Eytan Kobre
Mishpacha
In a recent piece in City Journal, former Time essayist and current Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Lance Morrow zeroes in on the essence of the smartphone:
The smartphone is… an absorptive miniature self and a megaphone and magical extension of the user, a Swiss Army knife of the mind: a genius, it must be admitted, compared with the dope who holds it in his palm. The self plunges into the little screen, Googling or texting with double thumbs, posting away, begging to be liked or shared.
Yet the transaction is not what it pretends to be. You’re not using the phone; the phone is using you. The smartphone is a Trojan horse, and you are Pavlov’s dog. The machine studies you with an alien’s eye, serving you with injections of warmth and affection (grandchildren, frolicking dogs) in order to suck out information, assembling a dossier — noting where you have been, what you have said, what you have bought and thought, your very footsteps and heartbeats — reproducing you as a useful commercial or political object, as if in a 3-D printer.
You’re a customer, a thing: fodder for algorithms. It is ruthlessly done. A suspicion of the fraud — since you were seeking love in the “likes” and “shares” and emojis — is why you come away vaguely depressed after a Facebook session. Your Facebook “friends” may or may not be your friends, but the intelligent machine is, in a deeper sense, your enemy: a predator with a repertoire of flashy metaphysics at its disposal, a hall of mirrors. The sleek machine is in the business of harvesting souls.
For me, at least two important points emerge from these paragraphs. The first is about the deeply engrossing nature of the experience. Watch others immersed in their phones for long enough, and an observable pattern emerges: the facial expression, a faint half-smile, equal parts beatific and entranced. It’s not anything like what one sees on the faces of people reading books or newspapers or conversing on the phone or in person.
It’s the look of someone who’s not really here, having been mentally transported away from this life and this world. When Chazal wanted to convey to learners of Pirkei Avos the extent of the damage wrought upon us by three cardinal bad middos — kinah, taavah, and kavod — they chose the phrase “motzi’in es ha’adam min ha’olam,” they remove a person from the world (Avos 4:28). These three traits of jealousy, pleasure-seeking, and pursuit of honor all have the capacity for creating alternative mental universes where those possessing these traits live, detached from reality. For Chazal, there was no greater indictment, because to detach even temporarily from real life and enter an imagined one is, simply put, death in installments.
Morrow’s second point is that technology users need to wise up to the way in which they are being manipulated to their great detriment and the concomitant enrichment of people and entities for whom their welfare isn’t even a remote consideration — their emotions and thoughts played with, their privacy invaded, their pockets picked.
In fact, the very word “smartphone” misleads about what it really is. Smart? Are we going to impute human characteristics to contraptions of metal and plastic, like zoologists who extol the so-humanlike intelligence of chimpanzees? To a self-respecting individual’s mind, he’s smart, and his gadgets do his bidding.
Phone? Is that really its primary use for us, and if not, why not call it what it is — a pocket computer, movie, and TV screen rolled into one, and a portal to everything the world has to offer, from the sublime to the indescribably degraded. By comparison, “smartphone” is so much more psychologically comfortable to use.
Jews are by nature so sharp, so good at identifying business opportunities and pitfalls and avoiding being taken advantage of — how have we surrendered that healthy skeptical sense to join the society-wide reflexive embrace of technology without limits? It ought to infuriate us, but we just smile and dive back into our tech-induced reverie.
“You’re not using the phone; the phone is using you.” Now there’s an appropriate refrain for our times.
