Cyborgs on the Toilet
What do YOU do when you have to pee?
Take a look around the next time you’re out in public and you’ll see lots of cyborgs. Every single person you see that isn’t actively talking - and some that are - is looking at, swiping, scrolling or tapping on a device. It’s usually a phone, but occasionally a watch, a tablet, or a FitBit. Every dead space or silence in your day can now be filled by the small light of a screen. If you’re in line at the store and the check-out clerk is working, that’s a solid 15 seconds of phone time. At a stop light you’ve got a good 30 seconds at least, and that guy honking and yelling behind you acts as an alarm. Commercial breaks during the big game get filled with your very own customized feed of information 12 inches from your eyeballs.
And let’s talk about the holy grail of phone time: the bathroom. Everyone takes their phone when they go to take a dump. And we always find something interesting, so a bathroom trip becomes 15 minutes instead of 3. Here’s an odd side effect: imagine the number of hemorrhoids caused by smartphones!
And I just looked it up on my own device! And there’s a study on the relationship between hemorrhoids and smartphone use! This is the reason for Google to exist: to organize the world’s information and make hemorrhoid studies accessible.
We live in a different world than the one that existed 20 years ago. It’s different than 10 years ago too, and the rate of change doesn’t seem to be letting up. We all know that it’s different. We wallow in the marvels that technology has brought us like a pig rolls in mud, delirious and unthinking. We leave some of the consequences of these changes unexamined because we don’t want to examine them. We enjoy the wallowing too much. But these consequences are becoming bigger issues.
I started thinking about this from the perspective of a parent of young children. I’ve had a strong intuition that I don’t want my kids to have much device time but just saying “yes” or “no” felt unsatisfying. I wanted the answer to be “no”, but I needed to have a foundation for it so I could explain to my kids why they couldn’t have a phone at 12 even if some of their friends did. I started thinking more about the consequences of the information revolution we’re smack in the middle of. And I started writing down notes in my notebook (with an antiquated pen). I ended up with a list longer than I expected, and I realized that the impacts are far wider than I could have imagined.
What’s odd is that this is happening in plain sight. Unlike kids who were born near phones and tablets, we adults have some intuition about this. We remember the world in the year 2000 and we can resolve some of the difference between then and now.
Social media is addictive. Everyone has internet access all the time. Everyone has a smartphone, including your 7 year old nephew. Bitcoin is apparently money. Twitter banned Donald Trump. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon — MAGA, which is hilarious - are the biggest companies in the world.
All these are symptoms of incredible changes in societal infrastructure. Changes that have brought tremendous value. They have reduced inefficiency in everything we do, from how we order coffee to global supply chains to cancer screening. And many of the fruits of technology are largely - but not completely - universal. The poor and middle class have the same phones and same internet access as billionaires. The smartphone is an amazing piece of kit, but it’s still a commodity. Everyone has or can get one and can access most of the world’s software and information. It has become ubiquitous. And that’s amazing.
In only a decade, the smartphone has transformed how we interact with reality. It’s always with us or always in our hands. It’s hard to overstate how profound a change this has become. To try to grapple with it, we’re going to try to get at a few of the underlying assumptions that have changed in our lives:
Yesterday we were usually disconnected and today we’re connected.
Yesterday most activities were naturally private and today they’re recorded.
Yesterday it was hard to reach a consensus across millions of people and today it’s easy.
Yesterday it was important to rely on memory and today we just look everything up.
Yesterday we valued content and today we value attention.
Yesterday we had relationships and today we have an audience.
We’ll pull these apart to see just how profound the change has been. Then we’ll look at our world today and where it’s going to change in the next decade. Because the changes aren’t over, not even close. Our lives will keep changing and in many ways will get better and better. But these problems aren’t going away either.
And how we take a dump is the smallest of them.