I hate cell phones. They’re a symptom of everything that’s wrong in America, like the rib cracking cough that’s makes pneumonia so much more insufferable than the flu. Fuck you, I don’t need you. There’s someone else, somewhere else, and they’re more important than you. I don’t need you. I am connected. I can talk to someone else. I’ve just been settling for you company, and I don’t need you anymore. And now I’m gonna run for mayor.
No wonder we’re all so desperate. No wonder we’re all so lonely. We live in our own head, at the whim of our whim. We’re indecisive, disoriented and confused. We don’t know where we are or who we want to be. We just know that we’re bored and are clinging to the hope that there’s just gotta be something better and more convincing beyond the immediate moment.
Eye contact can be terrifying. The eyes are the window to the soul, and it isn’t easy looking into the depths of someone else’s desperation and realizing that we’re not alone, realizing that we’re just as unoriginal and inconsequential and unappreciated as we find everyone else around us. So we put on the blinders, look at the ground six feet ahead of us, tune out, and tune into the magical little sound box that’s frying our occipital lobes one kilohertz at a time.
And what would we do if the network came crashing down tomorrow. Forget the disruption in communication. We’re a generation weaned on connections. We’re nothing on our own, and left to ourselves, we have nothing left to do but wallow in the foamy, white noise that’s our own shallow stream of consciousness.
I remember going to a conference in Vegas in 2005. It was The Magic Show and I was working for American Apparel. It was 2005, our phones were still in the stone age, and The Magic Show is one of the biggest conferences in the world. The system couldn’t hack it, and it crashed like a neanderthalic superstructure. We were lost. A bunch of us had push-to-talk phones and could still communicate enough to get our jobs done, but our safety net was gone. All our conversation could be heard by everyone around us.
There was no privacy, no one to confide in, no escape. We were stuck with whoever we happened to be standing near and were completely alone. And there’s nothing quite as pathetic in the same way as a hipster who has to face their own irony. Fuck it, I couldn’t take it. I ripped the battery from my phone and drove out to the desert with a model who robbed me of everything but my soul. She was a good girl.