tchotchke #44: It’s that damn phone

A dangerous archive-induced infohazard

It literally IS the damn phone, guys. We know this, right?

I think even as far back as middle school I have been crippled by intense anxiety that my natural creative energies (such as they are) were being routed in the wrong direction. This was a specific Tavi Gevinson-induced anxiety, as I’ve written about before, but it has since extended to cover, miasma-like, my entire existence.

Is it bad that my innate obsessive impulse, my “organ of veneration,” was long ago and irrevocably given a technologically enhanced route of expression? Maybe?????? I am increasingly filled with guilt about how much I compulsively use and genuinely enjoy social media; and still very much haunted by that old thought that I would be someone and something very different—and possibly better—if it wasn’t for my the internet, and specifically my phone.

The idea that I could simply go on a semi-permanent digital detox isn’t particularly helpful here because then the active absence of the phone would be the backdrop to my life instead of the presence of it. What I come back to is how I want is a kind of complete AU reset, a glimpse or quantum leap into a world in which I not only didn’t fall into the digital pit but never faced it as a danger at all. And of course it’s a fallacy that I would be in any way better or meaningfully different in that world, (or else not different in bad ways) but I want to see it all the same, JUST TO BE SURE!

This impossible desire has grown out of my ongoing interface with the historical archive, during which I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that a lot of these really really smart men (mostly men) with well-cited Wikipedia pages whose letters and diaries I’ve studied extensively would’ve merely been hentai addicts or McKinsey consultants or incels or gamers or golden retriever stay-at-home boyfriends or whatever, if they were born in 1987 instead of 1887.

Assorted “some guys” I have been researching, c. August 1910

There’s nothing inherently special about them except that they happened to be born at a time during which various inborn traits were able to combine with circumstance and luck to give them a chance at having an immense and exciting impact on their chosen field. They were literally just some guys.

But this knowledge is an infohazard: because once you comprehend that, you inevitably can’t stop imagining the flipside, which is that perhaps you, also just some guy, a boring anxious middle-class phone addict, might have easily become more important or successful or fulfilled or simply happier by this point had the technological circumstances of your life been different.

I think “different” is the keystone of this fantasy. Sure, probably some of those 1887 guys wished they were born in 1787 (nostalgia is universal), but there was nothing really equivalent to the phone to wish themselves free of. Whereas the simple absence of the phone would render my current life thrillingly unrecognizable.

The thought experiment completely falls apart when considering gender, but that’s one of the reasons it kind of intoxicates me. Like, am I so unhappy with the colonization of my consciousness and the dismantling of my attention span by my phone that I would consider trading my hard-won personal rights and independence for it? Obviously not (!!!!) But the fact that I’m even returning to it frequently as a daydream is a measure of my increasing dissatisfaction.

Anyway. Challenging myself to simply be bored more often is absurdly, embarrassingly difficult. I wish I was at a big WWII reenactment or LARP camp or even experiencing the stressful plot of Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog just so I’d have a reason to wear a cool outfit and not look at my phone for days.

If I wasn’t so locked into the Apple ecosystem I’d consider getting a Jelly Star or a Light Phone, but as it is I’ve been experimenting with screentime-control apps and taking my Ritalin. There is no solution here other than resistance, practice, and discipline.

Stuff I’ve written lately

• All Hail the Slop Bowl, Lunch of Our Ancestors for Atlas Obscura (6/23/25)

• How the Grateful Dead built the internet for BBC News (6/22/25)

• Can you picture an apple in your mind? If not, you might have this condition. for National Geographic (5/29/25)

• We Visited the Dino Bodega in (Jurassic) Park Slope for Atlas Obscura (5/9/25)

Banger of the week