Modern technology pisses me off to no end. I hate my phone and I hate that I have to use it. Everything is a subscription now, you don’t get to own media anymore, any useful innovation is overshadowed by 10 new features that make everything worse, and everywhere you look, a chat-bot is trying to convince you that it’s good at anything it does. So you can imagine my delight when, two years ago, I stumbled upon my old iPhone 4S in my family’s home, my first ever smartphone, and realized that it still worked. I was excited to see what I could still do with it, maybe it had the potential to be more than a novelty, and I clung on to that hope, even when it became clear that it’s now essentially just an MP3-player with a camera.
It was very disheartening when I found out that most modern apps and websites just refuse to work on such an old device, the software was simply too outdated. I wasn’t able to find a solution to this issue, everything I read online went way over my head, but I was still happy to use it for listening to music – especially so while running and working out, since it weighed about half as much as my current phone. And it was fun hooking it up to my PC and using iTunes to manage my library. Not having constant access to every song ever made meant I had to intentionally choose what to download. It was a little respite from the addictive and predatory hell of the 2020s.
Despite its flaws, I still liked my iPhone 4S, and I wished I could have made it my main phone. Even with the screen that seems too small to be useful today, with the broken volume-up button, with the couple of purple specks adorning every photo I took with it after 2015 due to a camera sensor issue, it was a reminder that technology wasn’t always this annoying, and that I want to take my life into my own hands, instead of constantly answering to the whims of a handful of companies.
I’d used it every now and then over the past two years, it had just been sitting in a box for about 9 months, until today, when the sobering stench of reality sunk its jagged teeth into my flesh and tore out a piece I didn’t even know was there. Inside the box was not a valuable reminder of pleasant days past, but a rotting, bloated corpse of glass, cracked by the expanding battery inside.
It was an accident waiting to happen. I didn’t want to look away, I wanted to hold it, feel it one last time, but my sense of self-preservation intervened. A childlike sadness overcame me, I felt like the past was now truly gone, and I’d missed my chance to step into it. Maybe if I’d taken better care of it, if I’d gotten more use out of it in those last two years, maybe then this good-bye wouldn’t hurt so much. However, this feeling quickly subsided as I was trying to understand, what I was actually grieving. Suddenly I wasn’t a sad child anymore, but an embarrassed adult.
The portion of my teenage years in which I used this phone every single day were some of the worst years of my life. The idea that there was anything worth returning to in those years is laughable and perverse, there’s no fond memories for this thing to represent, very few of the photos bearing those purple specks elicit anything other than dread and disgust, and all of its feats can easily be accomplished by other ubiquitous products. The only reason why I liked it at all was that all of its successors were worse.
At 14 years old I didn’t understand what an iPhone was, I didn’t understand marketing and the tech industry and how anti-consumer Apple was, and I didn’t understand that I was never gonna be without internet access again; but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I now had a way of escaping reality more potent than ever before. I mean, what can’t it do? It’s got music, games, YouTube, porn, social media, all of that constantly accessible from the palm of your hand. It was a vanguard of the dystopia I find myself in now, a tool whose greatest purpose is avoidance, and a dire summary of the 21st century: progress has stalled, but the capitalists wanna keep playing.
I feel ashamed that I fell for it twice. As a kid, sure, I didn’t know better, but now? I really wanted to live in a world where I could turn this piece of time-wasting technology into something worthwhile, and I believed in that fantasy for way too long. The current era of tech didn’t come about by accident, its lineage is out in the open, and in order to escape it, one has to look outside of its realm.
My old iPhone 4S was a meaningless piece of junk, it was made to be bought and then thrown away. But I refused to comply, I kept it safe and treated it with care for years – I used to take pride in the fact that I almost never dropped it, its screen was completely intact – and I wanted it to mean something. Years after I’d replaced it three times over, it fell back into my hands, and I really wanted to turn it into something worth keeping. I thought I could rebel against the machinery that does whatever it takes to make you buy a new one each year, but no – the game has been rigged from the start, their products are made to be ephemeral and resistant to meaning. I wanted to overcome its destiny, I wanted to keep it alive well past its best years, and in the end, it killed itself before my eyes, just to fuck with me.