One freaky machine
Summer’s here, and I’m off to camp in Wisconsin for a month this Sunday. It will be four weeks of companionship with my fellow teen Jew, and of overcoming an alienation derived from whatever rift divides my and suburbanites’ cultures. It will be four weeks apart from my beloved brick of glass and steel that’s one out of millions, but by way of some lapse in rationality comes to feel like a friend. Every year I leave (this’ll be my sixth and last), I struggle with a withdrawal not from Facebook or Twitter, or Google Reader or email, I think, but from a sense of connectedness provided by the accessibility of those things. To me and my feelings, my phone has come to be a cyborg-ial umbilical cord by which I’m fed pieces of others’ intelligence, and send pieces of my own upstream. By now, it feels like a digital manifestation of community itself.
I think that it’s really, really natural to feel that way, even if it is misguided. One of my favorite things about humans is our biological thirst for interaction with others (or if you’d like to get mad sappy up in here: our biological thirst for love). Our phones make it easy for us to satisfy that need in a way that we haven’t been able to since the entirety of humankind was contained in one fertile crescent; they let us reach what we’ve tricked ourselves into believing is the whole thing—all of us—when in reality, it’s just one measly forum that a big bunch of us have a tendency to frequent. The vastness of the internet—our not being able to see where it starts and where it begins—is enough to make us think that it’s infinite. It isn’t.
It’s just one freaky machine. We’re always coming up with mind-blowing devices together. I think most people would agree that the internet is the most mind-blowing yet. Despite whatever significance it has in our lives—whatever push on reality—that’s all it is: a thing that we put together, that is gigantic, and that grows.
In that light, it’s easier to subdue my craving for a blue luminescence on my face, and for a mundane tweet about what my e-acquaintance saw on their morning walk today. But more importantly, it makes it easier for me to be more in-touch with the feeling in my gut that we’re all connected, if not by some super weird metaphysical tendrils, then by the sober reality that we’re all doing our things on the same hurtling rock.