — like you’re supposed to be informed about every geo-political-cultural moment.
You sort of feel like you’re falling behind.
And you are, believe me.
But once the whole world runs so far ahead of you, it’s a lot easier to slow down, I think. Go at your own pace. You know, a human one.
You don’t dream in pixels anymore, don’t concern yourself with trade deals or silicon valley or what Popular Celebrity #47 is up to on their Grecian holiday. You don’t care about likes or follows or DMs or going viral.
You don’t even care about being on Substack’s Rising list.
Your life gets so damn dumb you start caring about all the stuff that’s not on a screen. Crazy.
About three weeks after Apple’s autopsy, I was driving home from my in-laws with Aislinn riding shotgun. Kid one and Kid two are in the back seats, one of them playing with toy excavators, the other one with a crinkle book. The radio was singing, the windows were rolled down, and the warm summer evening air blew through our Subaru like jazz.
“Does this look different to you ?” That’s me asking Aislinn the dumbest question you can think of.
“Does what look different to me ?”
“This —” And I gesture to everything.
The mountains, the trees, the open road, and even the cows in their dumb little fields.
“It all looks saturated,” I say.
“That’s how it always looks.”
We’re curving down back roads, rolling over hills, and I am saying :
“You’re probably right. I am the probably the one who is wrong.”
And what I mean is, I am just too smart, too connected, too engaged to see the forest for the screens. I’m not dumb enough to see the sunset on the mountains, see the dark greens of fir trees in twilight, see the clouds burn red and purple.
That magic box I used to carry around, the 5.8x2.8” brick with the flashing lights in my pocket, well, it was so smart it dumbed everything else down. In the same way that taking heroine makes regular life feel slow, I mean.
That’s what happens about a few weeks in — you learn your hierarchy of importance, of what takes precedence, and why, and how the heck in almost every situation the chime and chirp and buzz of notifications win.
That phone was so smart, and I was so dumb, it became my tyrant and I became its slave. Pretty smart, huh ?
About a month in you learn that all those promises it makes, our smartphones, I mean, the connection, the convenience, the comfort — well, those are lies. You learn it because you can sit and read in your chair for a few hours and the only thing that interrupts you is the laughter of your children. You learn it because you have to ask your fellow man for directions, and you each smile and tell jokes, and you laugh at SatNavs together — like explorers of old, I think. And you learn it because at the end of a long day when your impulse is to doom-scroll while mindlessly watching something on some streaming service, you just sit down on your patio and read and smoke, or you chat with your wife…or you do other things with your wife.
Maybe I should come out and say it, just in case you’re missing it, just in case you’re reading this on your oh-so-smart-phone :
These stupid things are making us dumb to all the things in life that matter most. They’re inverting the hierarchy of things. It’s this stupid little revolution, invited in like a Brave New World.
“Care about this !” It screeches, and it’s just some cat farting itself awake.
The new phone I have, the one with the e-ink screen, the dumb one — well, that’s the smartphone, actually. Because it disconnects me from the other 799,999,999,997 people in the world. Because it connects me to my wife and kids. Because it makes me enjoy my life more.
What’s smarter than that ?
2. The Wanting Seed
Since I have had all this dumb-time, I read more.
A lot more.
Anthony Burgess is the man famous for A Clockwork Orange, and I read that in my early twenties, on bus rides, trying to learn Nadsat to no avail.
Burgess was raised a Catholic, if memory serves me, and even though he drifted from his faith, at least the active belief in it, his works retain and spiral around major religious and theological questions. A Clockwork Orange is about, among other things, free will and determinism and moral responsibility.
This book, The Wanting Seed, the one I bought second hand a few months ago, is about sin and personhood and modern ideas of salvation.
There’s something really special about dumbing your life down and reading some ferociously satirical dystopian sci-fi novel. Right thing at the right time. It’s great to giggle along as Burgess mocks the values of a nightmarish coming “modernity”. The cherry on top, I think, is that I learned to go all the way dumb about 63 years later than Burgess.
But you know, maybe I learned it faster than you.
In The Wanting Seed technology serves as some instrument for governmental control, under the auspices of survival in an overpopulated world. Perfect means to a very efficient end. And that end is control.
Thank god ( lower case “G” intentional ), we have medical and reproductive advances to enforce population limits. Praise be ! There’s surveillance tools and propaganda to shape behaviour and erase everything and anything unique about a person, a community, or a nation. Count it a blessing that everything is 100% synthetic. Lab grown, I mean. Food, media, and other things, all concocted in such a way to remove anything pesky and human; all devised as some way to subordinate the messy individual to the growth of the efficient state.
“One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth. In a sense… you know, Mrs Foxe, you’ll be getting your son back again.”
That’s one of the government docs talking about the death of a child, trying to comfort the mother, who’s hiding her grief, by suggesting she’s doing her part in saving the world. You know, from over population, from pollution, and by producing some kind of “resource” ( that’s the decomposing remains of her son )for the rest of “us” to use.
And as I’m reading, every once in a while, I would have these very lucid thoughts about all the ways my smartphone was outsmarting me. Controlling me, I mean. All the ways it was beaming whatever it wanted into my brain, and how my attention was its currency. About how it, like most other technology, is not neutral.
“In millions of other homes – generally on the bedroom ceiling…the stereoscopic image of the Right Hon. Robert Starling glowed and scolded like a fretful lamp.”
And sure, there’s no hologram of my Prime Minister in my living room, and I’m sure Donald Trump isn’t actually in your bedroom scolding you, or the opposition party out on your lawn trumpeting faults and failures and what-ifs and should-haves.
But the similarities between what Burgess conceived of and what we currently exist in are not so different, really.
We pull our pundits out of our pockets any free moment we have, and we let them scold us, tell us they know better, and assure us that their way will save us. We grab our gurus and listen to their sermons while we wait in line or sit on the toilet. Someone, somewhere, is always telling us something, by our own invitation.
If actions speak louder than words, and I think they probably do, then all of us love a good bit of propagandizing. As long as it gives a nice little dopamine hit. Take the good with the bad, sorta thing.
Now I’m not really talking about global issues or agitprop or political brainwashing. Those are the means to the end, so to speak. Sure, I have my thoughts on population limits, synthetic life, and mind-control — just not in this little essay.
“I feel anti-social…deliriously anti-social. Who are they to tell us how to run our lives?”
I’m talking about the intrusion. Invited, or not.
It seems like these dumb smartphones have more than overstayed their welcome — and it doesn’t matter which “side-of-the-aisle” they are an evangelist for, Left or Right, up or down, it’s all intrusion. These smartphones burrowed into the very centre of our lives, and they have become a megaphone and measure for everything we ought to care about.
And it’s all a bit silly.
Some people tell me they couldn’t dumb down their life, couldn’t go dumb, as it were — that they need something smart for work. I used to buy it, a lot actually. But thank God I grabbed the receipt, so I could return it. The lie, I mean.
My parents didn’t need it.
Neither did their parents.
And I’m not saying this like I’m some boomer who’s telling you to pull-yourself-up-out-of-a-global-crisis by your own bootstraps. Nope.
I’m saying it like, well, me. And I think it’s all a bit silly.
“Sorry kids, poppa woulda spent more time with you, he just had some emails to check.”
“My bad, wife-o-mine, we could have stayed madly in love, I was just a bit too busy making sure I was staying on the cutting edge of every geo-political event.”
“Apologies, God, I wanted to pray more, read more, fast more — but, you know, memes and the global economy and a bunch of other things that don’t concern me.”
I’m about two months into my dumb-life and I can tell you that you start to see it. You hear it. What I mean is, I am blind to the connected world, deaf to its insipid screeching.
But I see others and I hear them, too, and man…I kinda hate it.
Not kind of — I really hate it.
“Who are they to tell us how to run our lives?”
And by that I mean, how to love and dance and sing and connect.
Those smartphones, in some sense or another, control us. They dictate our lives. They rarely leave our side, they call out to us, they steal our gaze and our attention, and they try to orient and order our loves in their all powerful image.
Ordo Amoris Telefonus.
And that, dear reader, is the dystopia.
The cool thing about these little tyrants is that they die.
Let me explain.
3. One Last Sunset
We have two kids, and one of them is about six months old.
All that means is that my wife, Aislinn, gets sleepy before me most nights. And all that means is that I sit out on the patio, reading, watching the sunset over parking stalls and through leaves of trees in a mid-life crisis.
Right now I’m usually out there reading The Great Gatsby, or For the Life of the World, or writing down my own notes for a book. The orange glow of that setting sun transforms to the purples and cobalts of night, and all that means is that the sun is sleeping behind the mountains.
And that’s when I get tired, too.
And around this two month mark, with my dumb-phone not by my side, I realized I no longer look for plugs before bed. No longer need to make sure my device is attached to some power supply. No need to get a current running into the capacitors, so I can be ready for the next day of distraction and psychological turmoil.
My dumb-phone is so dag-gone dumb it only needs a pick-me-up every few days. Longer life expectancy.
And all that really means is that you develop new nighttime routines.
I mean, after you brush your teeth and put on your PJs, you don’t need to make sure the world is okay before you catch your forty winks. The world goes on, in all its chaos, and little old you, well, you’re none the wiser. Memes are produced at the speed of failures and cultural splashes, but little old you, well, you’re too busy losing count of sheep.
I live in an apartment, and sometimes, before I go to sleep, I imagine some cross-section of my building, and I imagine glowing faces, dark circles under eyes, and red digital clocks counting down to morning alarms.
I can’t really do that anymore, exhaust myself in the glow of blue light — my phone is so dumb the only game it has is Chess. So once I am done scrubbing my pearly whites, once I’m settled down under the covers, all I do is say my prayers and close my eyes.
Good-bye, jewel world. See you in the morning.
And one of those sunsets was my last.
My last one looking for a charger, having the machine tell me bedtime stories of war, of terror, of the apocalypse, and worst of all, that I didn’t have the latest product sold to me by some tycoon in the West Village.
I almost miss it, the anxiety and the dread, as my nightcap, I mean.
Almost.
But, there’s something about sleeping with the sun, and waiting for the dawn that goes down so much smoother.
Makes the whole dumb world feel saturated.
Anyways.
This is less some essay as much as it is some kind of pub rant I’d have if we were ever hanging out.
That round was on me.
Next one’s on you.
*hits like button on my iPhone*
Slowing down to catch up to God