She refuses to kill insects and rats. Once he asked me to taste his home-made wine (disastrous). A few years ago, she quit her job at a food-justice nonprofit to live in a cottage, and then she went to graduate school and moved into an attic where her roommates were squirrels. Against his will, he had an iPhone for some time. She had no choice: a university administrator apparently told her she could not perform her student duties without it. Two-factor authentication and all that.
But Lilla’s Lilla, so at graduation, she gifted herself a dumbphone. And boy was that phone stupid. Designed for those who are distancing themselves from the real thing, it’s connected to Wi-Fi but not the Internet, and it definitely doesn’t include apps. Lila now roams the world without a smartphone. “I think the main reason I wanted to get rid of it was because I felt like I was spending my brains,” he told me recently.
Most of my twenty-something peers want to be stupid like Lila. I am familiar with and sympathetic to this urge: I waste many hours a day and lose many hours of sleep because of the tyranny of scrolling. I’m stuck in a cycle of embarrassment having spent the majority of my precious life watching videos of complete strangers until my eyes started stinging and my head aching. And, ideologically, I like preventing personal data from corporations, not succumbing to ads every time I unlock my home screen.
But I’m not fooled, and the reason is simple: I’m scared! It would be completely disorienting to give up my smartphone. This would greatly reduce my overall ability. It’s extremely embarrassing – it really does make me feel like a giant baby – but I’m convinced that my smartphone is a part of me. I mean this literally: the panic I feel when I lose sight of Him is internal, existential, as if pieces of my physical body were missing.
This idea is neither crazy nor original. In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced their “extended mind hypothesis”, the idea that external devices can extend the biological brain, in a physical way. Are you checking the Notes app for your grocery list? Using Google Maps to get to a friend’s house? It’s not just your phone at work, and it’s not just your biological brain either – it’s a single cognitive system made up of both. From the age of 14, when I got my first iPhone, my brain welcomed Apple’s increasingly powerful operating systems and, over the years, became attached to them. My phone and I are now completely entangled in each other.
But is liberation a worthwhile endeavour? And is this, as foolish users believe, even possible?
In 1985, The late psychologist Daniel Wegener published a theory about intimate human relationships called transactive memory. He argued that long-term couples store information in each other and that their collective pool acts as a joint memory card, a single “knowledge-acquiring, knowledge-holding, and knowledge-using system that is greater than the sum of its individual member systems.” This uncharacteristically—perhaps disparagingly—applies to my relationship with my iPhone.
At the end of my senior year of high school, I went to the Apple Store to replace my worn out device with a newer and better one. In typical irresponsible-teen fashion, I hadn’t backed up my data from recent months, so my photos from that school year were gone. It turned out that my memories of that period disappeared with them – a road trip across the South, a friend’s dramatic breakup. I knew intellectually that these things had happened. But I had no real feelings for him, no particular image to evoke my memories.
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