My phone doesn’t get to tell me what to do
A mid-year resolution
Something unexpected happened when I was in Italy and Croatia last winter. I flew to Rome with a lot of neck and back problems, the aftermath of being subconsciously dizzy for two years. I was convinced I would have to spend 1-2 hours a day lying on the floor and doing my stupid little stretches, as that’s what was keeping me going at home. And then, I was Rome, and Venice, and Rijeka, and Trieste, and Bologna, and Rome again, and I didn’t do that. Instead, I explored, marveled, and walked and walked and walked. I came home with a lot fewer neck and back problems.
My phone told me I’d walked somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 steps most days, and sometimes more. I concluded the walking had fixed me, and I decided to keep it up at home. All it took in Europe was not working, cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, lifting, watching TV, stretching, writing, reading, or doing anything else but walking. How hard could it be?
I could do it. I did do it, for a while. But then I got a cold, and took a work trip, and published a book. Some days, and then most days, I found myself with things to do that I cared about and needed energy for. Some walking—particularly my beloved first-thing-in-the morning walk—generated that energy. More than 10,000 steps a day, on top of other intense exercise and a cognitively demanding job, drained it. I also resented how caring about my step count made it hard to leave my phone in the other room. If I wanted credit for every step, I had to carry my phone around all the time, even in my apartment.
And that, of course, is why the phone has a step counter. So people like me, looking for a way to feel better, will consider doing the thing—Obsessing About Phone—that’s making us all feel worse. Here’s Tom Scocca in New York, writing about the even more invasive and addictive Oura Ring:
Self-tracking technology, the digital-sociology scholar Martin Berg of Malmö University wrote in 2017, when the Oura Ring was new, reflects a “widespread late modern ‘ontological insecurity.’” It “only makes sense in a social context where external factors make it difficult for people to trust their personal experiences, and where they carefully have to strive at keeping a ‘balance’ in their lives.”
Our ability to feel and interpret our own embodied experience is being degraded by the same nefarious forces that are trying to undermine the concept of truth more broadly. They want us to outsource our understanding of ourselves to a machine. They want us to think the machine knows us better than we do. Finally, they want the machine to tell them who’s not meeting their standards and requirements, and they want us to ignore what happens to those people next.
Comparing a few months of step counting to a quickly escalating eugenicist project might seem a bit overblown. But once I made the switch from letting my phone tell me what I was already doing (as I did in Europe) to inviting my phone to tell me what I should be doing, it didn’t take long to see what was at the end of that road and realize I had already gone too far.
My phone doesn’t know how I’m feeling. My phone doesn’t know what I need. And so, my phone doesn’t get to tell me what to do. It’s not a lot right now, but it’s something.
