Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The New Phone Sex

Before you ask, no I don't want to see your new iPhone app that reads your palm. Nor do I want to see how your Google phone can find me the shortest line for a Subway sandwich within a 5 mile radius. I simply don't give a holy, flying goddamn, but thanks anyway. It's not that I don't think some of those things sound kind of interesting, it's that I don't want to be one of those people. You know, the ones convinced everyone around them secretly wants to see the latest useless thing their gadget can do.

You know the people in the iPhone ads that cheerily believe they are evolving into a higher species thanks to the sheer usefulness of their little magic box? Those ads make me want to take a hammer to my TV.

I don't have an aversion to technology per se, in fact I can understand their affliction to a degree. I've owned a couple of Palm pilots in my time and initially enjoyed slapping on whatever free application I could scrape up. Even if they were primitive by comparison to today's touchscreen time-killers, my able little Tungsten was able to display a color map of the New York City subway system years before anyone riding on it had even heard of an iPhone. To be fair there may be something of a been-there-done-that mentality at work behind my bah-humbug attitude.

So why do still I refuse to join the dark side? First of all, I'm too cheap to piss away another 30 bucks a month for a data plan. I mean I don't even pay for garbage collection, thanks to a convenient and little known dumpster at an undisclosed location between my house and the office.

But it's more than just my frugality that keeps me in the stone age with a phone that can merely play solitaire and take crappy photos. The true reason is I don't want it to capture my soul. Comparing your phone's capabilities has become a modern day pissing match, one in which normally stable people are reduced to showing how cool their phone is to anyone that will listen. And if their phone is cool, then by the new logic, they must be cool. And isn't that what everyone really wants deep down anyway? Oh Fonzie, if only you knew how diluted that word has become.

I once thought this phenomenon was restricted to the techy world. We expect people with Dilbert calendars on their desks to spend way too much time fondling the gadgets attached to their belts like so many holstered pistols. However these souls were but the vanguard of the smartphone addiction.

Now the mainstream has fully joined the phone wankfest, a fact made very clear to me at a recent dinner party. At one point when a guest stopped mid-conversation to check his email, or his text messages, or feed a virtual pet for all I know, the other three at the table followed suit like a pack of Pavlov's dogs. It was Friday evening, there were cocktails, and everyone's kids were safely playing in the den. But all these accomplished executives and soccer moms wanted to show me was a game where you direct a stream of virtual urine into a bowl. And one where you could play a cheesy little ukulele. One showed me an app that simulates a level. I am firmly convinced that he will use this “tool” to do nothing more than show others he has, anytime at the touch of his fingers, a level.

Studying their faces as they stared into their little screens, mesmerized, I was briefly reminded of Gollum stroking his Precious. “So beautiful. So thin. Feel it. Now give it back to us!” It's only a matter of time before a retractable phallus or its mirror complement is offered with these things so the relationship can finally be consummated. It's the logical progression.

After a few minutes my wife God bless her, whipped out her distinctly primitive Nokia and bragged “Thirty five dollars, used. No contract. Good reception.” The crowd stared up at her puzzled, their appreciation for irony already atrophying faster than high school French. There was no iPhone app for a witty retort. I soon excused myself to have an actual conversation with the smokers outside, a Bosnian couple who also liked to talk about booze and make fun of the rat race.

Flash forward to this evening at a red light when I saw a kid waiting for the light on his bicycle. He was right in the middle of the oncoming turning lane, zombied-out on his phone. A homeless guy with a sign on the corner told him to watch it, that he was going to get run over. The space cadet slowly glanced up, graciously removed one of his ear buds for a moment, then shrugged and sank back into the world of his digital master. I realized I would need to stifle my laughter if he was hit by a car. Other bystanders might not appreciate the Darwinian process in action as juicily as I, and laughing at a bloody kid on the road is generally frowned upon.

I don't want something with that kind of hypnotic power tethered to me. I want a phone that when it is dropped I will just shrug and blow off the dirt, not something I will ask if it is alright. Sometimes I drop mine just to remind it who's boss.

We already waste enough time on television, games, porno and the Internet. Yours truly is no exception. But the powers that be want you to be reading, viewing, playing, talking, texting, and jacking off to some electronic device at every waking moment, preferably if it scrapes a few bucks off you. And a year from now they want you to think the device you are currently reading, viewing, playing, talking, texting, and jacking off to is laughably inadequate and in need of replacement and a fresh spanking new contract. And chances are you will agree with them.

This is why 90% of the conversations I overhear drifting over cubical walls center around consumer electronics and media. The other 10% is split fairly evenly between traffic, kids, politics, and where to go for lunch. For this reason, I covet my noise-canceling headphones at work. Yes I know, they're technology that I'm hooked to. But at least I don't talk about them. Excepting this case, of course.

Now the thing about these apps is that anyone with some programming know-how can write them. And anyone with a good enough idea and some luck can even sell them. I've been writing programs for a long time. Back in the 90's I even did a working Monopoly video game for a college class. Like many others I too have kicked around the idea of writing one in the hopes of getting rich quick. Of course I'd be like the dealer that wisely doesn't touch his own product. Maybe I'll write an app of a simulated person that appears interested when you show them all your other apps. *Cha-ching*