There’s a bartender joke that goes like this. A man paces anxiously in the waiting room as his wife goes into labor. The doctors scramble and a nurse runs to bring him to the delivery room. But labor seems short, the boy is small and delivered quickly. The doctor informs the couple, the boy was born without any arms or legs or even a torso for that matter. Still, the couple raises the boy as they would any other. Loving him just the same. On his 21st birthday, the father carries his son to the bar. The son is excited and asks for a strong pint of beer. His father orders the same and the bartender brings the two of them two icy pints of beer. They clink glasses together and the father chugs the beer and holds the other for his son to do the same. But then, something strange happens. The boy begins to feel strange and then suddenly, a torso erupts from under his head. The two are in shock, and quickly order another of the same. Together they clink and throw the glasses back and then, two arms sprout from the torso. The entire bar erupts into chaos. People are cheering, clapping. The two order another tall pint, feeling the effects of the first two. The boy with his two arms, grasps the glass and throws the pint into the air to finish the beer. Two legs appear dangling from the bar stool. The bar is in chaos. The bartender steps away for a moment to tell the manager. The boy with his new body is dancing around the room, shaking hands. He runs outside to show the world, but drunkenly he stumbles into the street and is hit by a truck. The bartender returns with his manager to find the crowd gathered outside. The boy should have quit while he was a head. 

Something is rotting inside of me lately. It has been two and a half years since I posted my incessant rambling “Is it even my choice anymore?” just as A.I. generated imagery was beginning to pop up on the internet in its most digestible and bite-sized form. Marking the start of my feelings that Zuckerberg and Alphabet and Jobs had finally beaten us. I am thinking of this blogpost as a spiritual successor to that post. Now, dear readers. We live in a world of horrific A.I. pornography, data centers that drink our water and eat our jobs and politicians that are so old they think orphans work inside the server terminals in those data centers. Our parents and uncles live in an entirely different reality than us based on the news they read. Our worlds only meet at the most painful Thanksgiving dinners, year after year. The progress of the past decade has been monumental, and continues forward at a rate only private equity could achieve. I am feeling that with these new advancements impinging on our lives, our personal sovereignty is being threatened. This is alarmist vocabulary. Injecting the word sovereignty is often an easy way to scare any conservative. But I think we should all be making more mindful decisions around big tech. 

I have been surgically attached to my phone for close to eleven years now. Fortunately, the time I lived without having one still outweighs the time I have spent with one. It initially was a way for me to keep up with friends, take more thoughtful photos, date, feel important and also look at memes and things that allowed me to feel culturally relevant. I would argue that for a long time, the utility it offered to my life was a net positive and in its most basic form I still think a cell phone is a good thing. But now I am chopped and unc. I watched a video while eating a meal (one of life’s many pleasures.) about the relationship between the algorithm and ‘Skinner Boxes.’ An Operant Conditioning Chamber, or Skinner Box is a chamber in which an animal is placed inside and given positive or negative stimuli based on the results of light or buzz or switch. In its most contemporary form, pigeons are placed inside the box and experience one of three forms of conditioning. The pigeon is given a switch and if the switch is triggered, nothing happens. The next subject is given a box in which when the switch is triggered, food is dispensed. These pigeons gain weight, but ultimately stop using the button after being satisfied. But the third group of pigeons is given a switch that only sometimes releases food. These pigeons adapt a behavior of doing nothing but constantly hitting the switch in hope of the next morsel. The algorithms that power tiktok and reels and Youtube shorts and all of the brainrotting media we ingest are programmed this way. In order to farm our engagement, they time our dopamine hits using metrics derived from our biology and engagement that we never see. Just like gambling. This disturbed me. The video that I watched proposed a solution, to inconvenience your use and also be mindful of your scrolling. Train your brain, everytime you pick up your phone to ask “What am I looking for?” This has proven to be the only thing that has ever worked to reduce my screen time. I deleted the instagram app, I can only scroll in the browser. It is a pain. Being mindful of my scrolling, asking myself questions has led to me being aware of how compulsory this behavior is. Instead of chasing morsels on reels, I divert my attention to something I’d rather be doing. I calculated my former average of 5 hours of screen time a day, into a more measurable way. 76 days a year of staring at my phone. Would anyone in their right mind choose to have spent two and a half of the last 11 years hitting a switch in hope of some bird seed? 

But why is this important? It is my leisure time, I shouldn’t be afraid of how I spend it. I began to experience days where I set intentions I would never fulfill. In Alaska, our winter days are very short. If you have a lazy sunday and get out the door at 1pm, the sun will be behind the mountain and the sky grows darker within the hour. I was feeling depressed by all that I wasn’t doing, despite the cold and despite the sun. I haven’t been writing. Because I was chasing something I would never get. I had sat on the couch to relax, and watched the sun set before I could get out the door. If you are a person who really enjoys your phone, I get it. I do too. But I want you to consider how the odds are stacked against you right now. Your phone understands and predicts your behavior, it communicates with people-you-know’s-devices. It knows everything. It recommends products based on what you think or say or what people around you are saying or thinking. The color choices on the phone are chosen to light up your monkey brain. The algorithms are designed to keep you engaged. They’re even now pushing more inflammatory content to get people to argue more. Even the Whitehouse is engagement farming. You would be hard pressed to find any other time in history where all the money was put into shit that absolutely nobody wants. We should quit while we’re still a-head. 

I have a lot of ideas and they never go anywhere. But I have a couple that I like. I like third spaces. The idea was championed by Ray Oldenburg and shouted by neo-liberals on college campuses for a hundred years after that. A place where social status is leveled by a communal need for something; places like bars, churches, libraries; gathering places. Churches have baggage, libraries are proven mostly obsolete by our phones and bars often require drinking and also a drive (behavior not recommended by the FDA.) I live in Girdwood, at the base of the Alyeska Ski Resort. An obvious third place! However ski resorts are focusing on extraction, profiting the most off of every guest they can (as most businesses do.) Leading to the prices we see now $9-10 beer, $16 Chicken Tenders. Exuding an air that locals and employees are a nuisance. The problem here is Girdwood is a town of ghost houses. Mostly empty homes rented on AirBnB. On the weekends it is packed with families from Anchorage and abroad, and during the week it is quiet. There is a dedicated base of homeowners and resort employees marooned in the Cook Inlet, during dark and brutal winters without anywhere to go during the week. The locals bars do a good job of hosting Open Mic nights, Trivia, Town League Ski Racing nights. But with a focus on extraction, the crowds have dwindled. Locals can’t afford the goods! Girdwood is a unique example being a ski town, but I think this is a relatable issue for most secular Americans. If you don’t drink, aren’t in a league of some kind and just moved to a new city then it’s very lonely. There should be a place in Girdwood (and other towns) where I can sit and meet others in a setting that isn’t too demanding of my safety, money or beliefs of the afterlife. I’m not a business owner, but I can imagine a clubhouse of sorts. That just offers space to sit in comfy chairs and drink coffee and play boardgames, space for sports in the summer and room to host events for a nominal fee. Like a country club but black people and women can be there too. Invest those membership fees back into the clubhouse and the minimal staff it would take to run the place and bam. We are in third place. 

Third places actually used to be much more common in the U.S.. Suburban-zation has led to the decline of spaces like this. Think back to college. The infrastructure around you existed at scale designed for you, not a car. Stores, restaurants, classes, the gym and library are a short walk away from where you live. This led to many instances of co-incidence or interacting with people and occurrences you wouldn’t choose to negotiate with on your own; running into a friend walking to class, those crazy protesters who get off on getting yelled at by a bunch of horny 20 year olds, LARPers. You met your friends in the library to study, and even though you sometimes didn’t talk much, you were still social. The promise of suburban paradise has created a false prophecy. Gated communities are built to keep bad people out, but we use the gates to lock ourselves in a space devoid of negotiation. Where-in the only people worthy of interacting with us day to day are people we chose to negotiate with. This is largely why I hated working from home so much, and why many adults struggle so much to make friends. In college it was easy, because the University is designed to make it so. Suburbanization is a tough gambit because I do believe some people prefer it, and should be afforded that luxury. Some people also belong in the sticks. But modern zoning makes it nearly impossible to build complexes in the U.S. that are mixed use spaces. Leaving the standing mixed use suburbs as some of the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in the country.

Let’s face it. We’re fucked. This is just a daydream for non-doers like me. My generation is largely apathetic to politics, but has been told it’s the local elections that matter. We are actually starting to see the repercussions of radical urbanism in this mid-term blue wave. No thanks to Trump also going all Erin Jager on everyone and everything and literally declaring war on Iran. Still, Apple and Instagram and TikTok will keep laughing from their non-corporate taxed wizard towers, casting new spells to drain our life force to power their dwarven machines. But there are feasible ways to implement a third thing into your life now. Pickleball maybe. Dungeons and Dragons is free. Say yes more, use your phone less when you are with people, even ones you don’t like. Be more playful, come up with stupid games and be weird. Give your whole self to your friends, see what happens when you’re unfiltered. Vote with your wallet and also your eyes. Being intentional about every single thing you do is your only hope, because it’s only going to get harder until we’re all dead.