Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in North Calais.
[A]s I explain that my only requirement for a cellphone is to make phone calls, the millennial Verizon sales rep looks startled, as though a stegosaurus just wandered out from behind the rose bushes. I’m only there because the planned obsolescence of my phone (of which I was unaware) inconveniently kicked in while I attempted to make a call, naively believing the thing would outlive a fruit fly.
We’ve apparently reached a point where we’ve been indoctrinated sufficiently to accept that a device — an iPhone for example — won’t last more than a year or two even though it has no moving parts and costs upward of $700. “I upgrade once a year,” my muse tittered, immersed in her 20-something life, wherein thousand dollar phones, scrapped and replaced annually, are as commonplace as parents’ guilty ruminations on how they failed to stress values while cultivating their offspring.
Although my faith in the intellectuality of humankind had been fading for a while, the last few years have accelerated that notion to the point where I’m thinking that our capacity for stupid is boundless. I’m no genius by any means, but I can walk and chew gum at the same time, which should be adequate protection from falling for simplistic scams whenever they pop up. But all too slowly I’m learning that most scams don’t pop up, rather they’re so tightly woven into our consciousness that we don’t even recognize them anymore.
No one says: “You will do this.” That would trigger our senses and roadblocks would immediately spring up: “No one tells me what to do!” we think, as though we’ve actually retained some semblance of a free will. Steve Jobs was by any measure a technological genius, anticipating possibilities and engineering devices for seemingly every specific situation that might arise.
But what gets frequently overlooked is his Svengali-like salesmanship. Each time Apple rolled out a new iPhone or iPad his presentations were a riveting combination of breathless hype and enough carefully orchestrated subtilty that consumers never realized they were being had. It took years to realize that an iPod, iPhone and various sizes of iPad were essentially the same device, differentiated by a tweak or two but mainly by Job’s expertly peddling the perception they were unique, different and vitally necessary.
Full disclosure: My status as technological neophyte notwithstanding, I bought it too. I craved Apple’s shiny objects even though I didn’t really know what they were, what they did or how I might incorporate them into my life. The only saving grace for me in the ever-accelerating high tech maelstrom is my finely tuned senses of ignorance and apathy: Generally, I don’t know and I don’t care … and I don’t even care that I don’t know. But — like negative political advertising — tapping into the world’s vast reserves of dumb may be offensive on its face, but evidently it works, therefore it proliferates. Social media and its essential hardware feel the same way to me: 24 hours a day; seven days a week; 365 days a year … something like performing your own lobotomy.
Technology’s forte — particularly Apple’s — was as much brilliant marketing as anything else but it’s still embarrassing when I think of how effortlessly I was convinced that having a smartphone was, um … smart?; and even necessary, especially since I rarely use it for anything but the aforementioned phone calls. I hardly text and don’t download any apps. I have both a desktop computer and a tablet for writing and research, making my owning the phone minimally redundant. It’s a little like your golden retriever having several volumes of an encyclopedia.
We hit the Apple nadir recently when Verizon wanted to add an additional $300 to our bill because — like a feral adolescent — the iPhone decided to do things because, according to their sales rep, we didn’t specifically forbid. It was then I finally realized that the phone was a mere tool, essentially a Continuing-Revenue-Generating-Device and, once our vulnerabilities were determined marketable, we became nothing more than prey.
It was exhilarating when I decided my days as a patsy were over, firmly telling the sales rep that I was opting out, going back to a flip phone, the one that comes free with your wireless plan. After a moment of what can only be described as the 100-yard Jurassic stare, she hesitantly said: “We don’t do that anymore.” I said, “Don’t do what, plans or free phones?” She said, “Both.” The flip phones, once handed out promiscuously at no cost, were now $200. I felt like a muskrat in a leghold trap.
Steve Jobs once said that during the introduction of the first Macintosh desktop computer the design team received a five-minute standing ovation. He beamed when he observed that “they all cried.” I think I know how they felt.
