on tools
i am not throwing my phone into the ocean yet
Apple recently had to apologize for their most recent iPad Pro ad, in which an enormous hydraulic press crushes and destroys a variety of creative equipment such as musical instruments, arcade cabinets, camera lenses, and sculptures into the neat form factor of an iPad Pro, implying that the tablet would replace the need for any of this other stuff — too extraneous and messy for modern life. With this ad, Apple imagined that they were identifying efficiency, saying, “look how much stuff you don’t need to haul around anymore, it’s all here in our little metal and glass box,” when it looked and sounded a lot more like, “look how much you’ve lost, how much we have taken away from you, how much more we can.”
So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at my phone with newfound ire, noticing the trade-offs that come with each of the innovations. AirPods are convenient ways to listen to music, but their microphones are basically unusable for any sort of phone or video call. And more obviously and widely, distraction leaks into any task that I want to do with it. Taking a photo is interrupted by a notification and several minutes of scrolling through my phone, enough to forget what I even took a photo of in the first place. A moment to google something is derailed by a 20-minute journey into the worst that the internet has to offer.
I have idealized dreams of all that I could accomplish in any given week: write every day, eat healthy, work out consistently, see friends, be outside. I imagine having endless time and energy to do these things, fluidly moving between the different aspects of my life.
But as I step back, it’s clear how much time I really do have, and how most of it is spent either searching for some distraction or being so caught up in a distraction that I don’t realize the moments slipping through my fingers. If it’s not to keep me from feeling something (boredom, emotions), it’s to ease the pain of doing basic tasks like washing the dishes or warming up food for myself or getting actual work done. Even as I write, every time a sentence stops flowing I instinctively switch to a new window, scroll twitter, play a quick bullet chess game; anything to avoid the discomfort of having to think harder.
Even as I’ve become more observant of these patterns, my attention has felt particularly precarious in the last few weeks, even with the screen time limits on my phone and toggling my phone to grayscale to make my phone less appealing. While watching a video on my phone, I ran a load of laundry the other day without putting any detergent in — just wetting my dirty clothes for the sport of it. Out of frustration over the wasted water and time, I tossed my phone into my bed and took in the state of my room, noticing how messy it had gotten, how I’d lost track of what was going on outside of my phone, wondering what else I might’ve missed in the process.
In contrast, I watched the film Days of Being Wild (1990) the other day and couldn’t stop thinking about how engaged everyone was in their actions — one character continuously preens himself in every mirror in sight, adjusting his hair over and over again until it’s just perfect. In another scene, he meticulously pulls a record out of the sleeve, puts it on and dances to it by himself. The shots are long, beautifully color-graded, and we spend a lot of time simply seeing characters exist, letting us into their mostly mundane lives where they often just sit and be. The film is set in 1960 and director Wong Kar-Wai is a master of styling it perfectly, making the lives of questionable characters look beautiful, admirable even. But what would he do when trying to represent a life like mine, in a time like this?
How do you make life today look admirable when every action that matters — sending and receiving texts that change lives, booking a flight across the country, finding out major news — just looks like tapping and staring at a little glass box? Where are our bodies in all of this? What is lost when text on the screen is the only way for us to experience so much of how we live? Should so much information, so much of life, be experienced the same way? Doesn’t it all start to meld together into one long scroll, our necks crooked, wrists sore?
I’ve been trying to take steps towards freeing myself from my phone — looking back to the sorts of tools that Apple is so keen to destroy. I unearthed my camera from my closet to take photos with, got a cheap e-reader smaller than my phone for the bus rides where I don’t bring my Kindle, started carrying a notebook and pencil, and an audio recorder to record the ambient sounds for some undefined creative project in the future. All of these tools are theoretically obsolete compared to my phone, and yet I return.
Taking photos feels more substantial when you have to manually tinker with the settings, fight against the way that the light reflects against the waves and how dark the whole world looks in contrast. When trying to record the sound of the waves, I notice that the wind sounds lessen when I point my ears towards the waves compared to when I look at them head-on. My thoughts feel more real when I push wood and graphite into paper, as the pencil lead changes shape as I write more and more and my handwriting alters to match the changing form. The lack of uniformity in the letters is freeing, nonsequiturs come more naturally, and reading my handwriting later becomes a creative exercise (”does this say microphone or microplastics?”). I write down things that I would typically text my friends. So many of those conversations get lost to the archives, it’s more likely that I’ll re-discover these ideas again on paper.
It seems that time moves a little more slowly when I live through these tools. There’s less immediacy implied in something disconnected from the internet, less inherent change at all moments. None of these tools are new either: I bought the wooden pencil I’m using when I visited San Francisco in 2015 or 2016, I bought the notebook I’m using around 2019, my audio recorder is from 2010, my camera is from 2014. These tools continue to work perfectly, as if they never needed to be replaced in the first place, and certainly as if they needn’t be crushed.
I still keep checking my phone as I use these tools, although less. I snap a few photos on the phone since I can send them without editing them, I still text my friends my thoughts, but I have a paper record of them too. Life still flows through the phone for now, but I get to experience these things in multiple angles, to imagine how a cinematographer might line up the shot to capture a life a little more admirable.
Programming note: I will be traveling to Tokyo for the next week and change, so expect a break in Splashes! More when I’m back!
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - may 24 - jazz, classical, house, electronic, we got it all
POEM - “Age of Pleasure” by Derrick Austin - It wasn't true / that you never went out. The mosaics were hidden.
I went to a party a few weeks ago where the host asked us to use her digital & Polaroid cameras to take pictures and it was fascinating!! So many of us hadn’t used a proper camera in years.
THE BODY IS SO IMPORTANT