Over the course of the last twenty years, as cell phones and then smartphones saturated the market, it was common to have some friends who held out and refused to get one for years after everyone else had. At some point, probably in the late ‘00s, it became pretty much impossible for anyone not to have some kind of mobile phone—being unable to communicate on the go imposed an increasingly large burden on one’s peers that eventually meant the holdouts effectively disappeared when it came to making plans. The infrastructure of social interaction had reoriented itself around mobile communication so completely that it was quickly impossible to remember how things had worked before, and the few who attempted to stay behind were similarly ineffable. As with other kinds of rapid modernization, this process erased areas of analog social life so thoroughly that virtually no evidence of what it was like remained, at least in one’s ordinary environment. William Gibson said that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed, but eventually that changes and the future melts into a present so familiar it becomes invisible.
#102: You Can't Go Home Again
#102: You Can't Go Home Again
#102: You Can't Go Home Again
Over the course of the last twenty years, as cell phones and then smartphones saturated the market, it was common to have some friends who held out and refused to get one for years after everyone else had. At some point, probably in the late ‘00s, it became pretty much impossible for anyone not to have some kind of mobile phone—being unable to communicate on the go imposed an increasingly large burden on one’s peers that eventually meant the holdouts effectively disappeared when it came to making plans. The infrastructure of social interaction had reoriented itself around mobile communication so completely that it was quickly impossible to remember how things had worked before, and the few who attempted to stay behind were similarly ineffable. As with other kinds of rapid modernization, this process erased areas of analog social life so thoroughly that virtually no evidence of what it was like remained, at least in one’s ordinary environment. William Gibson said that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed, but eventually that changes and the future melts into a present so familiar it becomes invisible.