My wife and I have developed, these last ten years, a habit, just before going to sleep, of holding hands in bed while watching entirely different television shows on our phones. W. tends to watch comedies in which women exchange febrile, witty repartee, while I favor dramas in which people blow shit up with their minds.
This pleasant if not very mutual habit is breaking down because W. can no longer guarantee that the sound of her show will be inaudible to me. She bought the lightest replacement phone she could find some months ago, only to find out it did not have an outlet for the jack on her very retro headset. Last month, when I too ordered a new phone from Best Buy, upon delivery I also found I could no longer use my headset.
As opposed to those headsets, which did not need to be charged and worked immediately upon being plugged in, W.'s earbuds seem fragile and require a lot of management. They must be charged every day, and sometimes fail to pair, or stop pairing, with her phone. With a sinking feeling, I bought a mid-price pair of buds, charged them and discovered that my phone could not "see" them. They came without a manual, just some very cursory and incomprehensible labeled graphics on the back of the box, saying nothing about charging. "Go ahead, press the button"-- indicating two disklike features of the outside of each bud which feel like a static implanted logo, without any analog "qualia" of a button-press, nor any electronic sound effect (a click or chime) to indicate a press. Below this are some encircled images indicating that a "1x" press accomplishes something (its an image of a speaker with a minus sign, so probably lowering volume), 3x affects "EQ", whatever that is, and a "2s" press indicates something else. I understand that "x" probably means times, as in "press the button twice", but wtf does "2s" mean?
The company, fully expecting you will hit a brick wall pairing its product, has a troubleshooting page on its web site which includes this advice: "Open the charging case lid, and tap the Right earbud 7 times. Now move to the Left earbud, and tap 7 times. Remove the Right earbud first, and after a second remove the Left earbud. The earbuds indicate they are successfully in pairing mode when one earbud blinks Blue and White, while the other earbud stays solid White."
By disenabling the old-fashioned wired headset, our phone manufacturers have forced us to use a technology which requires knowledge and careful management, and repeated trouble-shooting, in place of one which always worked on demand.
I am 71 years old and well, and nostalgically, remember a time when technology worked. I have listened to music while exercising on a portable cassette player and a CD player. Both of these provided my music on demand, and I could listen for hours if I wished. The only problems which could happen were the battery running out, or scratches on the media. More recently, I abandoned trying to stream my Amazon playlist to my phone, because the music always stopped, sometime during the first song, and inevitably before I had completed even a 15 minute work-out. I had no way to tell if the problem was in the phone app, its wireless connection, the router, the Internet connection, or in the cloud.
The first business computer I owned was a Morrow Micro-Decision running the CP/M operating system, circa 1984. It had two floppy drives and no hard disk. It was the fastest computer I have ever owned, and writing in its Wordstar program was very satisfying. The Windows 11 machine I am typing on right now is bloated with all kinds of background software I never wanted and do not need, and far slower and buggier than the Morrow.
It is a miracle more people are not killed by the Google Maps software, which is so fragile on every phone I have ever owned that it is constantly changing modes and even destinations. I once drove a full half hour before discovering that it was no longer taking me to the Port Jefferson ferry station, but a "rail trail" destination. Sometimes, when I am driving in a dense urban downtown, it tries to send me down a one-way street, and only then do I see it has changed from driving to walking mode.
This problem provides an interesting case study in the ontological "digital" v. "analogue" divide. There is a prejudice that everything digital is preferable to everything analog, but that is not so. Those analogue portable music players worked much better than the digital one. That is because digital devices actually encounter, even create, a new analogue they are ill-prepared for. Touch screens in particular constantly experience, especially in noisy, vibrating automobiles, a series of "phantom touches", which is why Google Maps software in particular never conducts me on an entire trip without constant vigilance and adjustment. Every moment spent looking at the screen is not spent watching the road, and is dangerous.
Here are two more variations on "phantom touch". Various phone screens went black when I touched them, a very frustrating experience when you are trying to raise the volume on a phone call, or turn on the speaker. I did a bit of research and figured out that the phone was mistaking my finger for an ear. In its eagerness not to experience "phantom touch" when the user is holding the phone to her ear, it was preventing me from using the screen icons. Both the phone and map technology did not function "on demand".
My new Windows 11 LeNovo laptop has a mouse pad so sensitive it too regularly experiences "phantom touch". On a tight deadline, writing a proposal that had to be emailed out before a phone call 40 minutes away, I thought I had lost twenty minutes' work when five paragraphs suddenly "rewrote" themselves to two, deleting half the content and adding a salutation. This boggled my imagination for a few minutes, until I figured out that a "phantom touch" had launched a completely gratuitous and unwanted feature within the gmail window, inviting "Gemini" to rewrite my work and to make it more friendly. One click of an "undo" icon only made some small changes; on a fourth frustrated click, I got my original work back.
I recently read Cory Doctorow's excellent Enshittification. Doctorow offers his own well-elucidated analysis of the reasons technology is getting worse, centered around monopoly power and a loss of any sense of responsibility to a customer.
Something I think Doctorow touched on, but which I regard as central to the problem, is what I have termed "billionairism". Increasingly, it appears that certain billionaires have grown so powerful, so huge, that there is no way for the rest of us to avoid their monstrous vanity, childish urges and neuroses. While one of the most important, if underrated elements, of democratic liberty is the right to be left alone, getting Steve Jobs to leave you alone was extremely difficult by the end of his life, and avoiding Elon Musk is virtually impossible.
I got my first telescope in 1967, a three inch refractor, and learned how to find the Orion Nebula, the double star Mizar, and other features of the sky. Since then I have always had a telescope, and discovered that I sucked at setting circles, at using the very primitive onboard computer, or at manually finding anything (I marveled at a young astronomer at a star party, deftly finding a nebula for us by locating a bright star, then moving the telescope a tidge leftwards). I am very proud of having invented "Wallace astronomy": I just make random sweeps of the sky with my 4 inch Dobsonian reflector, until I am centered on anything fuzzy, and then use a Sky Map app on my phone (one app which works reasonably well) to identify it. In seven years or so, I have located more than 40 of the 110 Messier objects up there, including some I always wanted to see but never would have been able to navigate to, like M31 in Andromeda (a galaxy!) and the Dumbbell nebula.I took the scope out last night (June 2026) and added another object (M14, a globular cluster) to my checklist.
I also saw five satellites, most through the scope while sweeping the sky. In 1967, when I started, these were extremely rare,and I never saw one through the telescope.Google Gemini tells me there were fewer than 200 man-made objects in the sky in 1967, and that today there are 14,500 active satellites (of which two thirds belong to Musk) and 3,000 defunct ones. Back then, there was a recording we would call at the Museum of Natural History (I still remember it, TR3-0404) which would tell you that if you went outdoors at 8:30 pm, and looked West, you would see a satellite. And we did.
Some nights, when I am not using the scope but just looking at the sky (maybe meteor-spotting) I spot as many as twenty satellites, frequently in the same orbit, sometimes four or five visible at once, like a chain.
I have seen sky photographs from remote observatories completely ruined by the tracks left by Elon Musk's SpaceX satellites. Speaking as we were of monstrous vanity, a narcissistic, entitled neighbor might annoy you at 1 am blasting his music. Elon Musk, gripped by similar impulses, pours satellites into the sky and ruins astronomy.
I remember knowing that the Apple II had no fan because Steve Jobs detested them. For years, I have noticed that the plugs which come with phone chargers fall out of outlets very easily. In my childhood, the prongs on plugs were slightly bowed, to grip the outlet, and you had to trip over or kick them to unplug them. Now you find that your phone hasn't charged overnight because the plug came out. I cannot prove, but can easily imagine, a billionaire in background, having a Steve Jobs moment: Fuck that; making sure it stays plugged in is the user's problem, not mine.
By the way, analog landlines which plugged into the wall always had excellent sound quality, and the calls never dropped.
Increasingly, a very common theme in the Spectacle has become the ways in which smart people make themselves stupid. Anyone with a billion dollars (Musk has a trillion) really doesn't have to think about most of the things the rest of us do-- like managing a buggy laptop rather than buying a new one, or trying to maintain a decent relationship with our neighbors. An increasingly visible feature of Billionairism has become extraordinarily childish, destructive and highly visible behavior, which is reminiscent of the Borgias, even as we slide back to a world of barons and serfs.
In a totalitarian society, by definition, privacy and solitude become impossible. In those, you fear the government. Here, as a weird "surface tension effect" of late Capitalism, it can be impossible to avoid living in Elon Musk's world. Those satellites swarming the sky were not placed there by an "invisible hand", but by the same one which brandished the DOGE chainsaw.