Without a Phone

It turns out I'm a cyborg and didn't know it.

Not the most horrifying future I can imagine.

I woke up, and my phone was dead. The screen didn’t work anymore.

It took a few minutes for me to realize, mostly because I was just waking up, but I was effectively crippled.

Phones aren’t just phones anymore. They’re sources of music, news, updates, emails, texts, calendars, and weather information. They connect us to the greater whole of the human race through WiFi or 5G or whatever network they happen to talk to. My phone isn’t just the thing I call people on; it’s the portal through which I interact with the wider world.

And without it, I’m a cripple.

Think about it: without a phone, I can no longer communicate with those far away from me in an instant. I can’t message a friend about cancelling plans or call my sister to check on her.

Due to the face that I’m navigationally challenged, I was even more crippled than I first realized. I use Google Maps to navigate basically everywhere, and because my car is old I use it on my phone.

Without my phone, I can’t drive anywhere far away, or any place I don’t know exactly how to get to and get back from. I’ll get lost, and without a phone I won’t even be able to call for help.

My phone is my portal to the internet on the go, which means that it connects me to google search and YouTube videos, which tell me how to accomplish almost any basic task on demand. More recently it’s been my portal to AI, meaning that I can have Claude (from Anthropic, my preferred LLM) explain or analyze basically anything to me from my phone.

Except I can’t, because my phone is broken.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like I’d woken up missing an arm. There was an entire suite of capabilities I used to have, ones so taken for granted that I didn’t even think about them, that no longer functioned. Would I oversleep because I could no longer set alarms on my phone? Or maybe my sleep hygiene would be good for once, since I could no longer look at my phone in bed?

Without my phone, people can’t contact me synchronously. They can email, but if they want a response they’ll have to wait until I check my email at my computer. They can’t call or text or signal chat or discord or <insert messaging app here> me.

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A cyborg is traditionally a humanoid with both organic and cybernetic body parts. Think of The Borg, from Star Trek:

Basically this, but less Hollywood makeup and more horrifying union of flesh and metal.

But does something have to be literally attached to your body to be a part of you? Writers metaphorically refer to external things as parts of people all the time:

He wielded the sword like it was an extension of his arm.

With her gone, it felt like a part of me was missing.

I could go anywhere with my airplane as my wings.

And so on.

My phone is a part of me - it is the part of me connected to the internet, from which I can pull up any of the information I need at any time. It’s the radio receiver through which people contact me and the transmitter through which I reach out across space and time. It’s an external memory for notes and contact information. It’s a universal translator and a guide to the layout of almost every street on earth.

With my phone in my hand, I’m a cyborg capable of confidently navigating the real and virtual worlds, interfacing between them seamlessly with a few flicks of my fingers.

Without it, I’m a cripple, cut off from most of human society and information, stuck in Plato’s cave, staring out from my skull like a neanderthal, utterly adrift in a world that requires constant access to information.

Basically this:

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Have I learned a lesson about the dangers of depending on an external device? Am I going to take this as an opportunity to learn how to navigate without Google Maps, learn to memorize things without a notes app, learn to play music without an electronic speaker?

Nope.

Instead, I checked Amazon for the fastest possible shipping on a new phone and got it sent to me the next day.

I couldn’t stand not being a cyborg. It felt horrible. Like being blindfolded and stumbling into everything, suddenly things that used to be easy were hard. Leaving my apartment and driving somewhere suddenly involved logistics: did I know where I was going? Did I know how to get back? What if my car broke down?

I had to write down people’s phone number on a piece of paper.

Like a caveperson.

There’s one narrative here about how, in today’s society, our dependence on technology is impoverishing our minds and turning us into helpless idiots as soon as we lose access to the very technology we developed to make us more powerful. I don’t think this is false, exactly: it is true that I lack skills my parents and grandparents took for granted because I’ve never needed to develop them. The big question this narrative poses for the future is that, in the age of AI, will anyone actually need to think at all? And if they don’t, if computers can literally think for us, if ChatGPT writes all of your essays growing up, will you ever learn to think in the first place?

But there’s another narrative, one that I prefer.

The power of civilization emerges through specialization and trade. Way back before the industrial revolution, back even before the Roman empire, people had to do everything themselves, and they were poorer than we can likely comprehend. When society sprouted up and farming emerged, people could grow enough calories to allow a portion of the population to specialize in other trades, and so everything from seamstresses to blacksmiths emerged.

This didn’t impoverish anyone - to the contrary, it greatly enriched everyone, to unimaginable heights.

Yes, I’m severely handicapped without a phone (compared to my capabilities with a phone). But I also can’t forge metal or weave a shirt or farm my own food or do any one of a million other things, with or without a phone.

Helplessness in the face of almost all specialized tasks is a feature of a healthy economy.

It just so happens that navigating, messaging, and so on, without a phone, is now another kind of specialty that I don’t have to invest time and energy into learning, because I make enough money from my specialty to pay other specialists for a phone.

And the fact that I could get a new phone within a single day is proof that the system of specialization and trade had me covered.

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It was humbling, in a real sense, to be confronted with just how dependent I am upon a little black rectangle external to my body. It is an external brain, able to store memories and think thoughts and reach out to others for me, and without it I’m only a fraction as capable as I am with it. It was scary to feel helpless, especially since I was without the very device I use to call for help!

But the same is true for plenty of things. I can’t grow, forage, or hunt my own food, so I’d be crippled without grocery stores and the vast supply networks and farms that sustain them. I can’t turn plants into threads and weave them into textiles, so I’d be crippled without the garment industries that provide me with clothing. And on and on.

It turns out we’re all dependent on each other in this civilization of ours. My dependence on my phone is just a small piece of that greater human interdependence, and there’s something comforting in that.

I’m still waiting for my phone to be implanted in my body, though. Then I’ll be a cyborg in truth, not just in metaphor.