Recently I wrote a piece about smartphones, the similarities between analog technology and Catholicism, and trying to reclaim a sense of unbroken time.

There’s a lot here that I like, and it could probably have been two or three distinct pieces. But I’ll share some bits making each major point. I remember the slowness of analog/physical technology, and of the greater sense of patience I had simply because so few things were at your fingertips back then:

I remember that old, slow perception of time wistfully. Waiting a month for the homeschool group to meet; waiting a week to rent a video game at Blockbuster; reading a book and reaching that point where you feel like you’re really in the author’s fictional world. Having to do something to do something: actually go to the store, actually go find the VHS tape, actually pick up the phone. I almost marvel at my focus and attention span in those days, to the extent that I can still recall it. I marvel at my patience. We didn’t miss not having a screen to check nervously every five minutes, and we didn’t know we wanted it.

A couple of years ago, I bought a Sony cassette recorder—the same model I had once owned and sadly sold off—and opened up a blank tape I’d found in a thrift store. Like I used to do as a kid—back then, with a gargantuan silver boombox my dad had picked up in the early ’90s—I just played around with it. That feeling of being deeply absorbed in something unimportant was so familiar to me, yet nearly forgotten. The time passes quickly, but in a very engaged, alive way. It is striking to think that this was once normal.

It reminds me of one of my first days of classes back in college. The professor let us out of a two-hour weekly class something like an hour early. We were all overjoyed, of course. But I never could sit through a normal class session for that class, for the whole semester. That one day getting out early made the regular schedule much more of a grind than it otherwise would have been.

The smartphone “speeding up” certain tasks does the same thing to, well, everything.

I also thought about the spirit—the concealed or submerged ideology, almost—of digital technology. Old-school tech is physical. And more than that, it clearly and obviously ties action and result. You have to actually do the thing.

When the tape is recorded, the only way to play it back (at least on the legacy technology) is to play it the way it was recorded. Even fast-forward and rewind are tactile, physical processes. The process and the means by which it is carried out are connected, in such a way that anybody can understand what is happening. And without that process, its contents are closed off. You have to actually do the thing.

A CD player can skip ahead by track, which attenuates that connection. A digital file can simply be dragged from point to point with a mouse, severing it completely. Amazon Alexa playing a song at your command? A few swipes of the finger ordering a pizza or calling up pornography or calling your mom? The connection between action and result is almost obliterated.

The final stop in the progression here—which may or may not ever actually materialize—is the brain chip, where your mere thought will actually execute an action in the real world. As a Christian, this gives me, let’s say, metaphysical pause. What would more resemble that old temptation, “Ye shall be as gods”?

And this brings me to Catholicism specifically. Catholicism is analog. You can’t do confession online. You can’t ordain a priest without a bishop laying his hands on him. You can’t make present the body and blood of Christ without the bread and the cup and the actual repetition of the words of Christ. Not just “can’t” in the sense of the rules; “can’t” in the sense that sacraments are inherently physical. Under ordinary circumstances, they are actually understood to be invalid without their proper physical trappings and procedures. Ordination without a bishop and the laying on of hands isn’t like cheating on a test; it’s like trying to play a cassette tape without a cassette tape player.

I don’t think of this as putting God in a box or reducing him to a magician who executes magic tricks; I think of it as describing and embodying something true about the world and human existence. You have to actually do the thing.

So I was dismayed when my wife and I visited Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, and we saw this:

It’s an electronic LED candle machine; you pay by credit card or smartphone and the candle” lights up. You can even “light a candle” anywhere in the world via app.

Now, lighting a candle isn’t a sacrament or a sacramental rite; maybe this doesn’t really matter, even from a strict Catholic perspective. But nonetheless, I don’t like it. I wrote:

This bothered me more than the entry fee—this notion that the ritual and physicality of the thing are not integral to it but optional. Can you light a candle in a metaphysical sense—or any sense—without lighting a candle? Is it like some ersatz version of transubstantiation, where the form of the act is separable from its substance? Or are you doing something different—whatever that thing may be?

It reminds me of the bit in The Handmaid’s Tale where there’s a storefront full of Xerox machines printing and duplicating prayer intentions, over and over again. That seems to me like putting God in a box; trying to bypass the humanity and physicality of faith.

And then there’s this:

It is disturbing how easily and half-consciously one can make time seem to pass by staring at a smartphone and doing nothing in particular: nervously flitting from email to Slack to one browser to another browser to work to social media, doing a lot of fast-paced nothing, as if the internet itself is a sort of nervous, poorly focused, disembodied intelligence. Which—the only difference being our bodies—is what it seems to turn us into. It takes particular effort now to be who we once were unselfconsciously.

It reminds me—and is probably partially inspired by—this goofy but serious piece titled “The Internet is Made of Demons.” I wrote about that awhile ago too, and how demonic possession is not the craziest analogy for what constant connectivity at our fingertips seems to do to us. (And I do mean it only as an analogy.)

I wrote a lot in that previous piece too, but the bit that stands out to me now is this. Part of it is rooted in the confusion over what’s real and what’s not real: the way this stuff is right in your face, and you can make it all go away, but you also can’t:

I think about a lot of people my age—their snarky, jaded style, their dark sense of humor. Some of that might simply be a result of growing up with Jon Stewart, but I wonder how much of it could be rooted in a premature exposure to things they shouldn’t have seen. Everyone my age knows that feeling of fear and adrenaline that comes from purposely or accidentally seeing something on a screen that you know you shouldn’t have, especially when it happens in the darkness of the middle of the night while your parents sleep. Maybe, over and over, such exposures do something to you. Perhaps the violence, the smut, the disturbing stories of death and crime and addiction and depression and grief mixed in with lighthearted comments—perhaps this mix of terrible and trivial things lodges itself into your psyche and continues to accumulate there, the emotional equivalent of persistent organic pollutants.

I went on to compare the smartphone to cigarettes. I meant that as a kind of catch-all for something age-inappropriate, because I was talking about smartphones and kids, but in both the sense of poison and the sense of addiction, it is even more apt than I realized.

I used this line in the piece: “You can’t be Amish alone.” I really think “just try harder” doesn’t apply to some things. Telling people to just try to use their phones less isn’t that far from telling a gambler to just try harder to beat the house. American individualism conceals the dogma that nothing is ever a collective, public problem requiring a collective, public solution. I’m open to the possibility that smartphones may be one such problem. I’m not sure. I’m not advocating for some specific government intervention.

For now, though it’s impossible, I’m trying, here and there, sometimes, to be Amish alone.

Related Reading:

Against Black Boxes

Mechanical Romance

You Can’t Be Amish Alone

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