I keep wanting to write a post titled ‘universal cursed artifact’, that’s obviously about smartphones.

when i say ‘cursed’ here i mean in a somewhat neutral way, not necessarily evil, just powerful and magical. so why not just use magical? because i think people see the word ‘magic’ being used casually so often that they don’t think about the challenges of being a magic user. so i’d rather start with cursed.

why does this post want to be written? well everybody’s got a phone in their pockets or hands now. people all over the world. we were never really prepared for it. our preparatory systems, which is to say our schools and our media, were not prepared to prepare us for it. the technologists making it were not prepared to prepare us for it. it just sprung on us and we have to figure it out along the way.

i like to talk about how, in snow white, the wicked witch– who maybe previously was a not-so-bad witch– was driven to murder because her wall-sized smartphone called her mid. this usually gets a laugh from people. why is it funny? because you connect the dots and realize that we do have a magic mirror in our pockets.

my favorite essay of all time was written in 2011, after the iphone was invented but before it had really become truly ubiquitous, and it talked about how every new piece of media technology in history caused a lot of mayhem, upheaval, religious wars, deaths.

what do i want from this essay? i don’t want people to think “oooh, smartphone bad”. i consider myself pro-technology. i like my smartphone. i actually have a great time with it. my smartphone has greatly improved my life, with comparatively minimal downside. in conversations with friends we’ve sometimes described it as like, “visa seems to wade into the toxic sludge of the internet and come out of it healthier, happier, wealthier, stronger”. (this is also why i joke that they should study me in a lab. and since that hasn’t happened yet, i’ll study myself in my own lab and share my findings publicly. it’s less than ideal, but i’m working with what i’ve got for now.)

the thing about cursed artifacts– magic staves, mirrors, crystal balls and so on– is that they typically require training to use them. they’re not just for anybody. you have to have a certain strength of character to manage what you will see. all the way back in 1992, bruce sterling described how cyberspace was like a funhouse mirror– and that was before we started carrying around portals to cyberspace in our pockets. some people are skilled at managing. some aren’t. i would like to contribute towards helping people get better at managing.

I suppose a large % of the point of this post is to simply get people to consider just how powerful their devices are. you have the ability to look up ~anything, talk to ~anyone. but… what you see is not reality, but a funhouse mirror distorted version of reality. there’s a version of the shiny lure problem. (man goes to a fishing shop, says wow, do the fish love all these shiny lures? shopkeeper says, my boy, i don’t sell to the fish.) we get a lot of slop. the algorithm doesn’t need to be evil, it simply needs to give us what we want, and it turns out that what most of us want most of the time is basically slop. steve jobs said so too re: why tv was so bad. though there’s some interesting nuance to explore here because it hasn’t always been uniformly bad. it was worse at some times and better at some times. my friend ronen would probably have a great take on how and why. (see his talk about the history of tv.)