Stop me if you’ve heard this one. (Or skip down three paragraphs.)

A chemical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are debating the nature of God. The chemical engineer says God must be a chemical engineer. “Look at the overwhelming complexity of the chemical environment! To say nothing of life itself, the miracle of DNA and RNA, proteins folding every which way, the interplay of microscopic forces to produce the astounding diversity of the natural world—God has to be a chemical engineer.”

The electrical engineer’s not to be outdone. “You’re forgetting the brain! Such a nest of circuitry and redundancy, capable of such feats of calculation and memory and invention and wonder, a portable supercomputer with a fully complete intelligence that cools itself, can run without updating or refreshing for eighty years at a stretch, and runs on twinkies? God must be an electrical engineer.”

The civil engineer takes all this in stride, then leans back in her chair with her beer and drawls, “I see where you’re coming from, fellas, but God has to be a civil engineer. Who else would put a sewage treatment plant right next to a rec center?”

I’ve been thinking about this joke a lot, and what it has to say about our strange universe of screens. Software ate the world, and the phones ate software, and now, to paraphrase Don McLean, “here we all are in one place.” This object in your pocket (plus maybe an object on your desk) is where you do your taxes, watch your shows, hang out, get turned on (sometimes without realizing it); it’s where you play, risk, look for dates, where you talk to your boss, where you catch up with coworkers and old friends, where you amble down the sidewalk to see what’s up with the world, where you hawk your wares, where you set your soapbox to harangue passerby. You turn on, tune in, and drop out all right here. Only a UX engineer would put a sewage treatment plant inside a rec center, which is also an apartment complex and a nightclub and an office block! And an amusement park and a school and an activist club and a church and a political debating hall!

Only the human mind is as flexible in its potential applications as the modern screen—I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the human mind is the reason the screen exists. (Though some folks in San Francisco are no doubt working to circumvent this inconvenient fact and make screens for screens alone.) The mind, to quote the other guy, is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. Our minds host our most depraved and sybaritic imaginings, our most social sentiments, our fears and dreams and everything between.

But it used to be that there was no single place where all that mind-stuff was supposed to come out to play at once. There still isn’t, if by ‘place’ you mean ‘arrangement of atoms.’ Physical spaces contain and shape possibilities. When you go to a dining room, you think about eating; when you go to school, you think about learning; when you go to church you think about praying; when you go to a club you think about dancing. You can host a prayer circle in a nightclub of a Sunday morning, or a dance in a school gym, but the nature of the space shifts as it use does, and we often use different markers to signal the shift.

But on screen everything is everywhere (all at once, naturally). Is it any wonder that the streams cross and twist and get all tie-dyed, since they’re each an alt-tab and three keystrokes away? LinkedIn-speak seeps into dating profiles, dating profiles seep into resume guidelines, memes seep into discourse seeps into politics, posting gets all over everything, 4chan is always leaking, everyone sounds a bit chatbot and I get a bit Genghis Khan. Argument becomes a game of appearance and ego-defense, even (especially) when real lives are being broken by its consequences. In the static TV era a profusion of channels on the single box led to the dead-eyed blur of channel surfing and context collapse, but the push-and-play of a modern screen—the illusion (even when the screen content is shaped by proprietary algorithms developed by and beholden to mega-billionaires) that we are doing this to ourselves, that how we spend our time online is in some sense a statement of who we are, that there is something essential revealed in our background-tabs and our search history—keeps the hook more firmly in the lip.

If everything feels a bit more id-soaked and superego-drenched at once, more ephemeral and more obsessed with a receding sense of reality—I won’t say this is the only reason, “all that’s solid melts into air” is a phrase that long predates the screens, but I don’t think the screens are helping.

Thinking like this has led to me being more careful about what I do, when, and where—even though (and especially because) I can do almost anything (that involves a computer) almost anywhere. I’ve been playing with different screens for different sorts of work, or different rooms, or using the same screens styled differently (a monitor turned to Portrait, monochrome mode vs. color mode, one desk or another, standing vs sitting, in the house or out). Orthopraxia is a danger here too of course—so easy to let the desire to do things in the right way eclipse the desire to do—but I’m finding that increasing friction increases traction. (The opposite of dis-traction, you know.)

I suppose that wouldn’t have been a surprise, if I remembered my physics. Hey, maybe that means god’s a mechanical engineer…

Best of luck in the rec center, y’all.