I never needed a dumbphone

I just needed a smarter Jen

The truth shall set you free.

First, a note: the thoughts I’ve been sharing re: technology and capitalism are studio notes, not an advice column. I’m sharing how I am getting from point A to point B and nothing more. As always, no judgment, you do you booboo!

This morning I woke up and everything in the world was as it should be. I’d slept well and woke up in a comfortable position. The morning is cool; the sun is out; the birds are consulting their maps and chattering about where they’re going to stop for lunch after they’ve been on the road awhile. I don’t have any looming work deadlines which means I have an entire weekend to look forward to enjoying. My coffee even turned out perfect!

I’ve just sat down to write this while sitting on my comfy sofa, surrounded by skeins of embroidery floss I’ve been winding onto bobbins for no reason other than organized craft supplies make me happy. When I’m finished writing I’ll take a shower and walk up the street to help paint the stage at our local pop-up park. No idea what I’ll be doing after that. Art. Probably laundry. I have all the time in the world to do things that bring me joy.

I can tell you what I won’t be doing, though:

Using the internet as anything other than what it is: a tool.

The world could literally be on fire right now but that information doesn’t matter to me unless the fire is at my doorstep or at the doorstep of someone I care about, in which case I expect they’d call me and we’d figure things out from there. I’m sure something is happening in politics today, but there’s not much I can do about it except be happy, mad, annoyed, disappointed, or *I fucking told you so*. I’ll wait to see how I feel about politics on Sunday morning, when I read the paper.

This used to be considered reasonable, rational thinking. Now it makes me an uncaring, uninformed monster. I’m ok with that, even though that couldn’t be further from the truth, because the opinion of strangers on the internet doesn’t matter. This also used to be considered reasonable, rational thinking.

I remember where I was sitting the first time I logged onto the internet. I was 19 and had just started my first paralegal job. I lived in half of a Victorian house in the middle of a small town with my boyfriend and our one-year-old kiddo. The carpet was hunter green – my favorite color in the world back then. (It was replaced by its cousin, phthalo green, once I started painting.) Our computer desk was set up in the room between the door and the dining room, across from my favorite room in the house – the living room -- a finished porch with windows on three sides and gorgeous trim work, where I’d spend all of my free time curled up in my big comfy Jen chair reading books and books and books.

My friends were all out partying and enjoying the college experience. I was home with a toddler, keeping house, working a Big Girl office job, missing my friends and feeling left out. This misalignment of life, this feeling of being ten years ahead of my peers but also ten years behind my parent friends, has kept me off balance my entire life.

So, when we signed up with a local ISP in 1995 and fired up the screeching noise for the first time, I was HOOKED.

The internet didn’t start taking immediately. The hours I spent with a toddler in my lap, searching the internet for soundboards where we could play short clips from his favorite Disney movies over and over again, were very happy times! In the days when long distance calls on a landline were expensive, it was fun to keep in touch with far-flung family and friends FOR FREE on ICQ. I was able to make extra money by sewing patchwork skirts and dresses on eBay back when people still mailed checks to pay for their purchases. When the library didn’t have a book I wanted to read, Amazon was there to save the day.

The cell phone didn’t start taking immediately, either. I came back to the office from lunch one day to find a message on my desk: kiddo had bumped his head during recess and was on his way to the emergency room, please call daycare asap. Everything turned out fine in the end, just a couple of stitches. The first time I was able to provide a cell phone number to his daycare peace flooded my body. Never again would something happen to my child without my knowing about it immediately.

After cat photos and porn grew the internet into what it is today, the primary driver for innovation has been money (obvs!), specifically, how can we turn The American Consumer of Physical Goods into The American Consumer of Digital Goods. How can we extract more work from these useless squishy humans who demand food, sleep, exercise, and payment for their labor?

Cell phones: people will feel important and accomplished when they take business calls while driving from one business appointment to another business appointment.

Blackberry: people can display how powerful, connected, and successful they are by being able to access work emails from a phone.

Amazon: people will have more available hours to work when they don’t have to waste time shopping for things they’d like to have (and ultimately their needs).

Spotify: you no longer own your music and you pay us so we can trickle some pennies down to artists, but mostly you just pay us.

Facebook: monetizing community means everyone who spends time on our platform is working for us by attracting advertisers. Soon we’ll turn everyone into a small business, which will also yield advertising revenue.

Technology wound its way through my brain like a fungus. The harm social media caused was the fruit – easy to spot, recognizable. I kicked it over and stomped on it, time and time again, but because I’d never attended to the mycelium it always grew back. Now that I’m pulling the mycelium out, patiently, thread by thread, I’m beginning to see that it was never social media, or the cell phone, or the internet, but capitalism.

The line between the computer room and the living room evaporated; the line between work and leisure evaporated; the lines between profession and family and friendship and community evaporated. All are consolidated into small, expensive devices that demand our constant attention and care.

At every turn, cookies and pixels attach themselves to us like leeches, burrowing their way into our flesh. Their teeth are sharp; you cannot scrape these leeches off. The only thing you can do is avoid them by refusing technology.

Becoming a Luddite no longer feels like an aesthetic, but a necessity, if we are ever to reclaim our lives from what capitalism continuously extracts from it. This makes me sound like a weird tinfoil hat person, but at this point I’m willing to embrace those people as harbingers I stupidly dismissed because I wasn’t willing to slow down enough to listen.

That voice you hear in your head? The one that’s saying, “I need to make money, how will I make money unless I publish on Substack and sell my crochet hats on Etsy and market these things on social media.”? That voice is just the machinations of capitalism whispering lies in your ear to keep you working in service of technology while it extracts more and more from your one human life.

It’s time to kick technology out of the living room and get back to living again.