Why I stare at my phone. A few nerds my age decided to market visual systems appealing to my base level urges, release chemicals in my brain, and rewire my thinking to require their sensory input on a daily basis. The hunger for information became insatiable when my own self interest, vanity, was threaded into the experience. I stare at my phone because I was taught convenience as the hallmark of progress when my dad would melt his ice cream in the microwave just enough that he could scoop it out of the carton unabated. I was alive before there were phones to stare at. I used to memorize my friend's numbers, even my first girlfriend in my early 20s, I called her the day after she gave me her phone number at a bar. I don't remember her phone number now. I couldn't tell you my mom's phone number either. I stare at my phone but never to learn the combinations required to call my mother should my phone ever fail me. You only need to memorize a couple phone numbers in case you end up in jail. I know my girlfriend's phone number (Santa Cruz area code) and my brothers (currently not on speaking terms but he'd owe me one for picking him up there one time). Why I stare at my phone, it got bad when Instagram arrived or maybe it was when my dad told us he had cancer. Leaving his chemotherapy appointments in the Valley near his house to drive ourselves to our apartment in Venice, my brother and I would go to our separate rooms to stare at our phones. The world is curated in the phone, chaotic outside of it. The world is curated to chaos inside the phone too but it's my chaos. It's the chaos I've told the algorithms I'd like to see and so they show me it between their advertisements also geared to me. My phone is a commercial and the content between it is my own interests serving as products of myself to myself. I heard Christopher Hedges on public radio late one night years ago driving home to Venice saying image-based societies tend to destroy themselves. I parked my car, sat there and listened because this was before Instagram, before my dad was sick, when I was full of unbridled strength and a head thick with curly hair. I listened to this thinker think out loud because that's what we did back then, we listened.
-joshua turek
