The Winter of Our Disconnect (14 page)

Is reading
Kafka on the Shore
(my somewhat desperate suggestion—he likes Japanese stuff so figured was worth a shot). Verdict: “Awesome.” Try to hide my shock. J. K. Rowling to Haruki Murakami?! Okay, I give up. Where’s the hidden camera?

Turns out Murakami’s full of jazz references. Hadn’t remembered that. What hooked B. was mention of Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” WHICH HE WAS LISTENING TO AT THE TIME.

 

 

 

Cooked roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and cucumber salad for self, B., A., and Millie. Lingered long time, picking over carcass, conversation. All of a sudden, kitchen has gone from Transit Lounge B to Command Central.

Yesterday B. described as, quote, the best Saturday of my life. Jammed with newfound musician pals—one of whom drives (OMG)—drank bubble tea x 2 and went to the beach x 2. Topped it off with a sleepover at Oscar’s (evidently featuring tearful reunion with a PSP). Fascinating because it was ordinary, really—but clearly intensely so.

Later A. & S. discovered in A.’s room, side by side under covers, singing along to top-forty radio in euphoric, trancelike state. (Taylor Swift: “Love Story.”) Moral: If you can’t get the ringtone,
be
the ringtone.

» 4

My iPhone/Myself: Notes from a Digital Fugitive

—
WALDEN,
chapter 1

—
ROBERT IGER, CEO
, Walt Disney Company
¹

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like most illicit affairs, this one had started innocently enough. We were just friends at the beginning. Work colleagues, really. But you know how it is. You start having lunch together. You meet up on the train. You go for walks. And the next thing you know, you’re practically living in each other’s pockets. Or one of you is, anyhow.

I was always going to fall for my iPhone. I can see that now. My craving for information—a black hole of lust and neediness, incapable of satisfaction—was something I’d struggled with all my life. I’d go to the dentist and bring two
New Yorkers
, a novel, a portable radio, and a rhyming dictionary ... just in case. Boarding an overseas-bound plane, it never once crossed my mind to fear a crash. But the possibility of settling in for a fourteen-hour flight and discovering I’d left my novel in the airport (a living nightmare that happened to me on a Qantas flight from L.A. to Sydney in 1998, and which still gives me flashbacks), now
that
could trigger a panic attack.

When the iPhone came along—which it did in Australia in mid-2008—I had been tapping my toes and hyperventilating for twelve long months. I’d been in New York in July the previous year, right after the U.S. launch, and a handsome stranger in a hotel lobby—seeing the gleam of yearning in my eye—gave me a quick induction. I loved everything about it. The way it felt in my hand, so sleek yet substantial. The way it moved, in such sinuous spins and slides. The way it responded when touched in that special way.

We’d only been together for six months, but in that time we’d developed a relationship that was totally in sync, in a totally out-of-sync kind of way. Needless to say, The Experiment shattered all that. Talk about a toxic breakup. This one had all the elements: anger, denial, bargaining. A massively overdue bill. I write these words five months, two weeks, four days, ten hours, and nine minutes—no make that ten—since that fateful day on which I told my iPhone “We need to take a break ...” And although I would never have believed it at the time, in the end I’ve found acceptance.

There was never a question in my mind that getting clean after six deliriously dopamine-fueled months on the iPhone would be my own biggest challenge. But then, as far as I was concerned, most of the other screens in our house had been a turnoff for a long time.

Even the loss of my laptop, while acutely felt, was something I was able to put into perspective in the early weeks. Mostly I associated the laptop with drudgery: churning out copy and column inches to the implacable, circadian-like rhythm of daily deadlines. The prospect of writing anything longer than a grocery list in longhand (and even those I’d been known to type, format, and print) was horrifying. But I’d organized a nice long hiatus for myself. One puny little five-hundred-word column a week was all I’d have to worry about, and if I really hit the wall, I knew I could take myself off to a café somewhere for a latte and a bracing shot of Wi-Fi.

I loved Della—yes, my laptop had a name (shaaaame!)—but I also recognized that a trial separation was probably the best thing that could happen to us at this stage in our relationship.

Looking back, I can see that Della was the spouse and helpmeet—faithful, reliable, comfortable, and just a little dull. But my iPhone, iNez? Hoooo, mama! Now that was one smokin’ hot affair. In one impossibly sexy handful, iNez embodied all the things I love best about technology. It doesn’t get any less humiliating when I stop to think about exactly what those things are. Basically, iNez was compliant, discreet, entertaining, ridiculously receptive, and looked amazing in black lacquer. She might as well have been a freaking geisha. If I’m honest—and it’s killing me to admit this to myself, let alone to you—I got a buzz from being seen with iNez. I loved what she could do, but I also loved what she stood for—some heady confluence of youth and wealth and mastery. Being seen in her company made me feel important, powerful, “in the loop.” But loops have a way of tightening gradually. That’s why I had to leave her.

 

 

When Ian Schafer’s wife complained that he would pay more attention to her if she were digital, the thirty-three-year-old CEO of online marketing firm Deep Focus didn’t even try to deny it. Tweeting their exchange, he was interested to discover that “a lot of people’s wives feel the same way.” Schafer told
USA Today
he believes the human brain wasn’t built to handle so much connectivity. “We want to do more and more,” he muses, “but the more we actually do, the less of it we actually accomplish.”
²

Tony Norman, who reviews gadgets for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, was dismissive when his friends warned him not to get too close to the iPhone. He failed to lash himself to the mast and suffered the consequences. “If you ever want to know what was going through Frodo Baggins’s mind as he stood clutching the evil ring over the lava pits of Mt. Doom in
The Return of the King
,” wrote Norman, “buy an iPhone.”
³

Computerworld
’s Galen Gruman suffers from iPhone-related separation anxiety that’s so severe he’s developed a dread of subway tunnels. It’s not the claustrophobia that gets to him. It’s the “connectivity gaps.” Galen confesses that at such moments he finds himself “thumbs poised ... itching to reconnect to the outside world.”
⁴

Then there’s Melissa Kanada, a twenty-seven-year-old PR consultant, who swore she’d stay clean during a two-week overseas trip with her boyfriend. “I think I lasted maybe four days,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘He’s in the shower.’ Like, you feel welcomed again.”
⁵

And Nick Thompson of
Wired
magazine observes, “There are a lot of people who have a problematic relationship with these devices, where the device becomes the master and they become servant.” Thompson would never let this happen to him. No way. Like the time he was expecting an important message but didn’t want to be checking for it every ten minutes. A less imaginative user might simply turn off the phone. But with the instincts of a seasoned junkie, Nick knew more drastic measures were called for. “I took the battery out, and then I put it in the [sleeping] baby’s room,” where no man—no matter how desperate for his next data fix—would dare to tread.
⁶

And let’s not forget the guy who experiences “phantom vibrations.” (“I can still feel it as if it were receiving e-mail. I reach down to check it ... and it’s not there! Am I losing it?”) Or the man who dropped his phone in the toilet and fell to his knees to rescue and perform CPR on it, lest “the water-logged center of my universe” slip away to that great helpdesk in the sky. (“I tried blowing in all the holes, then I got the hairdryer out to try and salvage ‘My Precious.’ ”)
⁷

I recount these testimonies not in censure, or even pity, but with the shock of recognition. They made me feel better about myself—and worse at the same time. Better, because most of these people seemed just a teensy bit sicker than I myself. But worse because they helped me to see that the problem I’d thought of as “mine”—part of my own neurotic personality structure—is actually embedding itself in our
culture
’s neurotic personality structure.

BlackBerry users got there first, of course, coining the term “CrackBerry”—
Webster
’s word of the year in 2006—as far back as 2000, and contributing to a rich and disturbing literature on their digital drug of choice. The 2008 e-book
CrackBerry: True Tales of BlackBerry Use and Abuse
compiles the greatest hits (in every sense of the word) from the
CrackBerry.com
site, including some of the stories above.

“This is a self-help book on coping with BlackBerry Addiction,” declare authors Gary Mazo, Martin Trautschold, and Kevin Michaluk. If this is self-help, I am Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Indeed, the book pretty much does for the CrackBerry what Tom Wolfe’s
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
did for hallucinogens.

CrackBerry
is a deeply creepy read, what with featured affirmations such as, “We feel better, more complete and more whole when we are tethered to our BlackBerry at all times”—the irony being that there
is
no irony—and stories like that of “Sue,” the survivor of a horrific car crash, who recalls, “I was screaming in pain and asked them to find my BlackBerry.” But in some ways it gave me exactly the kind of tough love I’d been crying out for.

The “Chart of Shame,” for example, which allows abusers to locate themselves on a ladder reaching from “Plain Rude” to “Downright Dangerous”: Did I “interrupt conversation” to use my phone? (Duh.) Did I “read and respond to e-mail during a meal with others?” (Depends how you define “meal.” Also “respond,” “during,” and “others.” Oh, okay. Yes, constantly.) Did I type “while driving others in a vehicle?” (Mebbe.) Did I text “while skiing on a crowded slope?” (NO, mo-fos, as a matter of fact, I did NOT! I can’t ski. So there.)

The whole cringeworthy exercise made me relive moments of iPhone passion I’d have happily mothballed along with my size 48L maternity bras, or that tiny shred of Bill’s umbilicus that detached itself into his nappy and I could never quite bring myself to throw away. (I showed it to him recently—it looks not unlike a piece of snot now—because he thought I was making it up. Or perhaps he only wished I was.)

I remembered how bereft I felt on those rare occasions that I left iNez at home and had to trudge through the day alone and unplugged. I remembered the sensation of rootling feverishly through my handbag, frantic for the familiar touch of cool, tempered glass. I remembered the sick-making adrenalin surge I’d felt when I couldn’t find her for a moment or two, or how, securely sealed inside my info-womb once more, I’d meet the eyes of other iPhone users on the train and we’d smile a secret smile, coyly complicit in our shared vice.

Okay, so maybe I wasn’t as hardcore as some users—Johnj41, for example, who doesn’t simply sleep with his phone, he
showers
with it. (“I actually keep a Ziploc bag in the bathroom just so I can do this. I know, I’m pathetic, and you know what? I don’t care. LOL!”) Or Lenny M., who Velcros his phone to the handlebars of his bike so he can see the screen while he rides. Or author Gary Mazo, who has a bondage-and-discipline thang going—“I can dress it up in leather if I take it out on the town and I can protect it in armor if I need to risk its being out in the world.” They make iNez and me seem like junior prom dates. But a dependency is a dependency is a dependency, and the experience of going cold turkey emphasized how far in denial I’d been about my own neediness. Or maybe “wantiness” would be more accurate.

Because the iPhone, like any other smartphone, is such a heady cocktail of functionality, it took me a while to distill each of the elements. Phone, text, music, podcast, Internet, e-mail, apps. In my own way, I was addicted to all of them. But the greatest of these was e-mail. Even at the very earliest stages of my rehab—when I was still experiencing auditory hallucinations of my beloved ringtone (ironically, it occurs to me now, a stride piano rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”)—I was aware that e-mail withdrawal would be my biggest personal challenge.

I’d always been ... well, let’s say “enthusiastic” about e-mail. (“Obsessional” is such an ugly word.) And why not? In my uneasy Western Australian exile, e-mail provided a direct pipeline to the world I’d left behind, capable of eradicating the tyranny of distance at the touch of a “Send” button. As a journalist, I’d made aggressive use of e-mail right from the start. Nothing thrilled me more than getting an instantaneous response to some arcane query from a source in New York or London or Washington, D.C. The twelve-hour time difference between Perth and EST (aka “the rest of the world”) meant it was easy to catch people online, checking their e-mail before bedtime, just as I was logging on to my day.