I’ve been trying to write more — mostly journaling, with a few little side projects here and there. It’s been a pleasant surprise to see just how much can come pouring out when I give myself the time and mental space. Memories that haven’t surfaced in years; opinions I didn’t know I had or (through writing) found I can’t actually justify; petty grievances and imagined slights that evaporate at the slightest introspection.
I’m more than a little ashamed to admit that at this point in my life, “giving myself time and mental space” basically equates to taking a break from being on my phone.
YouTube is the Charybdis of my digital life, swallowing up vast quantities of time as I navigate the day on my little screen. After all, the button for YouTube lives right next to the buttons for Mail, Messages, Slack, and Calendar. One slip of the thumb and I’m swirling down again. What’s worse (thanks to advances in App Technology and a serf-like subscription to YouTube Premium) once I start a video, exiting the app leaves the video hovering over the rest of my digital life Picture-in-Picture. Occasionally I’ll need to fling the hovering box to another side of screen if the video I’m only half paying attention to gets in the way of something else on the screen that (by virtue of the video) I’m at most half paying attention to.
If the story I’m sketching here isn’t already clear enough: I wouldn’t be shocked to find that a double digit percentage of my waking life in the past decade has been spent in the company of a YouTube video. I’ll be generous to myself in clarifying that most of what I watch is educational or informational in at least some way — lectures, speeches, documentaries, science and math content, etc. But much of it isn’t.
As a consequence of using the platform so consistently, for so long, YouTube has the ability to re-serve me videos in its algorithmic feed that I watched 10 or even 15 years ago (before the algorithmic feed existed). Videos that (somehow) it knows had a big impact on me at the time. I’ve been surprised to notice just how little of these videos I actually remember — even videos that carved deep grooves in my brain at the time feel unnervingly new and alien on a re-watch. It doesn’t feel the same with writing; re-reading things from long ago feels like seeing an old acquaintance again, but watching an old YouTube video feels like seeing someone again that I forgot I’d met before.
Currently, Instagram is probably a close second by mind-share. If YouTube is my dear long-time friend (and it is), Instagram is the member of the friend group I’m all of a sudden spending a lot more time around, though I’m still unsure if I really like them. Instagram Reels is the only product with a purely algorithmic feed that’s had success with me, and for that I guess Zuck can be proud. I have a perverse love for my Reels algorithm. Built it “brick by brick” as they say. Some of the weirdest, cleverest, funniest, most unsettling, horrific things I’ve seen on the internet has been delivered to me through Reels.
(I’m sure others feel the same about TikTok. I bounced off TikTok for reasons that aren’t totally clear to me. The best I can piece together is that it felt more adversarial to the user than any tech product I’d experienced before. Tristan Harris describes social media algorithms as supercomputers pointed at your brain, and nowhere has that description felt more viscerally true than in my short tryst with the TikTok algorithm.)
Then there are Podcasts. I don’t even really think of them as products of the Internet, through of course they are. Over time, they’ve become something in the same category as light fixtures for me. They’re there when I need them, all the time, everyday — and that’s about as much as I can say about them — until they’re not, after which everything feels a bit off.
Then there are the thousand little pings, vibrations, banners, red corner dots, and quick diversions that populate the rest of my life on the phone. And at this point so much of my life really is on the phone. I’ll stop short of listing actual Screen Time numbers, but suffice it to say the mere maintenance of my dignity requires that I don’t share them publicly.
One of the most alarming things I’ve found as I’ve begun to journal more is just how quickly and dramatically — yet, imperceptibly — my relationship with my phone, and the internet, has changed.
It’s not as though smartphones are new. I’ve had one since high school, and I’m in my early thirties now. But as I relive moments from the not-too-distant past I’m remembering more clearly what my relationship to the phone and the Internet used to be like.
Out of curiosity, and to corroborate my hazy memories, I went searching for videos of what it was like to use an iPhone in the year I started college. iOS 5 was released in June 2011 — the last version of iOS to be released before Steve Jobs died in October. Its hallmark features were the introduction of iCloud, the Notifications Center, and the camera shortcut on the Lock Screen; and the ability to sync data and install updates wirelessly (before this, you had to use the wide, click-y 10-pin connector to plug your phone in to the computer and manage everything through iTunes).
Apple was still leaning in to Skeuomorphism as its primary design principle: the Notes app looked like a yellow legal pad and text input showed up in what looked like handwritten print; the Voice Memos app looked like a big old-timey radio microphone; the icon for the YouTube app looked like the kind of huge boxy ‘50s cathode ray tube TV set you’d change the channel on by turning knobs on the front. Instagram had launched only a few months earlier, and its icon was a just-so digitalized front-view of an ‘80s Polaroid instant camera. When Apple introduced Twitter integration device wide in the iOS 5 launch, their UI for tweeting out a picture from the camera roll looked like an index card you wrote your tweet on, with the picture attached by paperclip. Everything looked positively adorable, as though designed by people with actual, uncynical vestiges of child-like wonder.
(There was more to Skeuomorphism than it seemed on the surface, in retrospect. There was still a pervasive sense that the phone and the internet were not the real world. So, to make the phone and the internet feel more like a part of the real world, the interface was designed as a simulacrum of it. We no longer feel the need to do this anymore. If anything, we design the real world to look more digital now.)
If you can, you should watch a video of it for yourself. We used to watch the pages load, element by element, in the web browser when we visited a website. We were all still figuring out what these things were for. Now that question seems silly or ill-posed, like asking what the meaning of life is. The whole point of the phone is that it’s for anything and everything.
I’ve always been a tech nerd. I mined bitcoin out of sheer curiosity from an otherwise idle gaming laptop in my bedroom somewhere between 2010 and 2011 — it’s in landfill somewhere. I modded Counter Strike and jailbroke my iPod touch. I somehow successfully convinced my mom not to worry about the letters we got from our ISP about Limewire. In the span of 2 or 3 years I had a Motorola Razr, an LG Chocolate, a Palm Pre. I remember watching the “one more thing” moment in which Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone, from the desktop in my Computer Room. I had to have one.
But, more than the technology or the operating systems themselves, I remember my relationship to the phone having a different character. It was still a device. It didn’t hold as much of my life within it. It was a conduit to parts of the world, not a portal through which the whole world flowed. The internet felt like something I acted on, not something that acted upon me.
We talk about phones and the internet in the latter terms now. We talk about what iPads do to babies. We talk about what phones do to teen girls’ mental health. We talk about what social media does to our public discourse. We talk about how YouTube and TikTok radicalize young men. Everything is framed in terms of what the products and devices do to us.
I wonder how much of this has to with the smartphone itself. It’s a giant screen. The very form of it cries out for passivity. It allows for input, but only as a means to facilitating further media consumption. Input is of course possible — the device would be unusable without it — but it’s worth noticing how much of what the modern smartphone does happens without input: playlists are automatically populated after the queue ends, embedded media autoplays, algorithmic feeds populate themselves. The modern smartphone is not the spiritual successor to the computer, but the television. It feels a bit strange even to notice that we still call it a “phone”. Something like half of the people my age or younger would rather commit seppuku than talk to someone on the phone.
Through the likes of Neal Postman and David Foster Wallace we got glimpses of what was in store for us as the television evolved. Much of this writing focused on what the medium would do to the user, how it would work against us — what the medium incentivizes, what the user desires. Those critiques came at a time when the television still hosted content that required skill, organization, and forethought so there was a sinister patina to the prognostications. There was the vague specter of writers rooms and entertainment executives optimizing for pure hedonism, aimed at the consumers’ base desires. But our media now is even more debased. On some podcast I can’t remember, I heard recently that most of the content we consume nowadays was produced in the last 24 hours. The line between consumer and producer is practically non-existent. There needn’t be a shadowy, manipulative, industrial aspect to media production — social media companies realized the audience could organize their own hedonic capture just as well, and more cheaply.
Somewhat surprisingly, the computer has remained largely the same since the 80s. Half of its form remains dedicated to input. Even the most advanced keyboard is still almost identical to a typewriter. For myself, it’s actually quite hard to imagine just watching something on a computer screen, not to mention using it to scroll an algorithmic feed. Why sit in front a computer when you’re not doing something with it?
Despite best efforts to change our norms and desires, the computer has endured. In the same video in which they introduced iOS 5, Apple celebrates the fact that, with the introduction of the iPad and WiFi syncing, it was now possible for someone to use all their Apple devices, and never own a computer to begin with. The mobile chips in Apple’s current smartphone lineup are more powerful than any computer one could buy in 2011. Yet the computer is going strong. We’ve stretched the phone to its absolute productivity limits, and even so, people type on phones at best 70% as fast as they type on a computer. We take work meetings from our computer, even though the phone would probably do. And I have a sense (however aspirational) that this isn’t simply practical — that there’s something deeper going on, something to do with holding on to a capacity for an active relationship with our technology.
This year, I’m going to try to put the Internet back on the computer. If I’m going to let the Internet pretend to be a part of the real world, I’m going to try to engage with it more actively. If I’m going to carry around a giant screen in my pocket, I’m going to try to put more of the people and things I really love on it, and less of the things algorithms wants me to love. Who knows. Maybe I’ll just be swimming upstream. But I want my old relationship to the Internet back. I want the real world back.
Happy New Year.