Here’s a memory from before the first iPhone was released.
Due to a train strike I find myself stuck in the city of Luxembourg while on my way to France. What should I do? I have no friends, no connections, no map of the place, and only a sketchy understanding of the French language. I meet a Canadian at a youth hostel who, like me, is 19 years old. We chat for a bit and then decide to set off for a discotheque.
We have no internet, no way to find “the best” discotheque, no way to read online reviews and evaluate where we will have the ultimate “experience.” We’re a little confused, but then all at once I catch sight of a sign that looks like it can show us the way. It’s for a disco called “One of a Kind” (or at least that’s how my high school French interprets what it says). So we start following the sign.
And then we catch sight of another, identical sign. And another. These signs lead us deeper and deeper into the city. In tandem with our wandering, deeper and deeper goes our conversation. We go down alleyways and backroads. We ask strangers for directions and strike up conversations everywhere. We talk about our estrangements from our parents, our obsessions, our dreams for the future. We don’t become fast friends for life. But what we’ve accidentally found is meaningful. It makes us feel a little less lonely. A little less aimless. It gives us some heart to carry on.
About an hour into our search, we find two signs each, separately advertising the discotheque “One of a Kind” but pointing directly at one another across an intersection. It’s then that we realize that this is no advertisement for a discotheque. It’s a common street sign. Sens Unique means “One Way.” We laugh, find a restaurant, and have a dinner that we both enjoy. We never end up going to the disco, but who cares?
I think of this anecdote as we welcome yet another iPhone into the world (the seventeenth!) because there’s pretty much no chance it would ever happen today. My Canadian and I would have looked up “disco in Luxembourg.” We would have evaluated the merits of this disco or that one relative to our location in the city. Perhaps we would have disagreed on which disco we found preferable and parted ways in favor of our respective choices. Whatever the case, the silly dinner afterwards would never have taken place, and my Canadian friend would have remained a stranger.
Some might say the smartphone-assisted version of this evening would have been preferable. Such people might argue that we’ve evolved and been led forward by a miracle in our pockets. We never need to get lost again!
But I think there’s a much darker interpretation of this miracle. Inadvertently, the smartphone has destroyed our impetus to wander, get lost, and find ourselves.
Wandering and getting lost is an intrinsic part of our humanity. It’s baked into our very bones. For 290,000 of the 300,000 years we’ve been on this planet, we mostly wandered. Our prehistorical ancestors covered dozens of miles a day, sometimes in search of game. Sometimes looking for a warm place to sleep. But sometimes just simply to move across territory and observe. To be in motion, head up, eyes and ears attuned to serendipity, was our natural state of being.
But capitalism cannot tolerate “free” time and space. And, so, at last, we have the iPhone. A device that forces us to look down and ignore changes in light. We have its sister device, the air pod, a blindfold for the ears which encourages us to disregard the whispers of the planet. And perhaps most nefariously, we have Apple and Google Maps, which conspire to take our time and space at the same time.
No longer does one simply roll the dice and go. Instead one chooses a destination and walks toward it. Along the way the route is commodified. Restaurants suggested instead of found. Parks digitally delineated instead of outlined by the contours of our promenades.
This enclosure of our physical wandering is now mirrored in capitalist technology’s latest enclosure of our thinking routes. For if there is a mental equivalent to the factory of the body, surely it is the “search” function increasingly baked into the inquiries of the mind as planned out by ChatGPT.
No longer do you wander from book to book, author to author, mind to mind, serendipitously finding so many other things than what you are looking for. Now you plug in your question and you get “THE answer.”
Is this not short-circuiting our inherent curiosity? Living with the mystery of an unanswered question might be the greatest gift life can give to us. Is not losing yourself in a stream of deep thoughts in search of that elusive answer not part of the process of gaining wisdom?
For anyone who has ever meditated for any length of time, this is self-evident. When you meditate, you don’t plug “peace” into your mind and then get a search result which leads you to peace. Rather, in meditation, the struggling of the mind, the seemingly pointless questing for distraction, and then, the hard road back to centeredness is the point of it all.
The road of searching is the fertilizer in which peace grows. Bypassing it just doesn’t work.
And herein I think our opposable thumbs have tapped us to a dead end. Instead of letting our legs carry us aimlessly down the road with our minds interrogating every step, our thumbs pose too simple a question to which our smartphones are pleased to give us too simple an answer.
The British author Douglas Adams quite rightly parodied this line of inquiry decades ago in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when the super computer Deep Thought is asked the answer to the question of “the meaning of life, the universe and everything.” The computer calculates for 7.5 million years and concludes that the answer is . . . “forty two.” Earth itself, it turns out in Adams’ telling, is the only calculator that can give us the meaning we seek.
“I have two doctors, my left leg and my right,” said the historian G.M. Trevelyan. If we are to have a future that benefits from the lessons of our past, I’d suggest that we take Trevelyan’s statement as a prescription.
We need to walk. But more importantly, we need to wander. To wander in physical space as well as in our minds. To wander without intent, without surveillance, without the anticipation of acquisition and without expectation that the walk might benefit anything other than our freedom of spirit.
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