Driving While Phoning: Zombocalypse Now
Phones, bows, and baskets
I was driving down the highway and came up behind a car swerving left and right in the passing lane. The driver had his right elbow on his center console and his phone was held up in his right hand. I watched his eyes in his rear view mirror. Eyes lifted—the car realigned between the painted lines. Eyes lowered—the car drifted left onto the rumble strips or right into another cars lane.
I have looked at my phone before and regretted it. Most of us probably have. But his pinballing was so reckless I sat in something like wonder.
Nothing else existed for this man except the glowing void in his palm. Nothing else mattered. I wanted to see how long he would continue to drive as if he would blow a .3 on a breathalyzer while seemingly dead sober. His eyes wore a mildly amused expression. It was as if he had transitioned from being to non-being. As if he had unplugged himself from the earth. As if he had made of himself a digit. A user.
This is the zombie apocalypse. But it strikes me as far more wretched than the Hollywood-ized version that we are used to because it is so uninteresting. This is not the Walking Dead. Where is the thrill of armored vans with cow-catchers? Where is the camaraderie found in Alamo-like last stands? Where is the painful realization our species is at risk of extinction and the sudden surge of meaning and purpose in the face of adversity?
Now, our suicidal swerver is an n-of-1, but he will be our stepping off point for a bit of apocalyptic contemplation. We do not live in the Information Age so much as we live in what James Williams calls the Age of Attention. We can also call it the Attention Economy, or, more precisely, the Inattention Economy.
My point is we live in an era defined by war: a war on our attention. If we want to know what sort of impact our screens are having on us and why this is happening, my sense is we should start in the analog world.
To Aché hunters, bareka means to hunt. Hunting is their purpose in life, it “is their function; they identify themselves with it and define themselves” by it. The tool of the hunt, and thus of a man, is the bow. The rainforest was their home, and in this unforgiving environment of jaguar and boa constrictor, the men whittle their bows and practice shooting because “the survival of the band will depend on them.” Thus they love it. “They feel no internal division. They are what they do, their self fearlessly achieves its fullness in doing what their group has always done since the beginning of time.”1
The basket is to a woman what the bow is to a man. From a girls youngest years, her mother teaches her how to weave, walk the narrow jungle paths, and find the lush coves of guava, papaya, and yams. On reaching womanhood, she celebrates this meaningful milestone by weaving palms into her first basket.
The tools of the Hunter and the Gatherer led to pure, utter attention to their world and their purpose in life. Their analog tools defined them.
What then?
The bow and the basket have given way to the screen and the void. Total attention to leaf, snake, and cloud while stalking forests of jaguar has given way to every human on earth spending an average of six hours and forty minutes in front of a screen, every single day. Corded muscles of neck, forearm, and calf have given way to chin-dropping, swollen legs, and bloodshot eyes. Minds attuned to a value-based life—a Way—have given ground to scrolling for the next post that might unleash a flood of dopamine into the blood stream.
Now both the Stone Age and the Digital Age pressure us to carry our tools every second of our lives. But who thinks the outcome of carrying an iPhone is the same as carrying a bow? The phone, laptop, and television are not merely bits of plastic and rare earth minerals: they are portals to ads, click bait, and angry news—they are the voids in which we pour our attention.
Is this attention paid back with purpose as if the screens were bows and baskets? From another angle, what is the intent of those who make digital technology at present? Do our Tech Titans want free and shredded Ache? Or do they want the living-dead sitting in a stopped car staring at a smart phone long after the traffic light has turned green?
No. They do not want autonomous, blood-pumping, basket-weaving Homo sapiens, but a 1 or a 0. Not humans, but users.2 They want to murder thoughts, solitude, reflection, and contemplation, and replace them with the promise that just a little more doomscrolling will not lead to doom but to the gates of the Garden of Eden.
The significant point is billions of dollars are spent trying to get you to look at your screen and not your child. Or the moon. Or the span of time you have been given here. You living autonomously and providing for those you love are useless; you swerving in traffic like a madman staring at a screen are worth money.
The motives of these digital overloads is almost boring—extract attention and then monetize the corpse.
The intent of the user, on the other hand, is less boring. At the root of modern tech, the intent is to be free from callouses, weaving, whittling, sweating, stalking, gnawing stomachs, and a swift and violent death. This makes the outcome fascinating in its reversal. Our craving for ease is natural but our attainment of ease is not. We were never meant to achieve it much like poor Tantalus, starving, and with those luscious fruit trees overhead set forever out of his reach.
What, then, is the result? Self-zombification. It seems, then, self-zombification is both encouraged and chosen.
In a way, we are wired to bring on our own apocalypse. If so, then technology is not so much a means for constant social revolution3 as it is a path to self-zombification.
Since the Age of Attention likes to quantify the monetary value of users, let us quantify the temporal value of users. Given the average humans spends six hours and forty minutes on screens every day, how much time will one person spend on screens over the next, say, two years? Six and a half months of uninterrupted screen time.
There are roughly eight billion people on earth . This means in the next two years, the world’s population will foresake four-and-a-half billion years of their attention on screens: emailing, texting, Googling, ChatGPT-ing, YouTube-ing, Meta-ing, Instagram-ing, Netflix-ing, TikTok-ing. You can throw a rock that far across the stream of two years’ time, yet packed within that span is four-and-a-half billion years of human potential.
There is righteous rage against swerving in traffic while staring at a smart phone, but at the prospect of four-and-a-half billion years vanishing into a void there often lingers only a question: “How can we make a bit of money from it?”
Let us linger here for a moment because I had to double check my math. The earth itself is four-and-a-half billion years old. It is a long time. Now what might be done on a civilizational scale if we spend the next two years—meaning four-and-a-half billion years of attention—not on screens but on something else? How many Dostoevskies would emerge from behind their smart phones and put ink to paper? How many geniuses would cure cancer, Parkinson’s, or dementia? Or forge a time machine to spend a few hours with Epictetus? Or create a wormhole to explore the civilizations across the universe? Or make our species multi-planetary so our offspring will survive when the sun swells and swallows the earth in a few billion years? Or simply spend some time studying the silky black layers of cacao or the granular sensations of every inhale and exhale?
What would it take to walk this harder path?
A relic of the analog world walking in the automatic.
Those who carry the bow and the basket in their souls despite the screens in their palms, following the ancient laws while amusing themselves with the modern, unbowed to any economy, algorithm, or overlord but their own.
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Clastres, Pierre. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. Translated by Paul Auster, Zone Books, 1998.
Thank you
for showing me this book. Williams, James. Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.See Marshall McLuhan for more on this idea
I'm, mostly, in ironic agreement with you. I am just about to put my phone down and return to tending my vegetable garden but before I do an observation or two. As a species we have removed ourself from selective pressure (evolution) and bereft of evolution we are doomed, eventually, to die out, it won't take a billion years! My other observation is that we use our phones to connect to friends, loved ones, colleagues because we live dispersed lives and we like to talk (as well as engage in poetry, philosophy, science and religion with fellow enthusiasts here on Substack - nourishing I think). So it isn't all zombification, love is seeping in.
Your distracted suicidal highway swerver is a brilliant metaphor for who/what "we" are becoming! 👏