The Masculine Urge to Destroy an iPhone

Is it really the phone's fault how shitty I feel?

About once every three months, for no apparent reason at all, I have a strong sudden urge to smash my iPhone over the edge of my countertop, burn it, throw it into the lake, or squeeze it until lithium and cadmium leak from the sides. It’s as if all the latent misery of modernity, stewing and swirling in pools deep within me suddenly belches a pocket of noxious methane gas up into my conscious mind. I become nauseous and furious and in dire need to break the phone in half.

Allegory of Charity (detail) / Francisco de Zurbar, 1655

Let me speak plainly: I hate smartphones. I hate what smartphones have done to me and everyone else. Having an iPhone has made my life much much worse. I waste an embarrassing amount of time every day cycling through a looped sequence of apps in search of delights that over 10 years of smartphone usage have assured me do not exist. Using a smart phone is all about the hunt and never about the kill. It is an accurate portrayal of how dopamine actually works, which is not as a “pleasure chemical,” as it’s often confused, but as a neurochemical that motivates the chasing of presumptive rewards. Who gives a shit if the rewards ever come, dopamine just wants you to keep running after it. This is what they mean when the dweebs talk about how technology “hijacks your brain.” Like gambling addiction, you start to enjoy the pursuit of the reward more than the actual reward.

This dogged daily pursuit of “stimulus” yields a constellation of adverse effects that - considered as a whole - could only be described as “brain poison.” My phone makes me anxious, exhausted, tired, depressed, stressed, angry, annoyed, and demoralised. It makes me know things I don’t want to know, forget things I was just thinking of, and part of things I don’t want to be a part of. It makes me sleepy, it keeps me up, it places me in hypnotic liminal states where I am neither asleep nor awake.

Other than the basic function of making calls, and perhaps a few convenient features (Maps, Spotify, Notes, Camera), the phone brings no good to my life. It does not bring ease, convenience, or calm. It does not spark joy. Not everyone hates texting like I do, but it does seem that Group texting is even universally reviled. Playing games on the phone sucks. Social Media is a wasteland. Productivity apps make you less productive. The rest of it is all just ways to spend money cloaked as “convenience.” There are plenty of things on a phone - banking, digital plane tickets, Starbucks rewards app - that you only think you need because their very existence puts you in a position of deficit or lack should you not wish to use them.

Most day I just seethe quietly in my hatred for the phone. I maintain the impotent position of wretched resignation. I mean what am I supposed to do? I need it for work emails, family texts, pictures of receipts I think I’ll need at “some point,” and to click the button to unlock my credit card when the bank thinks my $4.38 purchase at Walgreens was fraud. You simply can’t argue with reality when it makes a case like this! I am an adult, I have a job, I live in society, I need the big glossy picture phone. I do not make peace with this fact, I merely make do.

But every now and again, I get one notification too many on a Sunday afternoon such as this, and in the blink of an eye I am suddenly consumed with rage and visions for technological destruction. I want to destroy my phone, I want it to feel the pain it has given to me, I want to endow it with AI so that it knows that I hate it and it feels terror as it realizes what mortality is as at the very moment it is experiencing death at my hands (ideally by blending the phone alive).

I clench it with a murderous grip in my hand…I raise it above my head…lightning strikes…there is rage alight in my eyes…I begin to cackle maniacally as I think about just how easy it is, just how positively easy it is to end this phone’s poisonous little life, and then -

And then I think about this stupid lease contract that I’m on. Why did I fall for it again? So what, I’m going to throw the phone on the ground and smash it, and then I just keep paying $30 a month for something that’s in a landfill? That doesn’t make any sense. Also sometimes when I open up Youtube on my computer or my Roku, I have to do two-factor authentication so I have to open the gmail app on my phone to click that yes, in fact, it is I who is attempting to sign into my own account. I wont’t even begin to get into how helpless I’d be without Google Maps. Could I really make it to work without it? I need to know traffic patterns. I’m going to miss out on traffic patterns and for what? Peace of mind? Who has time for that?

Of course I could come up with workarounds. I could take an inventory of how I use the phone and then figure out different ways I could do the same thing without the phone. I could get a TomTom or Garmin or whatever the fuck and put that in my car. I could get a little Nokia phone with T9 text in case it’s really urgent. I could get an iPod shuffle and put some music on there and carry around a book and some crossword puzzles in case I get bored. Maybe I could even get one of those dumb phones with the hotspot tethering and just pull out my laptop when I needed it.

And now suddenly I’m carrying around a duffle bag full of shit. Yet I never seemed to need a duffle bag of shit before iPhones were even a thing, so why do I think I need it now? I guess I might as well just keep the phone, for however much it saps the vital energies out of my body, at the very least it’s light, convenient, and has a sleek form-factor, what ever that means. No use turning it in and paying an early termination fee and buying a new thing only to go back to the phone a few months later after I’m just so frustrated all the time waiting on hold to pay my electric bill instead of just finishing it one click and two seconds. How many more work meetings will I get in trouble for missing just because I hadn’t checked my email since 6am. I’ll just keep the fucking thing.

Why is it that I go through this same train of thought every few months and always end up at the same place? Is it really because this phone has such a hold on me? Is it really because the techno-capital complex has made such a maze of convenience that we’re no longer able to find our way out? Is it because of dopamine, nefarious algorithms, and notification fatigue? I’ve written this very post too many in times in my life to keep stopping here. So I’m going to suggest something beyond all of this.

My question is - what exactly am I missing out on? The fortunate ones who manage to untether themselves (usually young, beautiful, affluent, trite people) tell you to put your phone down and see the world around you. Meet new people, explore your community, become part of meaningful, real human interactions. My question is - where the fuck is this happening? This is a fantasy. I used to go to an anarchist coffeeshop in college that had the strangest collection of goths, libertarians, crust-punks, veterans, and granolas. People sat across from each other arguing about Derrida or whether taxation was theft. One guy used to lug in a whole desktop computer and set it up at a table. It was wild, smoky, silly, and often dumb. And it was fantastic.

I went there a few months ago and it was silent. A bunch of people sitting at their laptops with headphones on. No one was speaking. I passed by one guy and cast a quick glance to his screen. I couldn’t see the details, but he was writing a comment on a message board. Reaching out to his “community.” There sure as hell wasn’t a community in the coffeeshop.

I’m not blaming him. I’m merely admitting the truth of my defeat. I can unplug. I can move to Wyoming and work as a ranch hand or tag bison for the Department of Interior. I could never use a phone again, just write letters and seal them with an ink stamp and send them to my kids once a year. Until, of course, the USPS makes the transition they are most certainly destined to make and reduces then cancels the delivery of physical mail. After that I’ll try to find company at a local watering hole and make conversation with the man who plays Irish folk songs on Tuesdays. Where do I find that watering hole again? And if I do find it, how exactly do I start a conversation when everyone else is having much more interesting conversations with the people on their phones?

The world is getting flatter and more beige. The dominant cultural forces wish to cull the places that are still wild, to prune the messiness and smooth it all into total efficiency. I want to untether. I want to not feel like this anymore. But I guess my only question is: what is this real world that I yearn to return to?