No camera, no map, no weathervane. No calendar, no alarm. No boarding pass, no car services. While I was traveling on Friday, my smartphone suddenly bricked. A white apple blinked on black, over and over again. I couldn’t figure out where my friends were, couldn’t get on the AirBnb WiFi, couldn’t check the news, couldn’t tell what time it was or when the rain was going to stop. Every now and then, the phone returned to normal before shutting off again. To make matters worse, I soon realized that none of my photos and videos from the past six months had been backing up to the cloud; they were stuck on this phone, suspended between its glitches.
Confronted with the possible loss of all those images—those memories, in the parlance of iPhoto—I swung back and forth between something like mourning and weightlessness. I knew the last time I transferred my photos to my computer was before New Year’s. What if this whole spring were lost? I’d taken to printing out a few dozen photos each year and pasting them into my notebooks. What if I had none for half the year? Part of me couldn’t get over the loss—of commemoration, of marking the passage of time. But part of me thought it was welcome, almost instructive. Is the undocumented life not still lived? And what percentage of those hundreds of photos were even fit to print? And who were they for, who would see them, who fucking cares? Tropical Storm Alex was dumping rain outside the window. It wouldn’t stop for over a day; parts of the city would flood. A massive, mounted TV in the AirBnb played telenovelas. I muted it and sat there waiting for the others. I thought of paper notebooks, printed photographs, broken phones. All things swept away.
Between malfunctions, I slowly imported batches of media onto my laptop. 60 photos, crash. 100 photos, crash. Minutes after I salvaged it all, my phone finally failed for good. I was relieved, a little lightheaded. I set the phone on the table. Here was an apparatus made of electricity and rare earth metals, imbued with my very existence, reduced to a totally useless thing.
Over-reliance on smartphones is one of those things that has been talked and thinkpieced to death in recent years. It’s one of the primary symbols of modern American culture: the doomscroll as a metonym for our insecurities, addictions, anti-sociality, hyper-curiosity, malleability, distractedness, apathy; for the surveillance, financialization, game-ification, misinformation, and manipulation we’re subjected to each day. Much of this is messily and lazily referred to; hardware conflated with software, dependence with habit or convenience. But anyone with a smartphone has felt its power, the need to check for notifications, to flick it unlocked while waiting in line or for a friend, while sitting on the subway or the toilet. The blue glow of the phonescreen, the heads bent from regarding it—the smartphone, whatever else it is, is a portal into the hallucinatory torrent of postmodern life.
I was surprised, however, that most of my anxieties over being phoneless had nothing to do with social media or a craving for my newsfeeds. Sure, I pulled out my broken phone a couple times out of habit, trying to check Twitter or my email before remembering I couldn’t. But mainly I felt suddenly dependent, as if parts of my brain had suddenly blinked out. I was stripped of powers I had so long relied on. There were things I wanted to know but could not find out. Predicting the weather, summoning a car—these were things I’d convinced myself that I could do. But it was my phone that did that. I was just the operator, the input. For systems beyond my control.
Rather than going into some kind of social media withdrawal or feeling off the grid, I felt even more enmeshed in it, reliant on other people’s phones and more cognizant of my complacency. Life can be easily lived without a smartphone, but its sudden absence creates gaps in other places, like clamholes that appear on the beach as the tide recedes. Had I remembered everything, did I know where I was, could I get back to where I’d been? I hadn’t been paying enough attention, I hadn’t prepared for this. My navigational sense, my second memory—how would I recalibrate them myself?
In other ways, I felt freer and keener, leaving my phone behind. The weekend passed pleasantly; traveling with friends, I had nothing to worry about, could rely on the phones that they constantly pulled out. I never tried to check the time. I had to bribe a bouncer at one point because I’d left my ID behind too, but for the most part it was a useful re-attunement with the world. I still wished my phone hadn’t broken, but I started to hope that, once it was replaced, I wouldn’t need to take it everywhere I went.
Back in New York, unable to call an Uber or Lyft, I waited for almost an hour in the taxi queue at LaGuardia. Without my phone and no watch, I had no way of knowing how long I had waited until I got into the cab. I could only measure time in pages of the book I was reading, in the frustrated travelers creeping slowly around the stanchions toward the automatic doors.
As it turned out, the cab was much cheaper than an Uber. I had my keys, I had my credit card, I knew where I lived. I told the driver the cross streets.
“Brooklyn, right?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Sorry, what number?”
I told him. He pulled out his smartphone and entered my address slowly into the Waze app. We drove off. My phone like a stone in my pocket.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
My friend Lucas works at Three Lives & Company, a bookstore in Manhattan, and I recently read two books he recommended in the store’s newsletter (which you can subscribe to here): Daša Drndić’s Belladonna and Matthieu Aikins’s The Naked Don’t Fear the Water. I couldn’t do a better writeup than Lucas’s if I wanted to, so I’m just pasting his below:
This month I traveled by plane for the first time in a long time. I spent both flights reading Matthieu Aikins’s The Naked Don’t Fear the Water (Harper). Aikins, a Canadian journalist living in Kabul, develops a deep friendship with an Afghan translator (and hopeless romantic) named Omar. In 2016, when Omar decides to flee Afghanistan, Aikins joins him on the “smuggler’s road” from Afghanistan to Europe, passing undercover as an Afghan named Habib. Together they traverse mountains and seas, crossing borders both physical and emotional to reach a better life in Europe, a promise that grows more illusory the closer it looms – an asymptote of possibility. I clenched my jaw at Aikins’s sharp descriptions of fantastic risk, at his and Omar’s endless performances, furtive deceits, lovesick vows. Then I showed my driver’s license to a man at a desk who looked at it briefly, glanced at my face, and nodded me through a security gate, without a bribe or a fight or a foot chase.
Before my trip I had just finished Belladonna (New Directions, translated by Celia Hawkesworth), a novel by the Croatian writer Daša Drndić, another book about – among other things – the human costs of war. (Drndić is a major writer, and she deserves wider recognition.) Through the mind of her protagonist, Andreas Ban, Drndić catalogs the crimes of twentieth-century Europe; together they collect photographs and stories of violence, name their perpetrators, search for their victims. Andreas is a Bartleby for the world after Auschwitz, his voice a heroic refusal of catharsis: faced with the options of forgetting the horrors of the past or remembering them on History’s terms, Andreas would simply prefer not to. – Lucas
I also got my hands on an advance reader copy of Cormac McCarthy’s forthcoming novel, The Passenger. I’ll hold off on saying anything about it, as it isn’t due out until October.
from the discourse
Drew Austin reflects on American culture, the Internet, and inflation in his recent substack post:
The decade of low interest rates that followed the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recovery fueled an unprecedented bubble in asset prices as well as upper-middle-class lifestyle norms and expectations that trickled down from the wealthy but also bubbled upward from below. The former proceeded via standardization—fast fashion, apps that let you hail black cars—while the latter was gleaned from a dedicated scouring of subcultures and the vernacular landscape—streetwear, hipster culture, artisanal everything. Incidentally, the internet was the perfect medium to disseminate both.
from the uncanny valley
OpenAI recently unveiled DALL-E 2, a highly powerful AI system that can generate images from text. As it’s still only available to a few hundred people, dilettantes like me are left to toy around with things like the free-to-use DALL-E Mini, a less-impressive image-generator working with a much smaller dataset. Still, its images have that fever-dream facewarp like something out of a dream or an acid trip.
My favorite results were from typing in “Jean Baudrillard eating at Subway”:
But I also tried different variations of this newsletter, to varying (and rather unpleasant) results:
The thumbnail image for this post—a bizarre, textless graphic novel from hell—came from the prompt “june 2022 volume one.”
from my incoming texts
“Why is the new phoenix song SO funny”
“Matching golf polos I hear??”
“Davidson College-core”
“Every performer is isolated in their own light rhombus and it is making me anxious”
“Drizly Update: SoBe Liquor is on the way with your order!”
weekly wiki
Read back about a Tennessee drive, an NYC summer vibe, and another NYC summer vibe. Share this post with friends. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.