The Wit’s Guide to Smartphones

Or, scroll if ya got ’em

This prescient 1906 Punch cartoon unearthed by the Public Domain Review predicted the lonely phonely phenomenon.

When and where did we go so wrong?

I’ll tell you. In 2009, a market researcher of my acquaintance went to a mall in middle America to ask shoppers if they would delete their Facebook accounts, right there on the spot, in exchange for $1,000. A surprising number said they would not. At that early stage in human history, we still acted like social media was candy; this was an unexpected signal that it was more like crack cocaine.

“Cell phones are so convenient that they’re an inconvenience.”
— Haruki Murakami

This experiment has been conducted many times since, most notably in a 2018 study published after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that also landed on $1000 as the median value of a “free” Facebook account. So what if we asked people today to give up their smartphones? The devices themselves are worth about $1,000, so how much would it take? Or maybe give it a Black Mirror spin and ask, would you trade a finger for continued use of your phone? How about your hand? How much raw utility does that supercomputer actually possess?

“Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.”
— Anne Lamott

I asked the researcher who did that early study. “If you give me a relatively small amount,” he replied, “I will give up my phone forever.” Would he, though? I suspect I’d be walking out of that mall with a big bag full of hands.

“On the other hand, you have different fingers.”
— Steven Wright

Is that the metaphor, then? A smartphone is like a hand: An essential tool for navigating the world. Sure, you can survive without one, but you’ll need elaborate workarounds. Hearing the phoneless talk about their survival tactics actually sounds very similar to the handless. “Adapting to life with one working hand, I used to joke that everything was three times harder and took three times longer in the wake of my injury,” Kurt Kohlstedt of 99% Invisible writes in his fascinating and ultimately inspiring account how he adjusted to the world after losing the use of his right arm. And here’s Franklin Schneider’s few caveats in his mostly gleeful Atlantic piece about being a Never Phoner: “The pockets of every jacket I own are filled with maps scrawled on napkins, receipts, and utility bills torn in half to get me to unfamiliar places. I once missed an important job interview because I’d mislabeled the streets on my hastily sketched map.” In many restaurants, you’ll need to learn how to read QR codes with your naked eye.

“A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones.”
— Douglas Adams

Or maybe a smartphone is like a baby. When you drop it, the horrible feeling is similar. And surely the most relatable scene in One Battle After Another is Leonardo DiCaprio desperately trying to charge his phone while on the run. My baby needs to eat! But maybe we’re the babies and the smartphone is the pacifier, something you reach for when you need to self-sooth? There’s academic research that cites “the portability of the device, its personal nature, the subjective sense of privacy experienced while on the device, and the haptic gratification it affords.” The subjective privacy bit is perhaps the greatest irony of our era. And you’re never quite soothed by your phone, are you?

“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
— Oscar Wilde

And that’s why a smartphone is like a cigarette. The form is carried as you would a pack of smokes, and for bonus points, your AirPods case flips open and shut like a Zippo lighter. It’s bizarrely anti-social to blow fumes into someone’s face, just as it is to stare at a handheld screen in their presence, and yet we’ve normalized it. It is a surefire cure for boredom that you’ll need to access, oh, 100 times a day. It has some benefits (improved digestion/Google Maps) but mostly downsides (lung cancer/societal breakdown). It’s very difficult to post a picture of your dinner with a Marlboro, but it’s equally difficult to look cool while holding an iPhone. Even the new thin one! And when I turn to my phone to check something (lol, “check something”), I invariably get sucked in by various notifications and become the dad in the meme: Stepped out for cigarettes, never came back.

“Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.”
— William Gibson

You know how the kids call Diet Coke fridge cigarettes? Your phone is a brain cigarette. Let’s call them that and see if it fixes anything. It won’t, but I’ll send you a notification if it does.

“Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult. It makes growing up genuinely worthwhile.”
— Fran Lebowitz

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“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
— Virginia Woolf

Perhaps I didn’t appropriately distinguish between the actual smartphone and the addictive stuff on it? You could in theory use a phone strictly edifying and helpful purposes, just as you could visit a casino solely for the shrimp cocktail and comfortable couches. And next week?

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I’ve got something fun cooking for my paid subscribers. More on that soon, but in the interim I will send you Riposte Cards, the glorious collection of 28 bespoke works of art commissioned over two years, and now Aphoristicks, a monthly snicker of a sticker going out to those of you kind enough to cover the postage.

Well, if you’re reading Issue No. 341 of Get Wit Quick on your smartphone, they can’t be all bad, right? This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book that sparked this project was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. One of the most depressing bits I read this week described the processing of group chats via hearts, thumbs, and hahas as unpaid data entry. Anyway, I’ll take a ❤️ below if you’re mechanically dispensing them!