My naive six-year-old self was fascinated.
Snuggling into our family table at the Saturday night diner, I spotted an anomaly at the adjacent table.
“Look daddy,” I said, “those people are sleeping!”
He shushed me with a finger and explained the Saying of Grace. Why do we only do that at home? A more impatient finger. Should we do that here? Before we eat the table crackers? A slap on my leg closed the discussion.
Sixty years later, my wife and I were settling into our own restaurant table when I noticed heads bowed at every table. Diners hunched over their phones, praying fervently to the God of Gorilla Glass. A lifetime later, and only the favored deity had changed.
I wanted to call my wife’s attention to this, but out of respect for her prayers to Facebook, I kept my silence.
Attention has been capital forever. Newspapers were slower, radio and television more sporadic, but our own attention has been weaponized against us in a much more pernicious way lately – and it isn’t new, just faster. The ninety-second television tax has been replaced by the nanosecond algorithm that reads the difference in how long you paused on a cat video versus a political meltdown and adjusts accordingly.
We doomscroll weird tricks and miracle cures. We ride fifteen-second reels calibrated to our nervous systems. We get interrupted from our distractions by notifications about four-day-old posts we missed because we were already distracted. The whole stack is designed to keep us just engaged enough to show us one more thing.
And then there’s me.
I’m staring at my phone too. Except I’m logged into my home server, typing text into Emacs, reading plain-text email, surfing the web with no graphics or ads, connecting with people over secured channels that have been around since the eighties. Dressed in tribal garb, war paint in place, conversing with others in the mothership about things that would be incomprehensible to anyone who could actually hear my voice.
I am the alien in the room. Quietly disguised as a Gorilla Glass worshipper, apparently stroking my idol to summon the Blessed Dopamine. In fact I’m inhabiting a world where simple truth is revered, complexity is earned, and all claims for the One True Way are treated with the suspicion they deserve – which is principle sixteen, if you’re counting.
The irony is that from the outside we look identical. Both hunched. Both scrolling. Both somewhere else entirely.
The difference is I know where I am.
The zeitgeist feels like being one of the few teflon lifeboats in a sea of molasses. Whether that’s wisdom or just a different flavor of delusion, I genuinely can’t tell you. The jury is still out.
Looking at their phones.