Smartphones and lovemaking
The philosophy of sexiness & cultivating life as one long act of love
Smartphones make you dumb because it atrophies your ability to act. In German, “to act” is handeln, which is related to the word “hand”. Our hands make us human. This shows up in the metaphor, “I can handle it”, meaning I can do something about it. We exist when we’re able to do things. I act, therefore I am.
Digital tools make us handless. In the famous 2007 keynote presentation where he introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs declared: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”
Fingers have replaced hands. We no longer have to handeln anything because we no longer deal with things that matter—literally, things made of atoms.
Get out of your head…
Ideas aren’t real in the way the world is real. The smartphone is Plato’s cave, full of shadows and projections: social media gives us illusions of int…