digital slavery

A little over a year ago, I wrote this in response to a Julio Cortázar essay about the little devils we call watches. I still hold my stance: my Skagen is tattered and worn and I love it just as much as I did when my sister gave it to me.

A friend suggested that Cortázar's literature be updated to the times. Who's a slave to watches these days? We've come a long way. My first thought was to write Cortázar requesting the change, but since he died some 25 years ago, I had to take the mission upon myself. Here you are:

Consider this: it is your twelfth birthday and your parents buy you your first cellphone. Yes, that's what we've come to. Twelve year olds running around with cellphones, their lives so incredibly jam-packed with activity that a landline is just not adequate.

When they present you with your first cellphone, it is not just a device for making phone calls that they are gifting you...your new companion, best friend, friend of all friends...nokia, blackberry, iphone 4 with a bejeweled plastic cover because nobody has a cellphone of such caliber without the candy...text messages, photos, music, internet, everything you ever needed in one little digital device...freedom, independence, popularity...

No no...when they present you with a cellphone they are actually giving you--they don't know it, and it's.so.terrible that your dumb worried parents don't know it--they are gifting you a new, vulnerable piece of yourself, of your soon-to-be slavehood, ahem, I mean adulthood, you are coming-of-age and this is how the 21st century deals with that.

They are gifting you a massive responsibility of taking care in your usage of minutes and messages and battery power, a fear of losing or breaking the thing, a paranoia caused by the feeling of being attainable at any moment of any hour of the day, a dependence that can sometimes lead to withdrawals...you will truckle to your new friend for the rest of your existence on this earth because there is no going back...

You don't realize any of this..you are incredibly excited because you are 12 years old and it's all you ever wanted in life, nothing could make you happier, not even a banana split on a Friday afternoon because you are an adult now not a kid and banana splits are so 11 years old, you just cringe at the embarrassment that would flourish inside you, to sit at the bar of Dairy Queen with your treat, because someone might call you on your cellphone and then what? You tell them you are eating a banana split at Dairy Queen with your mom? GOD.

They are not giving you a cellphone for your birthday, they are taking your digital virginity.

:)