Lookout Don't Look Up
Phone addiction is the most powerful drug on earth.
Is the art of conversation dying or dead amongst those born since 2000? Does that age cohort favour emojis and digital communication over face to face human interaction and verbal dialogue? I ask these questions both rhetorically and tongue-in-cheek, because we all know the answer.
I feel like I am surrounded by zombies. I am surrounded by zombies. I’ve ranted about this kind of thing before, here, here, and here.
Today I re-examine ‘smart’ dumb phone addiction through the lens of a pedestrian in mortal peril, a driver who sees 99.9% of motorists playing on their phones or watching videos in Bangkok, and as a quietly despairing man from a bygone era that values meaningful human connection. I must be old-fashioned. I was born in 1984 and now I am living through Eric Blair aka George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty four. I have yet to turn forty years old, yet I may be called a ‘boomer’ simply by virtue of my principles and how I cling onto being human, acting human, rejecting the merging of man and machine, and quite literally detesting my own phone.
I leave my little blue screen at home most of the time. Mrs. Creed is never without hers; alas I do encourage her to spend less time on her Instagram story and more time on our story in the land of the living, within the magical, spontaneous, unpredictable realm of reality.
There are a handful of friends who I can rely on for punctuality to appear at a convened meeting point at the allotted time. It is liberating being without that little device that craves attention - even with zero anti-social media apps installed, no email account apps, *no Substack app*, no food delivery apps - only Telegram and Signal messaging - I can make do with those on my laptop desktop alone.
I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks back when I met a friend in the park for some outdoor exercise at the open-air gym, when he was despondent to my calls and messages. I reluctantly brought my phone in its little faraday cage pouch and fished it out upon arrival to check if he was nearby. He turned up and proudly announced that he’d left his phone at home, inspired by observing me having done the same so often. It was checkmate with me in the NPC crosshairs on that occasion. Nay bother. Going ‘phoneless’ is catching on. Long may it continue.
Last night I braved thunder and lightning in a torrential classic Bangkok monsoon season downpour to make a run to the local minimart. There are rarely any pavements (‘sidewalks’ in American English) around Bangkok’s little ‘Sois’ (roads). As I toddled home, I hugged the right side of the road on the final corner of the home stretch, only to be almost wiped out of the game.
A food delivery driver tore around the corner towards me, one hand on his motorcycle handlebar, the other hand holding his phone as he slouched forwards checking the map direction on his blue screen. I breathed in and darted further still into the walls atop the drains. He missed me by millimeters. I shouted in Thai “concentrate!” - to which I received an angry glare. Sorry for existing, and being in your way as you multi-tasked your journey one-handed in zero-visibility heavy rain at highspeed, Mr. Motorcyclist.
I see these near-misses daily around my neigbourhood - for the most part these motorcyclists seem to have developed an extra-sensory perception via peripheral vision that allows them to remain glued to their phones as they swerve around oncoming traffic and pedestrians. Although I know from the daily death tolls on the roads involving motorcycles and pick-up trucks, that many souls are not so ‘lucky’.
It really is a concrete jungle out there.
As my car’s engine idles in the dreaded Bangkok gridlocked traffic from time to time, I look around from side to side, and what do I see? Everyone is on their phone, almost all motorists are wearing a facemask, often alone in their cars, and motorcyclists are often playing games or watching YouTube videos; if they are not otherwise mesmerised by the infinite scroll of drivel via Facebook.
When the traffic lights turn green, invariably it warrants a beep of my horn to pull the driver in front of me out of their phone-induced stupor, so that they may drive forwards, whilst they ambidextrously continue tapping away on their screens, putting their automatic drive vehicles into gear.
Frightening. Insane. Normalised.
The brief reprieves from being - I like to think - sane, in an insane and abnormal society, come via the rare glances of acknowledgement from fellow humans who are socially self-aware of their surroundings, and fully conscious. What a rare, beautiful sight it is to behold, truly. Especially on the public transport links - Bangkok’s underground mass rapid transit (MRT) trains, or the over-ground ‘Skytrain’ system.
It reminds me of that scene in the film I am Legend when Will Smith’s character discovers the mutated humans underground all huddled together in silence:
Yet within the silent, huddled, phone scrolling of the public transport trains in Bangkok, I yearn to find just one person who is phoneless, without earphones, without an Ipad or device in their palms. It is extremely rare. If our eyes meet but for a moment, we might exchange a knowing smile as we glance around at the other automaton passengers. It makes for good people watching at least.
What a waste of the inherently natural beauty that used to radiate from Thai women. They just do not look up anymore. They are also still often masked. Hidden away from the world, sinking into the digital, all consuming, attention sapping succubus demon of the blue screen. Unquestionably addicted. Hopelessly dependent on their bastion of truth propaganda, spewing out attention-span diminishing ten second clips of nonsense.
I am so glad to not be a single man in this landscape which is devoid of feeling, numbed by always being connected to the internet, yet entirely disconnected from the sense of self, surroundings, and from life itself.
I met an interesting bloke at the sports hall in the local park. He has a unique job where his role comes in between physiotherapy and doctor’s rehabilitative duties for people who have suffered devastating physical injuries, often from car accidents. I can’t recall the job title, but it is something ‘activated’. He helps people to ‘get activated’ through a type of Swedish massage and stretching exercises. He ranted about phone addiction.
He casually said:
“Basically, babies are born now, they learn to walk, then that’s it really. They do not progress beyond the ability to walk in terms of their physical development. The walk turns into a shuffle with poor posture. Most infants are given an Ipad by the age of two years old here. Then they are cognitively and physically stunted in terms of development.”
We mused on how across the sports centre halls of the local park - Pickle Ball, Badminton, Table Tennis, Basketball, and Volleyball - the children are absent. Teenagers are nowhere to be seen. The age demographic for the most part is 30 years old and up. We agreed, nostalgically, how our childhoods in England were spent climbing trees, building rope-swings, playing football, and generally being outdoors as much as possible.
“Piss off Creed you cringeworthy Boomer!” - I hear some youngster shout from the backrow…
As a teenager at the turn of the millennium on new year’s eve 1999, I was at a house party with the entire high school year of pupils. It was wild. I drank myself stupid and ended up throwing up all over my friend’s parent’s pretty flowerbed in their neatly trimmed suburbia garden. I was somewhat mortified. I featured heavily in Monday morning’s gossip stories around the school. It faded away. Only to be replaced by some other drunken teenager falling down some stairs or into a bush at the next week’s house party.
Nowadays, teenagers cannot afford to make such mistakes - even though such errors can be a coming of age rite of passage. Not necessarily involving alcohol, but general moments of great embarrassment when you want the ground to swallow you up and memory hole the incident.
Nowadays, a teenager would be subject to intense ‘cyber bullying’ if they put one foot wrong at a party. It would be remixed into a funky video clip to a whacky soundtrack and might go viral, if they are very unfortunate. I wonder what teenaged house parties are like now. Do they sit around on their phones showing each other videos and messaging the person sat beside them? Do some people play up to the camera phones for attention, or choregraph a little dance for TikTok?
“Shut up Creed you stupid Boomer!”
As a child, I would call my friends by landline and ask “are you playing out today?” Then we would ‘knock-on’ our friend’s front door, and off we went to explore the great outdoors, tearing around on our BMX bikes, with the only danger we put ourselves in owing to our own non-stop laughter, and perhaps foolishly cycling together side by side in a row on a main road.
Although we weren’t chased by nefarious government officials from clandestine programs like in the show Stranger Things, we once experienced a bicycle chase from a group of much older boys after we replaced the huge log on their rope-swing with a twig, just for a laugh. I am sure they would have beaten us to a pulp if they had caught up with us - a lucky, narrow escape.
That’ll do it for glimpsing into my misspent well-spent, character building youth.
We were free once upon a time. Carefree, adventurous, explorative, and curious about the big wide world.
LOOKOUT PHONE PARODY VIDEO
I don’t know who to give credit for this final parody clip. Fellow Substacker TriTorch sent me a link to it (I hope he recommences his writing again when the time is right). If I can persuade Mrs. Creed to add a Thai voiceover to the video, I bet my inbox will be inundated by Thais asking where they can order it…
As TriTorch said to me in a direct message which I am sure he won’t mind me quoting verbatim:
They're (phones) highly weaponized poison aimed directly at mankind. Worse than drugs because the vector of attack makes so much sense ("well my son has to have his cell phone in class, what if there's an emergency") <--- there's so much evil built into that mantra it's practically inconceivable (we went on just fine for 200 years without cell phones in classrooms, but whatever eases the parents' minds paves the path to our ruin).
FURTHER RECOMMENDED READING AND VIEWING
WATCH: How to Control Your Smartphone (So It Doesn’t Control You)
Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok based writer. Any support is greatly appreciated. If you are in a position to donate a virtual coffee or crypto, it would mean the world of difference. Paid subscribers can comment on articles, videos, and podcasts, and also receive a monthly subscriber newsletter. Email: nicholas.creed@protonmail.com to enquire about a crypto-paid discounted annual subscription.
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Read this a moment ago. Screen dependency decimated reading and, consequently, knowledge skills. The culture and ethos of the screen is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral.
Thai women LOVE the "insta". It's like catnip