Smartphone has taken my life not freedom

Howard Jacobson, The Independent

Late in the 1980s, I sold my soul to the devil. I got convenience, the devil got me, and there was no turning back, no cooling-off clause for either of us. Not that I could or would go back now if the devil allowed it. I am too wedded to the ease. I tap in these words on my phone without getting out of my chair, without having to look for a pen or sharpen a pencil, without pacing the room as I once did, to let air circulate round my words. My arm describes no graceful arc. My fingers do not enact the meaning of my thoughts.

I always had terrible handwriting, but it was art of a kind, a painting of the vexed disunion of my hand and my imagination. Unless I go back to pen and ink, no such struggle for harmony is any longer possible. The hand has lost. At what cost to the art, I am unable to say.

I work surrounded by thousands of books, many bought when I was a teenager in the belief that they would be indispensable to me as I aged, a record of my reading and a compendium of my favourite extracts, lines, sentences, entire pages marked with a folded piece of paper or a bus ticket. The dangerous inconvenience of searching for the right book, now on my hands and knees, now on the top rung of flimsy library steps, would be an emotional act of memory retrieval, like looking through old photographs, the story of my life told in half-forgotten phrases.

It would have kept me fit to boot. Now I grow portly, type in a couple of syllables and watch the full quotation flash onto my screen in a heartbeat. When I sigh, the dust flies out of the pages of my books. I said no at first to a smartphone, then maybe, then oh all right if I must. Now I sleep with it by my bed and turn it on before I am awake. What am I hoping to find? News? I know the news. It sends itself to me. Emails from friends? Yes, but not to be compared to letters, because emails, too, bypass the old drama of handwriting, get to the meat of things too quickly, distil history into message. Grandchildren in Greece. I’m getting by. You? What then is it I am expecting?

Messages from people I don’t know? I subscribe to no squalid sites. I have all the happiness I need, which is more than I deserve. The score of the darts match I was too tired to stay up late and watch the night before? Before the devil sealed our deal, offering to satisfy my curiosity in matters about which I was not curious, I lived in quiet contentment, not knowing or caring who won what.

It irks the devil that, although he has my soul, he has not yet persuaded me of the virtues of the emoji. Show me the emoji for “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”, and I’ll consider it, I told him. But he couldn’t look me in the eye.

He hasn’t got me onto Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, either. I don’t do thumbs-up; I don’t “follow” or “subscribe” or “share”. The talk right now is of all of the damage AI might do us. Reader, wherever you are hiding, the damage is already done. I am not speaking of the lives cynically ruined and taken by those algorithms of death that fuel the industry we call social, though there is nothing remotely social about the attics in which the addicted allow their life blood to leak away.

The damage to which I refer is spiritual and intellectual, the havoc wreaked on us as creatures once proudly immune to malicious rumour and vile distortion, beings capable of independent thought, calm expression, a tentative, exploratory uncertainty incomprehensible not only to the chips and accelerators that power the machines that have stolen our spirit but to those who profit by them.

“A book,” wrote Proust, “is a product of a different self from the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.” In the sense that we all have a self that is different from the public one we display in our habits, Proust is right. And whether we write books or not, we spend our lives thinking about that other self, our doppelgänger, our shadow being, another and, we hope, more various version of the humdrum, opinionated, vicious being we drag through the world like chains.