Prayer over a new smartphone

Hello, phone. For many years, starting today, you will be my most loyal companion and my most treasured possession. I will feel your weight in my pocket every moment of every day, a presence as constant as my breath. The muscles and bones of my hand, arm, and shoulder will deform to accommodate your shape; you’ll have become another of my limbs.

For months at a time, you’ll be my only portal to the people I love. I’ll be holding you in my palm, looking at you, smiling at you when sharing articles with my dad, when playfully ribbing my siblings, when sending photos of book pages to my friends thousands of miles away.

I’ll be stealing nervous glances at you, unable to focus on my work, wondering why she hasn’t texted me back, my chest tightening a little more each time to block out the pain. Another time I’ll be staring at you, hunched over, my fingers dancing gracefully over the glass, seeking desperately for a sequence of words that will make everything okay.

All the people in my life will have a dual identity: as flesh-and-blood human beings whom I can touch and smell and feel, and also as patterns of pixels that will, with no warning or context, pop into my awareness and trigger intense feelings of love, curiosity, annoyance, or dread.

I’ll use you in situations with the highest stakes - calling for help when I’m injured and alone; navigating a foreign country; talking a friend down from doing something rash and destructive. But also with the lowest stakes - soothing myself with bullet chess or twitter feeds or reddit posts until the bad feelings go away and the world beyond the screen feels safe and interesting again. You are both Epipen and fidget spinner, firefighter and clown.

I’ll resent you bitterly for all of this. For the way you invite me to squeeze my personality through my thumbs, to choose pixels over people, to shard my attention until I can’t sit still for even five minutes to read a book. I’ll feel trapped by you. You’ll enable me to hurt myself in a myriad ways, but I’ll never be able to leave you, at least not for long. You appear in the physical plane as a smooth black slate, but on the spiritual plane you are a shard of broken glass, slicing into me every time I pick you up unless I do so with utmost care and presence.

None of this is your fault, exactly, nor that of your creators. They tried hard to sand off your edges, to make you softer and more humane. The reason you are so dangerous is that they tried even harder to make you useful, and succeeded wildly. You amplify my voice so that millions could hear me. You amplify my memory so that nothing I see or say can ever be forgotten. Like Tolkien’s palantiri, you amplify my sight so I can see anything in the world at the swipe of a finger. And again like the palantiri, you often make me the subject of a great and malevolent will. For in giving me godlike powers you make manifest the inner struggles of my soul.

I pray for the presence of mind to use your powers well. For connection, not distraction. To set boundaries that preserve what is precious, not to mix all together into undifferentiated pixel slurry. As an augmentation of my will and of my imagination, not as a chain to bind me to the ratchet of technocapital. Amen.