Pulling the Veil from the Void

"Your phone, that hunk of rare earth metals and electricity, certainly does not need you..."

Becoming, Sabine Spier

Rufus Knuppel is a 20-year-old writer from New York City studying English at Dartmouth College.

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While I was a toddler in the summer of 2007, burying myself in sand at the beach, lines were forming outside of Apple stores, rows of buyers giddy to get their hands on an iPhone. Eighteen years on, ninety percent of Americans own a smartphone. But the diagnosis is bad. The smartphone makes us sick. It rots our brains away. It deprives us of our beings.

I recently watched Steve Jobs’s ten-minute introduction to the iPhone on my computer, disturbed. “Every once in a while,” he begins, “a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” Steve Jobs, the silicone, entrepreneurial titan, is dead, but his smartphone revolution lives on. The devices in our pockets today are far from the primitive, original iPhones — their App-Store-less interfaces, their grainy cameras, their square-in-circle home buttons. The smartphone is the vital accessory of modern life. But the Jobs speech, which has nearly 50 million views, unsettled me not for its clairvoyance, nor its inevitability. The keynote has an air of gleeful solemnity; Jobs wears black and speaks gravely, as if seeing the future; the announcement unfurls, the presentation spins, the crowd cheers. But all the while I had the sick feeling that I had found the precise moment, like a cursed home video of a tragic death, when our humanity began to shrivel away.

Nearly two decades later, the comments agreed with me: “This is when society died…the worst thing to happen to humanity…the start of the end.” We all seem agreed that our smartphones are bad. We check our screen-times and get a little nauseous. We say things like, yeah, I should probably look at my phone less, and, yeah, I’ve been trying this thing where I don’t go on my phone before bed. There exists mass consensus that our phones are evil, yet we all own one despite it.

Toting around a smartphone is like carrying a little slab of poison in your pocket. But the drug is so good, so addictive, so powerful, we’re convinced that we can’t live our lives without it. We spend five hours a day, on average, puffing away on opium, hooked to an IV drip, our attentions fixed to pixels. The mean American adult lives a third of their waking life on their phone, not including time spent on their computer, their tablet, or their TV. Our consciousness — on the scale of the species — is a brief and transient gift. By comparison our own lifespans are granular. To spend any fraction of that mysterious time senselessly numb, glued to the same patch of glass, should make you shudder. Spending a third of your life on your phone — well, that should send a chill, like a drop of mercury, down your spine to your silver soul. We don’t have to accept the encroachment of the digital. In fact, the correct response to our phones is insurgent and reactionary. The proper behavior is extreme. The right thing to do is to rid ourselves of this venom before it’s too late.

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The iPhone’s vanguard destiny first revolved around its supremacy as a practical tool. Everyone needed an iPhone because it was simply the best option available. Humans in 2007 still operated like hunter-gatherers. If a more lethal spear came on the market, you just had to have the more lethal spear. Nowadays, tell someone you don’t own a smartphone, and they’ll gawk at you in disbelief. Even adults, most of whom have lived a majority of their lives virgins to this technology, will scowl in suspicious wonder.

The trick to the grand deception is in the spectacle of advertising. We all worship the religion of science. The key is that techno-capitalists can convince you that you need something, even when you don’t. That progress is good, even when it isn’t. That convenience is happiness, even when you’re sad and lonely and hate yourself for scrolling. They don’t care that you haven’t been outside for hours or that the sun just set.

The microchip oligarchs talk of an “attention economy.” They buy up your time and your brain, settling your independent faculties like real estate in Monopoly. They purchase your neighbor’s property and move in next door. The first thing you do when you think about getting rid of your phone is run through a laundry list of activities for which you’ll need your phone if it does indeed go missing. The morning alarm. Two-factor authentication. The camera. Your messages. The timer. Your calls. The weather. The calendar. Your emails. The news. The directions. The search bar. Your credit cards. Etc. You know your phone makes you unhappy, but you’ve come to depend on it. You’re helpless without it. It’s too integrated into your life. It’s your iron lung. And then you remember that you’re a human being.

When the original iPhone launched, the software didn’t support an App Store. The settlement of our minds occurred through one long tedious roll-out. The techies accumulated territory over many years through the modern-age arcade. Apps are the suicide bombers of the attention economy terrorists. Every task can be made more efficient by an icon on your phone. Identifying wine, naming birds, measuring lengths, and so on. Defunct apps lie around the back pages of our phones like files in an old closet, all of them contracts we signed to sell our brains and our time to a piece of code. The apps snatch away our fun like pickpockets. But the worst of the worst are not the logos collecting dust, but the Osama Bin Laden-s of attention terrorism, the social media platforms (even worse are the mobile games, but their evil is self-explanatory, like heroin). These algorithmic kamikazes are slaughtering our generation’s valor, our self-worth, our ideas, our individuality, our enchantment. The social media apps aren’t men, though, dying for their emperor, they’re passive drones, serving no one except the machine. Unfortunately, they’ve succeeded in murdering our generation. In the collective hours we’ve spent idling away on Instagram, we could have constructed cathedrals and pyramids, or at least we might have talked to our friends.

The smartphone functions like a brain-eating parasite. A person nominally unwinds by shutting down their mind and letting waves of blue light wash over their glazed eyes. The deeper the scroll, the further the functions boot down, like lights in a warehouse. Then your brain goes black-out. If you think you have a special, healthier relationship to your phone, you don’t and you’re deluding yourself.

Spend a day noticing all the times you pick up your phone, and you’ll start to feel disgusted. Wake up — no sunshine — texts. Breakfast — no taste — news video. Commute — no observation — article. Toilet — no thinking — social media. Movie — no talking — notifications. Food — no eating — picture. Orgasm — no cuddling — what happened on my phone. But the worst of all, maybe, is the awkward moment at a meeting, a party, or a bar when in the dead silence, the potential moment of breakthrough with a stranger, you smash any potential connection into pieces by staring at your phone. You didn’t even try to talk; your phone habit hooked you first.

On the other hand, shut off your phone for twenty-four hours and you will feel how numb you once were. Awake and hear the birds — you don’t even have to name them, they sound better unnamed! Eat and care about the taste in your mouth. Talk and focus on the other person. Walk and observe what life is happening around you. Notice how the anxiety of constant stimulation retracts. Wonder why you haven’t felt the urge to look at your socials. Watch how everyone else is playing a different game from you: phone up, phone down, phone up, phone down. The phone game is not real life, you think, and waltz on.

So you’re not addicted, you’re not numb, you haven’t lost your senses, you’re just well-trained. Your phone hasn’t buzzed, so you haven’t picked it up yet. Your notifications haven’t triggered your instincts because you don’t have your phone on you right now. You don’t open your apps because you don’t see the red dots and the shimmering icons. The signals aren’t present, and you don’t crave the rewards.

In this way, we are all like rats, hitting glowing buttons to receive treats. We say we aren’t because we know we’re human. We can think, we can feel, we can conceptualize that we’re operating like rats even, but it doesn’t preclude the fact that our reality is pushing glowing buttons with our paws to get treats.

Here’s what they want you to think to yourself: I can’t leave my phone right now — someone might call, someone might text, I might need a photo, something might happen in the news. This urgency, this constancy, this fallacy of need is the core of the problem. Your phone, that hunk of rare earth metals and electricity, certainly does not need you; your expensive smartphone does not need to be loved and coddled like a child or a pet. Sever this false bond and you will have freed yourself from digital slavery.

Our phones explain our miserable unhappiness. The common statistics suggest that our generation is lame, stunted. We go out less, we make fewer social engagements, we have less sex. We are the unhappiest generation of young people in a long time. What happened? What changed? We were force-fed smartphones like French ducks. Our brains are fatty masses of digital crud. The price of convenience is unhappiness, and we’ve all paid the ante.

I’m not making an argument here about the internet or screens in general. I’m not anti-technology or anti-progress. Innovation has undoubtedly made us healthier as a collective. A male colonist in the eighteenth century could expect to live to twenty-eight. I’m arguing specifically against the ubiquity of our phones, the dilution of reality, the destruction of the present, the idea that our phones are necessary. In actuality, they make us needlessly unhappy, inactive, unalive. The internet should be something we clock in and out of, not an omnipresent entity. The OLED-tentacles of our smartphones are wrapped around us, constricting our lifeforce, choking our relationships, limiting our precious liberty to feel! I dare someone to argue the counterfactual.

We’re the first generation to be weaned on this digital IV drip. Older shamans handed the phones to us when we were nine or ten or eleven or twelve (if we were lucky). We wanted them because our parents had them. We became addicted before we had a choice. Our elders complain that we can’t read books like they once did. But they can hardly read books either. Everyone knows the dreaded panic of their parents sending them short-form video content — God forbid their grandparents too. It makes us feel sick. It’s the same cringe that descends when a dad crashes their kid’s college party to feel hip and young again. But that flinching at the old man shot-gunning beer is the moment to look in the mirror and take inventory. How many times have you emerged from the scroll, woozy, spinning from hypnotic concentration?

The paranoia of the archive consumes us: nothing is really experienced without a phone to document it. But in reality, the phones are empty, black vacuums, sucking experience out of our lives. But my phone is so full! I have the whole world at my fingertips! But do you really? Or are you losing out on the world by staring at your phone? The temptation leans toward mediocrity. The phone is like a Swiss Army Knife, good for cutting your fingernails, pointless for building a house. The urge is to say, well, I can watch movies from anywhere, I can read books wherever I go. But who really watches more movies, reads more books, lives more, does more, feels more, because of their phone? The fix is intentionality: reinvesting in the present and the task at hand, in doing the dishes and focusing on doing the dishes, in photographing a walk and bringing only a camera, in picnicking at sunset and enjoying the view. The phone obscures this deliberateness. Every objective is available to you, but nothing can be done well.

In fact, the experience of going on your phone is plain, flat, and universal. When you summit a mountain and check your phone, you are plucked from whatever particular coordinate of time and space you occupy and heaped instead onto the great mass of other phone-gawkers everywhere for all time. The experience of the mountaintop — the moment of actualization in which one gazes upon a view, asks questions of one’s smallness, one’s being, one’s senses, one’s place — this moment is annihilated by the axe of the phone. The grand sublimity comes crashing down to base banality. An experience terminates, ruptures, the moment you indulge your dirty habit. The phones constantly agitate the present, kick up muck in the riverbed, place us in a daze. Do you ever dream of using your phone? The truth is the phones cannot permeate our fantasies because they are so meaningless to our subconsciousness: they exist only on the surface of life. They have no relationship to the void.

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I sat next to a girl my age in a movie theater recently who went on her phone during all the sex scenes. What is wrong with us? We don’t like looking reality in the face. We’d rather approach it through a screen, through our phones. The phone is a digital veil, like hologrammatic wool, pulled over our eyes, covering up the questions of being.

What I’m saying about our phones being bad has no novelty. The dangerous idea is that we have been heading down the road to doom for the last two decades and need to quickly, aggressively turn back. The volatile sentiment is that we must reverse from where we’ve invested and buck the great titans of the twenty-first century from our backs. The anti-phone manifesto is a stale argument, precisely because so many say and think it (my phone is so bad for me!) but walk around still glued to their screen. They read about how bad their phones are on their damn phone! Many will complain that if they didn’t have a phone, they’d get bored on the toilet. I say good. Be bored. Focus on your excrement. Contemplate your fickle existence.

In a recent conversation with my friend, he posited that our generation’s unhappiness is linked to the suppression of our innate, human neediness. We’re all desperate gluttons for human interaction, human touch, human bonds — love, friendship, sex. He’s right, and what the phone does best is sublimate our neediness into mute unhappiness. Our generation has less friends than previous classes because we displace our desire onto our phones. Boredom was a dreaded word for our parents growing up. They were raised with plenty of empty time. Now, with our smartphones, we’re never bored, per se, but we’re always placated, pleased just enough, stimulated just right. I’ve been told many times that TikTok is “just a really great way to pass the time.” The replacement for the former idleness is the modern plague of apathy.

But boredom is good! It’s productive to have nothing to do, to wander, to invent, to imagine, to think. It’s important to feel lonely, to wonder where you are and how you got there. It’s necessary to ask scary questions, to crave other humans, to seek connection. The phone plugs those feelings with digital fantasia. We forget that we need each other to live. We feel miserable and can’t place quite why. Feeling lonely, in the absence of your phone, can remind you that there are people who you care about, who you want to see, who you want to kiss — that the spiritual adventure of life is in the constellation of our communal humanity, that we cannot forget, while we are on this planet, to live face to face.

Mark Zuckerberg recently said in an interview that most Americans have three friends but the science says we need fifteen: that’s why Meta’s developing AI chatbot companions. These older generations really think we’re stupid. There was once a “greatest generation.” Now they call our years “the TikTok generation.” We don’t deserve it, but we certainly earned our title. We’re all addicted to the slop on our phones. We take brain rot head-on. Our attention spans look like roadkill. They assigned millennials the task of adapting capitalism to the internet. Now they want to assign the best and brightest of our generation a brand-new mission: turn everything AI. They point to our phone usage as the merit of our idiocy, and they’d be right. But God help us, we are not the TikTok generation! We must create things! We must love! We must travel! We must go to parties! We must have lots of sex! We must live! The more we go on our phones, the more the electricity of youth, the energy of our age, is zapped from us. Every time the screen lights up, our bandwidth flows into the smartphone.

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” If we keep on suppressing our humanity, scrolling our phones, we make ourselves easier to rule. The less we bond together, the more atomized we act. The less analog we become, the more powerful the automatons grow. The less humane we behave and the less mystical we feel, the more inferior we are to the real machines. The technocrats and the coder-boys speak far too often of their supremacy over the fallible human. They believe they can rule us because we’re hooked to their algorithms, because it’s so easy to manipulate our sycophantic attentions. They think we’ve sacrificed our right to self-determination by becoming subservient to their trillion-dollar digital schemes. They expect AI policing to yield net-benefits and crypto to be the currency of the future. They’re convinced corporate revenue models work better for humans than bureaucratic states because the market encourages efficiency and growth. They see the solution for everything in the economy of autonomous operation.

So we must clutch tight to the tiger of our myths and our irrationality, our un-programmability and our physical existence. We must fight for our politics to be conducted in the human realm instead of the server farm. And we must not relinquish the murky sovereignty of truth to the streamlining of the auto-complete machine.

As revolutions occur, politics fold back into the culture — capitulate, dissipate into history. As the computer receded beneath the internet, as the internet disappeared below the smartphone, thus the smartphone fades under the shadow of AI. That new revolution is coming fast, barreling toward us. There’s no way to stop it. The new silicone CEOs spout that the social contract is about to change, that the new dawn is near. It’s already upon us. The setting in of regime is downstream from the flurry of coup. But this is exactly the time to renegotiate our relationship to our phones. To say the experiment has failed. To terminate our unhappiness. To strip back the veil, to stare into the void.

There are three ways forward for the willing Luddite. The first journeyman dips his toes reluctantly in the pool: he comes home from work or school and shuts off his phone for the night. The second wades up to her waist: she deletes the attention terrorists from her phone, she strips the software to its bones, she powers her smartphone on only in emergencies. The third submerges themselves in reality: they sell their smartphone and replace it with parts — a flip-phone, a camera, an alarm clock. Something about the water calls each of them. Something mysterious about the wetness of existence. Something urges them onward, deeper.

Stumbling upon a McDonald’s in the heart of an ancient city is never a good feeling. I am reminded of my homestay in Rabat, Morocco. I lived in the Old Medina, the most traditional part of the seaside capital, where the streets were narrow and the families were all related. At dinnertime, we sat around the table, picking at the central tajine, each locked into our private worlds. The phones sprayed sound at each other, but I listened for the frequency that matched my own simulacrum. Chuckles. Scrolling fingers. Endless hours of emptiness. Our American export looks dirtier abroad. I am reminded, too, of a conversation I had with my coworkers in Berlin. They were telling me there was a new drug causing an uptick in overdoses in vulnerable areas of the city. “Have you heard of this drug,” they asked me, “fen-ta-nyl?” I got a similar feeling recently when watching Steve Jobs.

Don’t kid yourself, you too are captive, the phone holds you under its opiate spell. Two powerful and disparate groups want the same destination for our technology. The optimists claim discovery empowers democratic, healthy, and free lives. The pessimists say that human nature is violent, and the security dilemma requires the good guys getting their hands on weapons before the bad. Therefore, technology will develop, inevitably, irrationally, without regard for our happiness, some good and some bad. But on the individual level, we must take the extra time to hesitate and ask what technology we are willing to surrender into our personal lives.

Here the fork splits over our fealty at the altar of progress. You don’t have to carry a phone. Why submit to their desire to strip us of our humanity, our only claim to being, our only source of life? AI will become tremendously, unpredictably powerful. But the question remains: will we allow this technology to exert control over our social sphere, our romance, our individuality? Will we submit and go along? This is what our generation must begin the process of rejecting. We must learn and create this technology — ruthlessly for good — while keeping it far, far away from ourselves.

How rare these days to meet someone our age seriously engaged in the questions of being: the spiritual youth, the one who endeavors toward philosophical meaning, the sublime-seeker, the transparent eyeball. Their sincerity takes us aback. Why are we startled by the zealot? Why are the experiences of our youth extra-natural? My friend tells a story of a grade school trip she made with her class at twelve-years-old to the Grand Canyon. At night, in the deserted national park, the kids gathered in a circle under the stars, bearing glow-sticks, talking about their memories. Hushed, mesmerized, they all began to cry. The night sky! The cosmos! The oceanic feeling! The questions of being! So rarely are we confronted head on with these queries, so seldom do we think of ourselves within the existential matrix of oblivion. The light pollution of the industrial and the digital silences the void. That fact that we will die is quieted by the very thing making our fragile lives less vibrant, less meaningful.

In an early essay, “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche outlines the difference between the intuitive and the rational man. The intuitive man “to be sure…suffers more intensely” than the rational man. But only in him can “art’s mastery over life” exist, for he disregards fear and counts “as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.” The rational man, governed by pleasure, adverse to misfortune, instead “wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.”

So we idle on apps, stoic and expressionless in the warm glow of our screens, wrapped in our cloaks, shielded from the storm. The thundering questions of being swirl and crack over our heads, but we hide ourselves from the downpour. By eliminating smartphones, our generation can commence the work of recuperating whatever humanity the ruling classes have sucked out of us through the IV drip. The opium veil does not supply life by sheltering us from the void. The drug can only drain us. We are human beings. We cannot allow our beings to be taken away.