Afew days ago, I picked up my phone and, in the course of about a minute, looked at a photo of my fat-cheeked baby giggling in a wading pool, a closeup shot of a fan-tailed songbird, a video of hundreds of desperate people waiting for a disappearing chance to exit a nightmare, a paragraph in a news story about a mother of five who died in a flood, a digital rendering of a blue sunset on a planet near the edge of our solar system, a video of a bikini-clad influencer begging her followers to save the coral reef, a text from a friend who was mad at herself for starting another argument with an anti-vaxxer, and a recipe for cold tomato-cilantro soup.
By now, this hardly registers as experience. That we prod our phones from morning to evening, reflexively seeking love and terror, is such a given that it has ceased for many of us to generate active meaning. It is already difficult for me to imagine anything other than this—anything other than grabbing the pocket-sized Internet to assume the vantage points of a god and a serf, simultaneously, anything other than constant confrontation with the systems that both demand our action and dwarf us into utter inconsequence. After eighteen months in which the physical world has been more or less swallowed by digital mediation, I find it hard to remember, some days, that I am capable of accessing a myriad of emotional textures aside from the one I fall into almost any time my fingertips are moving across a phone screen—numb exhaustion, dull anxiety, near-automated desire.
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By now, this hardly registers as experience. That we prod our phones from morning to evening, reflexively seeking love and terror, is such a given that it has ceased for many of us to generate active meaning. It is already difficult for me to imagine anything other than this—anything other than grabbing the pocket-sized Internet to assume the vantage points of a god and a serf, simultaneously, anything other than constant confrontation with the systems that both demand our action and dwarf us into utter inconsequence. After eighteen months in which the physical world has been more or less swallowed by digital mediation, I find it hard to remember, some days, that I am capable of accessing a myriad of emotional textures aside from the one I fall into almost any time my fingertips are moving across a phone screen—numb exhaustion, dull anxiety, near-automated desire.
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