If you're over fifty you may remember old telephones -- not flip phones or Blackberries, and not the multicolored, slender touchtone models so easy to knock over, no, I mean those really old, black, squat ten-ton phones that rang like banshees and you'd go running to them. They beckoned you. No caller ID, no voice mail. Pick up or not. Rotary phones were industrial devices and we were their industrial operators: insert index finger in the numbered hole, spin the dialing mechanism clockwise until it stops, release, wait ever so patiently in a way few humans could do today for the mechanism to reset, one down and six numbers to go, then insert index finger in another hole...I liked those phones. I miss them. But don't tell my students. How lame, they'd say. What can we, children of the limitless technological now, possibly learn from you?
I got to thinking about rotary phones after reading David Wallace-Wells' climate-change book, The Uninhabitable Earth, specifically after tripping over an insight in the middle of a very long sentence, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez-long sentence listing a multitude of reasons why most people haven't taken climate change seriously, and it goes like this: “...because we felt so ‘postindustrial’ that we couldn’t believe we were still drawing material breath from fossil fuel furnaces...”
The other reasons in his uber-sentence are weightier, but that one stuck with me. The most postindustrial object we almost all possess in the developed world is a smart phone and we think we're so cool and sleek and clean, don't we, slouching around with brushed-steel rectangles in our clammy hands, the glass gleaming, the corners smoothed, our little devices so seamless, so futuristic, so Steve Jobsian in their arrogant attentiveness to our supposed needs and so very far beyond the world of coal barges tied to wharves and power plants polluting the dirt-poor sides of town and oil rigs far out at sea, squint and you still can't see them, and fracking platforms on former hay fields in flyover country and cattle by the billions burping methane in feedlots G-d knows where if G-d cared to know, and so on.
The other reasons in his uber-sentence are weightier, but that one stuck with me. The most postindustrial object we almost all possess in the developed world is a smart phone and we think we're so cool and sleek and clean, don't we, slouching around with brushed-steel rectangles in our clammy hands, the glass gleaming, the corners smoothed, our little devices so seamless, so futuristic, so Steve Jobsian in their arrogant attentiveness to our supposed needs and so very far beyond the world of coal barges tied to wharves and power plants polluting the dirt-poor sides of town and oil rigs far out at sea, squint and you still can't see them, and fracking platforms on former hay fields in flyover country and cattle by the billions burping methane in feedlots G-d knows where if G-d cared to know, and so on.
Of course, that's not entirely true. Homeowners have furnaces in their basements, but they're in the basement not in the living room next to the slick miracle that is your flat-screen entertainment system. David Wallace-Wells, later in his bludgeoning book, quotes the singer/poet Kate Tempest: "Staring into the screen so we don't have to see the planet die." We're "atomized," she raps, "thinking that we're engaged when we're pacified." And now maybe you're staring at the screen of your phone-friend, thinking it's no fun considering such jagged things by the light of my Super Retina HD Multi-Touch display with 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution, and by the way who's Kate Tempest? I didn't know either and so off to iTunes I clicked and swept, so effortlessly, so seamlessly, and I played a few samples and downloaded a few songs straightaway. She's awesome, it turns out. The lyrics above are from her epic "Tunnel Vision." We're born with it, you know, tunnel vision between baby and parent. It's good for development, for awhile at least.
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