Post 653 - September 20, 2024
When I was a kid, I used to pretend that I had a phone in my shoe.
Agent 86 on the campy television show Get Smart had a phone in his shoe and I thought that it was the coolest thing ever. I have a distinct memory of sitting barefoot on my bicycle at our town pool, my wet towel around my neck, and holding one of my untied shoes up to my ear. I so wanted that to be possible.
Nowadays there is no reason why you couldn’t have a phone in your shoe. Agent 86 was trying to hide his phone, but we aren’t. We aren’t spies during the Cold War so there’s no reason to hide our telephones in our undersoles. We can just carry them out in the open.
My iPhone is never very far away from my right hand. Wallet, keys, phone: those are the three things I check every time I leave the house. Wallet, keys, phone. With the first and the third I can cover just about anything that comes up over the course of a day. With the second, I can get back into my nest after a day of exploring and experience.
I haven’t touched my Nikon SLR camera in years. There’s no need. The cameras on my iPhone are almost at par with it now picture quality-wise. My camera weighed two or three pounds; my phone is just a few ounces.
I was in Australia a few months ago and we were out on a boat in Sydney Harbor. From the moving boat, I was able to take a picture of the stars in the sky so that I could better see the Southern Cross. Stars that I couldn’t see with my naked eye showed up clearly in the image.
The information we have access to on our phones rivals that contained in the world’s greatest libraries. Encyclopedia Britannica, in its entirety, is available instantly after just a click or two. Ask the phone a question and you get tens of thousands of possible answers.
Traveling in a foreign country where nobody speaks English? Open Google Translate and point the camera’s microphone at the native speaker and it’s as if you are both speaking the same language. Aim the camera at a sign written in Arabic or Mandarin and you can instantly read it in English.
I am not sure whether I can still navigate using a paper map. My iPhone always knows where I am and where I am going. Whether I am in New York City, Rome, or in the middle of a Philippines jungle, that little blue dot can find me and point me in the right direction.
Is it any wonder that my iPhone is rarely out of my hand?
In Lebanon this past week, in two separate instances, thousands of handheld communication devices exploded in people’s hands and in their pockets killing at least thirty-seven people and seriously injuring scores more. Of the people who weren’t killed outright, many were blinded and many lost fingers or lost their hands.
The explosions seem to have been a deliberate attack against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group’s leadership. Israel is the presumed perpetrator, but they have yet to take credit for it.
Nobody can quite figure out how the devices were rigged. They appear to have been knock-offs of a Taiwanese brand called Gold Apollo. Gold Apollo has denied any involvement. They say that a Hungarian company called BAC Consulting was given the license to use the logo.
BAC Consulting, with shared offices in Budapest that nobody seems to use, appears to be a shell company created by Israeli Intelligence.
The second wave of devices looks like a Japanese brand called ICOM. They, too, look like they were knockoffs. The Japanese say that they stopped making them a decade ago.
In both cases, it looks like the devices were retrofitted with explosive material before they were delivered to the Hezbollah members. The pagers and walkies seem to have been triggered electronically by using text messages purporting to be from Hezbollah leadership.
This could all be right out of an episode of Get Smart except it isn’t funny.
We have all seen the information coming at us through our phones become weaponized, but this is the first time that the devices themselves have turned lethal.
The implications of this are almost too scary to think about. I’m looking at my iPhone sitting next to me on my coffee table and I’m thinking, “What’s inside it?”
I know that there is a profile of my cell phone usage out there. I know that when I talk to Michael about something random like patio furniture suddenly ads for patio furniture are going to start streaming into my feed. We all know that our phones have ears and tracking ability. What else do they have that we don’t know about?
We should always be questioning the news stories we read online. I am not sure that unbiased news exists anywhere. Even if the facts are being reported accurately, are all the facts being reported? Curating what aspects of an event are being talked about and what aspects are ignored creates just as much a slant on the news as making something up out of whole cloth does.
Especially now during this contentious election cycle, I have almost given up reading the news. Any poll can be made to represent anything the news agency wants. Who was asked their opinion and what was the context? How were the questions framed? Were the respondents telling the truth or were they just saying what they thought the pollsters wanted to hear?
The current news is creating an absurdly high level of anxiety among us all. The simple way to avoid being overwhelmed by that anxiety is to just put down the phone. Instead of that, though, we keep scrolling like lunatics hoping to find something else that might calm us down. Here’s a news flash: we aren’t going to find solace on our iPhones.
The nuclear war lesson from the eighties movie War Games is that the only way to win is not to play the game. In some ways that might be the most important message we’ve ever gotten from a film.
I’ve long been aware that the information I am reading on my phone could be dangerous. I’ve always thought that I was smart enough to be able to avoid falling into conspiracy rabbit holes. Am I?
Honestly, I know that I have been manipulated into believing a lot of what I think is true. I spend a huge part of my day out walking or driving just trying to carry through ideas to their logical conclusions in an attempt to see through it all. Having a healthy disregard for everything I read, no matter what the source, is the only way I have found that I can move forward.
Even trying to figure out what the consensus is across multiple platforms isn’t always helpful. The information the MAGA Republicans are using to reach their consensus seems to be all horribly tainted. I try to be aware of what that is, but from where I stand it seems pitifully easy to poke holes through their logic. I am guessing that from where they stand, it’s just as simple for them to poke holes in what I am thinking.
Them and us. Even that is a construct that has been relentlessly pushed by all our news agencies to force us all to buy more papers or listen to more podcasts or news reports.
I am addicted to my phone. Michael is addicted to his. I‘m not sure I know anyone who isn’t. Even my mother, who doesn’t have a cell phone, follows along on her computer or on television religiously.
The fact that we could be physically harmed by these little devices and not just metaphysically, psychologically, and neurologically harmed adds a whole new aspect of terror to our contemporary lives.
For the love of all that is holy, when does it stop?
Science Fiction is an almost perfect predictor of what we can look forward to. There is no doubt in my mind that some of the people behind the development of mobile phones loved Get Smart just as much as I did. I am also sure that the creators of the astonishing LED signs in Times Square these days must have seen the movie Blade Runner more than once.
We seem to get one step closer to the dystopian world of The Matrix every day.
If we start watching SciFi movies and television shows with the idea of that’s what we can all look forward to, we might never leave the house.
OK. It’s time to sign off and take a shower. I am then going out to take a walk with my iPhone in hand. I likely won’t use any part of it while I’m wandering except for the camera. I’ve already done Wordle and Connections for the day and am almost finished the Spelling Bee.
I can put my iPhone down anytime I want. Says every addict everywhere.