obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition) (Apologies for a substack link but this one is worth it.)
Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe!
What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to us to give that moment meaning. Walter Benjamin called this fixture of modern life homogenous, empty time and believed it to be a real sickness inhibitive of social progress, though these days it’s nothing special…>we find ourselves stuck in the cafeteria of ultramechanized capitalism where the sushi of time goes round and round on the carousel. How tragic that we don’t pick a plate and eat it because we’re on our damn phones!!!! Or something!
…Thus, invoking (whether unwittingly or not) the utopian visions of the Arts and Crafts movement which thought, a bit too late, that the tide of mechanical reproduction and the resulting deskilling and abstracting of labor could still be turned by a return to handicraft, today’s analog influencers want you to believe that if you buy their course and put down your phone, you, too, can resist the world’s immiserating forces by using your hands to make things that matter, such as this needlepoint pillow kit that says ‘log off,’ which you can buy via this Etsy referral link for $39.99.
…I would say that the most important thing to keep in mind when quitting anything is that it is possible to change one’s behavior and have agency in one’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. This may sound obvious but you wouldn’t believe how many people are willing to cosign the idea that they are slaves to dopamine, that they are irretrievably enmeshed in the Matrix world of Screen Time Capitalism or whatever, that they are helpless to control their own minds. I have a serious mental illness that requires neurochemical modulation and even I can log off
…In order to quit, one must realize that what is really being interrogated is not necessarily the thing itself (and yes this includes Phone Capitalism) but the behavior and what we get out of it. What do we want from Phone World? Is it companionship? Prestige? Reassurance seeking? Attention? Entertainment? What do we get from doomscrolling? Why even call it that? Can we not use grown-up words like self-soothing, numbing, rumination, avoidance, paranoia. insecurity, anxiety, despondency, resentment, despair, anger etc. to describe our behaviors and the feelings behind them? If we can name these things, these actions, these needs, only then can we actually take the necessary steps to put the phone down and seek either help for ourselves or satisfaction of these needs in less maladaptive ways, because that’s the thing: ultimately, phone use is not an existential battle between the human mind and nefarious powerless-making material and mechanical forces — it is a behavior.
…The other advice I want to give is that regardless of what one does with one’s newfound quiet time, putting the phone down itself is enough. You don’t need to go form a political party or read the entire work of Dostoyevsky in a month with all that time. The harsher, more disappointing, more Benjaminian reality is that, when abstaining from our phones, when we suddenly feel the embodied length of a minute…we soon realize, horribly, that we don’t actually have much free time to begin with. Those three minutes at the bus stop may feel longer without Instagram but they are still only three minutes.
…getting off my phone and limiting my screen time has not radically reoriented my existence. It has not made me suddenly erudite, though it has welcomed considerable peace into my life. It is actually very relieving to not have four hundred commentators yelling in your ear about how we are all going to die from the climate change no one in power is doing anything to address whenever it gets a little smoky outside even though this is, in fact, true.
I updated the nav area of the archives (and corresponding categories) page. This precipitated a lot more historical metadata cleanup, and makes me want to speed up the archive culling process…but…meh.
