The devil in your pocket

A few thoughts about the smartphone

Some time ago, I started to call my iPhone the devil in my pocket. It started off as a joke, an offhand remark to an Orthodox deacon who shared an appreciation for Christopher Lasch and Marshall McLuhan. But I was probably channeling some of C.S. Lewis’ fiction when I made the joke.

The Screwtape Letters is about a demon-in-training, Wormwood, who is being counseled by Screwtape, a senior demon and his uncle. Wormwood’s assignment is to tempt a young man into hell; Screwtape’s job is to make sure that Wormwood doesn’t screw it up. As a young tempter Wormwood thinks he needs to find a way to get the young man to commit grave acts of tremendous wickedness. Screwtape tells him otherwise: what you really need to do is just keep the man from thinking about what really matters.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

My iPhone took Uncle Screwtape’s advice to heart. It’s the devil in my pocket.

I admire Apple’s design philosophy. When someone asks an Apple fan why they use a MacBook and an iPhone, the answer is usually something like It just works. The best versions of Apple’s products feel effortless. You don’t feel like you have to do anything in order to get it to do what you want.

This idea – that Apple products just work – is part of the appeal of the brand. With Windows, you have to worry about bloat. With Linux, you have to worry about tinkering with details most people find distracting. With TempleOS, you have to figure out if the Third Temple has really been built in digital space. But the dark side of a product just working is that you don’t feel like you are working when you use it, but you very much are. Every time you pick up the phone to check your messages, your emails, your feed, you are engaging in a small bit of cognitive labor. And this isn’t the sort of cognitive labor that, say, trains the mind to be better at something. Instead, you’re just tiring your mind, making you less able to do the real work — the work you want to do, the work of being human.