DAEDALUS // PART 2 of 3 / THE BEGINNING

Part 2 is written as a journal of the first three days of this experience of attempting to be more mindful with my smartphone consumption. Find part 1 here.

Day 1: I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

I’m thinking of deleting YouTube off of my phone. I spend too much time on it. But if I were to apply that thinking, why wouldn’t I also delete Instagram? Why wouldn’t I also delete Spotify? Wikipedia? All the apps save the ones I actually need to be a functioning member of society?

I’m a sucker for a ‘big project’. So often I’ve made a simple task the first step of a larger journey to ‘someplace far’, metaphorically speaking. Even the smallest of things start first with why, then how, then what. The thinking goes: starting with ‘what’ often misleads, direction is key. Maybe it’s because I’ve been trained to use frameworks to (what I believe is) good effect during the white-collar portion of my day. Maybe it’s procrastination driven by fear of failure [footnote 1].

Whatever the reason, I’m a sucker for ‘big projects’, the vast majority of which do not make it past day two.

I have been getting increasingly aware of how the internet’s current form has exacerbated my tendency to plan big projects that either never begin or fail right at the outset. By occupying every square inch of the attention I have to spare, it has made procrastination second nature. I, like most clear-eyed adults, have been asking myself how I might better use our species’ jaw-dropping advancements in information and communications technology as a tool, rather than becoming a puppet in its hands.

Last night, I stumbled upon a fascinating video by a YouTuber called Digging the Greats. It begins with his experimenting with using an iPod for 30 days to break free of the algorithmically driven chokehold Spotify has on his music listening habits.

THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU

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THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU 〰️

In documenting his journey over the 30 days that followed, he hits touchpoints that will be familiar to many that have wondered about the impact their phones are having on their ability to function as fulfilled members of society. On the one hand, he discovers Digital Minimalism (and Cal Newport), the benefits of deleting social media from the phone, ideas about algorithms flattening culture and creating a sort of ‘lowest common denominator’ experience of it, etc. 

On the other hand, he discovers how deeply integrated our smartphones are with our day-to-day – be it to access laundry or to play requests at a DJ set. In order to be a functioning member of much of the world today, you need your smartphone and the apps that you load on to them [footnote 2].

On some level, we all know this, of course. Every cliché about the attention economy is true. The big ones:

1. Technology is a tool; it’s up to each one of us to decide how we want to use it.

2. Your attention is a product that’s being sold to large amoral corporations by other large amoral corporations.

3. Your self-control stands little chance against the trillions being spent to monetise your attention span.

In fact, writing ineffective thinkpieces about the attention economy is now its own thriving economy – the attention economy economy, if you will. In being subsumed into the very culture it was set up to oppose, this subculture of internet criticism joins the ranks of several once thriving subcultures that are now part of the mainstream they once opposed. Ever had your inbox cluttered with emails claiming they’ll declutter your inbox, for example? 

Of every form of writing in the world, I find none more repulsive than self-help. Is it even ‘self-help’ if it’s someone else doing the writing? Isn’t it just ‘help’?

Inevitably, any writing that speaks to the dead-eyed consumption of throwaway content will find itself join the so-called ‘pantheon’ of ‘delete social media’ books, videos, reels, tiktoks. Any writing that attempts to help someone better themselves runs the risk of being labeled ‘self-help’. Ultimately, the tragedy of living in a post-postmodern world is that self-reference is ‘baked in’ to most action.

All writing about this subject matter is ‘like’ the Social Dilemma.

All attempts to better oneself are accompanied by imaginary montages of famous men playacting lowpoints for anonymous men to consume transferred improvement –

1. Mark Wahlberg, the Fighter, Strip My Mind by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

2. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 500 Days of Summer, Vagabond by Wolfmother

3. Ryan Reynolds, Definitely Maybe, filmscore

All of human experience is a photocopy unless one makes a deliberate attempt to remind oneself of one’s status as occasional subject (in reference to Beauvoir). Unless one begins to see all writing as writing for an audience of one. All living as living for an audience of one. There is no audience but the self.

I’m not looking to add to this panoply of articles from millennials bemoaning the pitfalls of the defining trend of their shared adulthood. I’m looking to redefine my relationship with the internet of today. I’m just looking to reclaim my attention. In concrete terms, I’m documenting for myself my experiment with eliminating non-essential smartphone usage.

CONTENT. CONSUMPTION. COMMUNITY.

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CONTENT. CONSUMPTION. COMMUNITY. 〰️

I no longer write stories.
I no longer make albums.
I no longer film videos.

I create content.

Or more accurately, I used to create content: before the tedium of posting, publishing, pushing said content completely consumed the joy of creating it, just as my original Instagram account was lost to Thai t-shirt salesfolk [footnote 3]. 

I no longer read stories.
I no longer listen to albums.
I no longer watch videos.

I consume.

I’m an object at the mercy of a much-maligned algorithm from which I’m separated by a screen. I’m not a subject experiencing the good work of an international community of artists from whom I am never distant.

At about the time the world – as we saw it – began to fit in our palms, all that’s sublime about the human experience began to be pornographised. It started with sex, then conversation, then all community. Everything of beauty was replaced by a poor substitute: made up of exaggerated versions of constituent parts that add up to lesser forms.

CREATE. CHERISH. COMMUNICATE.

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CREATE. CHERISH. COMMUNICATE. 〰️

I have done the following.

1. Deleted every app on my phone that didn’t serve a specific, expected, highly utilitarian purpose, e.g. Uber, apps for work, etc.

2. Disabled all notifications except those coming from family.

3. Grouped apps into four folders – utilities, core, productivity, and ‘careful’.

4. ‘Careful’ = Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and Wikipedia. I should probably delete YouTube as well. This folder is where the risk lies. Besides, this folder is what got me started with this ‘big project’ in the first place.

5. Moved the phone to greyscale + Night Mode.

Day 2: WITHOUT SPOTIFY, HOW WILL I RUN?

Last night, I did two things over and above the prior list. 💩 is now serious.

One, I deleted the last remaining entertainment apps on my phone: that’s Spotify, YouTube, Audible, gone. The last remaining time-sink – Wikipedia – also gone. It’s ostensibly a place to learn, but has become primarily a source of gossip for me.

All that remains for me is to lose the browsers – Chrome (gone) and Safari. Already I’m finding it hard to imagine a life without browsers readily available on my phone. The panic and disorientation I experience when imagining a life – or rather, a month – without Chrome and Safari reminds me of the panic and disorientation I experienced last night when I deleted Spotify off of my phone.

When I did that, a single obsessive thought kept running through my head – without Spotify, how will I run [footnote 4]?

In reality, Spotify has nothing to do with running; except that for me – and many others – running without music is unimaginable, and music is Spotify. It’s the sort of insidious link the television made with the family dinner in 1990s India; dinner, in theory, has nothing to do with television. Except for millions, it suddenly did.

My current experience attempting to write this very sentence without getting distracted by the fantasies in my head, the bustle of the café around me, the song blaring from its speakers, the sun, the sound of the till, the Australian sat behind me, the Brit sat in front of me, is proof that I’m also forgetting how to write without music. It could be that I don’t know how to be without music. That’s a larger problem.

Two, I’ve bought a DAP – a digital audio player – that can have its memory expanded to up to 2 TB; it gets delivered tomorrow. Less convenient, more expensive alternatives to Spotify exist for those fortunate enough to be able to afford them.

For those fortunate enough to be able to afford these alternatives, the price we pay for the convenience and affordability of Spotify’s streaming service is the value of intangibles that, at least to me, have begun to matter.

These are the hidden fees of Spotify:

1. Most of my favourite artists make a lot less money than they should.

2. The Spotify algorithm feeds me the same set of songs for every occasion while pretending that what I asked for is three identical ‘daylists’ a day.

3. I have a mostly compressed auditory experience of the world.

The insidious thing is that, commercially speaking, this is the only outcome for a streaming platform.

• The number of songs on earth grows exponentially.

• The number of people listening to music on their phone hits linear growth.

• The only road to growth for Spotify – and the only chance in hell that the artists on there make any money off of the platform at all – is if every listener spends more time on it over time.

It’s also the best shot its algorithm has at doing more than recommend Tomorrow by Silverchair in three playlists every day. I’m choosing the real world and real human beings (hopefully) as my music recommenders.

In the one day that I have spent without my AirPods locked into my ears, I have come to realise exactly how loud crowds are, and exactly how quiet being alone is. Spotify + the smartphone evens out the volume of all these experiences – in a sense, one experiences neither stillness nor chaos. With this experience-evener gone, my first experience is that of anxiety.

Day 3: THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL

Four conclusions lie at the centre of a deeply personal social anxiety I have experienced since I was a child. Be funny. Be insightful. Be fun. Be ever-available. Smartphones made this worse.

They didn’t make me socially anxious; in 2008, I feared missing out more than the average seventeen-year-old. It would be more accurate to say I feared being left out, being left behind. It’s important to draw the distinction between missing out and being left out. Truth be told, most things that lay at the other end of staying up late, always being available, are things I was always okay missing. It wasn’t my interest in these things that mattered – it was being chosen. The fear wasn’t that I’d miss out on something significant or fun – it was that I’d be excluded.

The smartphone took these nascent – addressable – fears and blew them up: not only for me but also for others. What if there’s something amazing at the end of my fifteen hundredth scroll of the day? replaced What if there’s something amazing at the end of another late night? Wouldn’t it be better to first fill in the large empty spaces of life with things that lead up to ‘why’ and ask what’s lost when they’re filled up instead with what-ifs?

DO FOOLS RUSH IN?

Adult life, in many ways, attempts to answer a question that’s as fundamental as the question of economics: how is a finite resource – time, in the case of adult life vs. money, in the case of economics – best allocated? Much of adult life’s most interesting questions arise because we know it ends. An unending life – immortality – would allow for endless luxuriating, and would therefore be animated by an entirely different set of concerns from the ones we currently face. That I get to ‘dip my toes’, as it were, in the ‘river of life’ is, without question, a cosmic miracle.

One’s experience of this might evoke either happiness or sadness, but in both those experiences is contained a miracle: the fact that, as a conscious being I can string together symbols that activate it in your head your head-voice concatenating a set of sounds that mean – approximately – the same thing to both you and me is nothing short of a miracle..

To ‘immerse’ oneself in this ‘river of life’ is to surrender to this once-in-an-eternity experience. All efforts towards such surrender – especially from the chronically anxious and fatigued – are worthy. However, one must never mistake oneself for the river. Any attempt to experience all of life is futile and self-defeating. Those that fight the enormity of life, struggle against it, and are eventually overwhelmed with ease.

Time is a limited, precious, resource. If you were to fully accept this world view, adult life, you would likely find, has no decisions – it contains only trade-offs.

Jobs that do not serve must eventually be quit if the pull of the ‘why’ is strong enough (within reason). The question relevant to ‘Project Daedelus’ as I’ve come to call this endeavour is – what rushes in to fill the vacuum left by no longer numbing my mind with my phone? 

This isn’t only a question of the smaller moments spent in the backseats of cabs, in queues at checkout counters, in dead spaces in conversation – the liminal spaces that riddle life. This is a question of how those five – or more – hours that bracket a workday might be better spent in service of ‘why’ now that I’ve committed to ridding myself of my smartphone habit.

Footnotes:

1: If a task doesn’t need doing until the whole of which it is a part is known with a high degree of confidence, then it will not be failed, even if it’s due to lack of trying.

2: I become acutely aware of this every time I fly back home to India, where the whole system of banking and payments has moved to the phone through the widespread adoption of UPI and the government’s phone-first banking schemes. The smartphone will soon be seen as a necessity.

3: I, of course, created another one.

4: Cut to today – 30 December – my first mid-distance run (7 km) since the start of this experiment. In the month of December, I’ve gained 6 kgs, mostly due to bad consumption habits and a sudden drop in exercise from a high baseline. The second I at least partially attribute to my deleting Spotify from my phone.