National Post (National Edition)
Oh good, another life-changing cellphone
Evidently the iPhone X is a “game changer.” And about time too. We’ve been playing the same boring old game for months, ever since the last great new smartphone revolutionized our shabby existences. Now at last we can begin to live. Possibly on the instalment plan.
I’m not saying I’d throw a free one back. But how can the universe be radically transformed for the better every two years by a telephone or anything else? And how can we have been miserable until Product X arrived and not notice, repeatedly?
When I first got a “cellphone,” I feared it would become a ball and chain. Which was as ridiculous as it sounded even though the “cellular telephone” only made calls, emailed and surfed the “web” using a “browser,” and life was grim and dismal.
Then came the original iPhone, a genuine “game changer” that put a computer in our pockets. Which we started using to argue with strangers who compared us to Hitler or search for cats that looked like him, which somehow does not sound ridiculous today, though it certainly would have when the “net” left the sea.
It also does not now sound ridiculous that I’d rather leave the house without my wallet and keys than my phone. I’d almost rather leave without my pants, though the world might disagree. I certainly don’t call it a cellphone any more. What other kind is there? (And please stop requesting my fax number; I left it in the Mesozoic.)
Speaking of faxing an Allosaurus, remember in the original Star Wars, the movie that invented special effects without wires or firecrackers, Luke can’t get a decent price for his hovercar because of the new model? It struck me as odd even then, before either kind of “PC,” to suppose after thousands of generations of interstellar travel personal transport would feature gamechanging breakthroughs annually.
Surely at some point, even if we don’t run out of technological ingenuity or hype, we run out of needs and desires. At least ones that can be satisfied by changing the rules of the game constantly instead of playing it better and more joyfully. Whatever the game is. Life, I think they call it.
I know, I know. Everyone’s hyping changely change-hoodship and a future so different from the drab present that time will run sideways or something. But what’s so wrong with things as they are after 250 years of amazing progress, from the mechanical loom to railways, electric light, colour TVs and microwave ovens? If technology could buy happiness shouldn’t we become less desperate for the next big thing as wonders accumulate?
I realize Tim Cook must present each new product as a dream you didn’t even know you had, partly for commercial reasons and partly to fill Steve Jobs’ enormous shoes. But every carmaker can’t be Henry Ford, and while I now struggle to parallel park without one, a rear camera is not the moving assembly line.
So here’s a game-changing thought. Perhaps what really matters in life is not what constraints we face but how we face them. The proposition is not absolute: being crushed by a huge rock limits your options drastically. But lacking an even better iPhone than you lined up for in September 2016 doesn’t, even if a year is an eon in frantic internet time. And I’m not just thinking of technology. At some point we might have enough “social change” to pause briefly to smell whatever replaced roses.
So here let me quote Aleksandr Herzen, writing with (gasp) a fountain pen, the “game-changing” ballpoint then still lurking in the dazzling steam age future of October 1888:
“If progress is the aim … Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach … draws back, and as consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitude crying, ‘Morituri te saluant,’ can only reply ‘After your death it will be beautiful on earth’? Do you really wish to condemn people to the sad role of caryatids, supporting the floor on which others will dance ... or of wretched labourers, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some mysterious treasure … ‘Progress in the future’ on its flag? ... an aim which is infinitely remote is not an aim but … a brilliant trick; an aim must be more immediate … at the very least, the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each age, each generation, each life had and has its own fullness.”
Even for Apple’s hyper-wealthy, trans-cool modernist executive icons. They invent the greatest thing ever, beam at it for a day or two, and then wonder, how can we improve on this piece of junk? As Marvin the Paranoid Android said, “Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cause I don’t.”
I don’t call it life satisfaction either. Maybe I need a new phone.