E-Flowers for Algernon
Smartphones have undoubtedly given me superpowers. But what happens when they are callously taken away? The result can be disorienting, and dangerous.
I’m currently traveling in Europe, with seven stops in four countries over a three-week period. Ordinary me would not be able to cope. But with mobile superpowers I am doing just fine. I use phone apps to maintain my itinerary, navigate public transportation with the ease of a native. I frequently use my “photographic memory” to perfectly recollect which hotel room I’m staying in, or where I am parked.
All of these travel-friendly superpowers are great, as long as the phone is with me and sufficiently charged. But a few days ago I reached a crisis point which shook my confidence in these borrowed faculties.
I was visiting my son in Copenhagen who just started a postdoc there. As I was packing up to leave his apartment, I stuffed my phone charger and laptop charger— everything that sustains life within a phone — into my son’s bookbag and headed for Stuttgart.
In my defense, we have identical backpacks. My online purchase arrived with four identical backpacks instead of just one, and now each family member is using one copy. Talk about fodder for situation comedy.
It was only at my hotel in Stuttgart that I realized that I had left both chargers in my son’s backpack. (If I had just left the phone charger I could survive via the laptop’s power/data port.) I was running out of time —my laptop was already completely discharge, and my phone battery was down to 12%. The hotel concierge could not spare me a charger, but he suggested going to a shopping mall which involved nontrivial public transportation. In the end, I succeeded to buy a charger and return to the hotel with about 4% battery left. And I was able to order online a replacement laptop charger, which arrived the next day.
Yay, technology.
I have a condition which you could call “xenomobilephobia”, a fear of being stranded in a foreign country (or unfamiliar place) without phone smarts, not being able to remember even the name of the hotel where I am staying, or the phone number of any local contact.
I realized during this episode that the rollercoaster of emotions associated with xenomobilephobia track a well-known short story called Flowers for Algernon. In that story, Charlie Gordon, a man with a 68 IQ, undergoes an experimental therapy that causes his intelligence to increase markedly, only to tragically reverse course later on. My story had a happy ending, but I can’t help but have mixed feelings about borrowed intelligences.
I will end with a link to a screenplay for a short film called Via Starbucks, that I wrote a decade ago and never produced. Two urbanites venture into a forest, and lose access to their phones. They are saved not by silicon but by another wonder of nanotechnology: caffeine.
The story is either an indictment of our technology-addicted society, or a subversive ad for Starbucks Via.
You decide.