intimacies with an iphone

unfortunately, in terms of direct messaging and dating apps, the medium is the message

you’re more intimate with your phone than you are with other people, probably.

As to the above title, I know I tend to be. It’s not great. So it goes. After my last couple weeks’ moment with someone I met on Hinge, back in early October, I have yet to redownload Hinge. Despite Hinge’s claim that it is designed to be deleted there’s always its readiness to be redownloaded. Even when something is going good, I’ll admit it’s nice to swipe and make casual chit chat and with that the disinterest creeps in. All dating apps feel a little too much like collecting pokémon cards for comfort. And so I deleted and haven’t gone back, — and such an abstentation has really helped squash my fear that dating apps were something I needed, despite having not really had any sort of real, meaningful connection through the apps that didn’t last more than three weeks.

In the time since I’ve begun to try and think clear-headed on why dating apps didn’t work for me, but I came to figure out instead why texting is so distressing to my communication style. Typical.

When you open your messages app, when you click the box at the top on Twitter (“What is happening?!” the faded out gray letter say, beckoning you forth, brave shitposter), when you click on the new post bubble on Facebook (“What’s on your mind, Griffin?” The faded-out gray lettering here asks, presumably in a Mark Zuckerberg cadence), when you type Google.com into your search browser, and before you begin typing, do you notice the bubble itself as it awaits your words? Do you notice its shape? Long and narrow? A boxy rectangle? How different are any of these really from a box on your tax forms?

Having, like most everybody else I know, used a personal smartphone for almost as long as I can remember, over ten years by this point, this bubble at the top of my keyboard has become gradually invisible, meaningless and not considered, —like any tool for any worksman, it’s become an extension of my arm.

But this past week I took notice of it being there, waiting above my keyboard typing texts to you, responses to these posts, tweets, and sometimes actual forms I need to fill out, — and I remember that such a square had been there all along, all these years. I had just not noticed it. I had forgotten it was there. I felt a sudden sinking feeling in my chest at how this box at the top of the keyboard, scattered throughout the internet, has become as much a part of my communicative body as is my mouth or ears. The box feels like one of the internet’s primordial needs. It’s everywhere and everywhere it’s slightly different. In a sense, direct messages are an extension of bureaucratic form filling.

Anyways, the awareness of such a thing revealed just how much of my gesturing and communications is bound deeply to the mere form of the text message, and like any forms to be filled, blank-by-blank, there’s a hazy bureaucratic efficiency inherent which must be adhered to. The exhaustion I feel from digital communication is sometimes too similar to the way I feel after filling out taxes. If I didn’t enjoy irl conversation so much, or even talking on the phone, I would say I just don’t like communicating. But that’s not the case. I simply don’t like filling in forms.

And besides the surface-level, more visual confluence between texting and the bureucratic communication of form-filling, texting feelings of passion or intimacy feels awfully estranged from the implications of the medium of texting as one of pure efficiency. Year after year, it seems more of a faux pas to spill out one’s emotion over text, to really share intimate moments of human feeling with one another.

I would hazard a hot take here to say that it’s not, or at least not in terms of the person on the other end, really possible to be truly and fully intimate over a text, but rather, when intimate moments are shared through direct messaging, whether this be by long passionate paragraphs or by quick, blunt (consentual) sexting, that those intimacies are more with the phone itself rather than the person on the other end.

As McLuhan said, The Medium is the Message. Of all his many takes, I think this is the best to carry around, — as in, question everything about how you engage with the middlemen of the ocean of mediums in which we send and receive information, be that personal or of the mass culture.

And this leads us, of course, to dating apps.

Because with this awareness of the medium being the message, it becomes more likely than not that when a person feels intimacy on dating apps with other users, that intimacy felt is not fully felt for the other users but rather for the app itself.

And so dating apps present us with an intimacy with the algorithm, a romance with a pseudo-bureaucratic exercise in form filling and profile-forward digitized spaces.

Think for a moment, if you’ve ever been inside one of these apps, on whether you’re more hooked by the legitimate human connection these platforms claim to provide, or if you’re more entranced by the freedom to swipe, sort, and fill in boxes. It’s a fun kaleidescope to look into. “Singles In Your Area,” markets itself for single people.

While you may yearn for human connection through these avenues, or you may just plain want sex with someone, both of which are perfectly fine things to seek out, do be sure to keep in mind that these apps might have nothing to do with the either and they may be here more as a representation of fulfilling a human urge, “disrupting the dating economy,” or whatever.

Consider, for a moment, whether the kind of intimacy you crave is really possible through the medium of the dating app, or whether the medium itself soaks up such an intimacy like a sponge, like a personal mirror which you hold up and speak to, deluding the user into thinking that this object in front of them is another person and not the object itself. Dating apps do work for some people. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But it seems almost as if they’ve been prescribed culturally upon us all and all I know is I’ll likely never download one again. Not until I get really desperate, that is.

This may be a depressing thought but even with all of this somber analysis, I worry that we genuinely do risk all of our relationships (outside of the irl, at least), platonic and romantic, becoming parasocial in small ways that build over time.

And speaking of texting (lol), here’s one from

eleanor kang

on this topic:

But then a sneaking guilt eludes any efforts at stepping away from communications while others continue texting us, sending us videos, sending us memes, reaching out, and so we’re drawn back to holding cell of social, form-filling intimacy, time spent with our devices and their networks, as to satisfy others’ social intimacy and their satisfaction with their own networks.

I’m now attempting to imagine what a relationship, platonic or not, kept completely away from our consumer electronics would even look like in the modern world… Letter writing seems promising but then again if phone intimacy is intimacy with a cellular device, wouldn’t letter writing be an intimacy with paper itself?

Perhaps, but handwriting lends itself a humanity to the moment it’s shared; the handwriting in which the two co-conspirators develop in a back and forth growing fondness over the weeks and the months of is certainly more personable than iMessages’s default font.

a good restack

the morning after

The Trembley Family Singers ended today’s rendition of Girl Get Your Face Off The Chair all huddled together, singing in unison, — a full family unit so neatly framed in the iphone’s rectangle — all shaking bags of popcorn and sodas with such a steady ferocity that kernels flew out of the paper bags, bouncing to the floor, soda sputtered out of straws, and the youngest of the singers, 9 years old, sputtered a small laugh at the end. Once the song was done, I swept it away, — onto the next video! Thinking vaguely of Doo Wop, I finally rolled myself out of bed and blew my nose a couple times, walking into the main room of my apartment with a strip of white paper towel more-or-less shoved up into my nostrils to greet a handful of last night’s dinner guests who were still in the apartment the morning after the dinner party.

We all made breakfast together, brewed coffee, the works. My roommate played a light jazz playlist from his pone and we sat around our round table with its chipping paint and drank coffee with toast, eggs, bagels, orange juice. It was a nice morning to spend under the shadow of a collective hangover. Together, that is. We talked about politics and once the coffee kicked in we talked about how hard it was to talk about anything else.

After all was said and done I walked outside, huddling my way up Lincoln to a branch of the Chicago public library where I had a copy of John Rechy’s City of Night on hold.

I stopped outside the abandoned Scientology storefront, once filled with televisions displaying L Ron Hubbard quotes amid piles and piles of Scientology books in plastic cling wrap and where a man in a grey suit would stand around smoking a cigarette and talking no one at all. Last year I had walked past him a couple of times, back when the “church” was still open and running, hoping that he would talk to me and try recruiting me because I thought it would be a funny experience, and also because I desperately wanted to be wanted by someone.

Anyways, now the Scientology logo is painted over with a deep blue paint that would be beautiful on a canvas but which instead looks particularly eerie above an empty storefront.

a good restack

a small aside about eating a cheeseburger, jack black, and an awkward moment in a hotel room

Returning from thanksgiving was a real Planes, Trains, and Automobiles moment for me.

I took a shuttle bus from Eau Claire, where the five days straight of eating multiple pounds of mashed potatoes each and every meal was fully catching up to me, — I had been falling asleep on relatives’ couches.

The shuttle times hadn’t lined up quite right causing me to miss my plane down to Chicago. So that I slept at a Hilton Embassy nearby and ordered a room service burger with fries and watched School of Rock on Showtime. Kicked back, cleaned up my paid subscriber post for the last day of November, — wasn’t quite finished enough with my Bachelard essay (due now on December 31st), — a short story I wrote way back in the winter of 2019, something I don’t want to send to magazines because it was the first real story with any sort of merit I had written, but also something which I don’t want to forever disappear into my external hard drive. I posted it. I thought it was good.

Anyways, in the hotel I made the mistake of ordering a burger and fries up to my room, having not stayed in too many hotels nice enough to have a real restaurant, I forgot about the service charge. When the squat, bald man appeared at my door in a server’s vest and a reasonably nice tie wielding a tray of food with a stemmed glass of water with one lemon wedge on one end over his head, I realized then and there that I had fucked up and that this was to be a bit more expensive than I thought.

He walked in and placed the meal gingerly on the hotel’s table. I tipped him a small amount because the room service charge added twelve dollars to the total bill and, well, I make less than 30,000 US dollars yearly from my day job (and only 50 monthly from this blog), but I still tipped him $5. He nodded grimly and folded up the small bit of paper back his pocket, starting to step out the door but lingering once he noticed School of Rock-era Jack Black on the screen.

“Oh my god I love this movie,” he said quickly.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. I watch it all the time with my daughters,” he said. He continued to stand there, transfixed. There was a beat of silence.

“I, um, I used to watch it with my dad,” I said. “We had it on DVD. It’s wild how young Jack Black looks here. I forgot.”

“He’s the same age as me. I share a birthday with Jack Black,” he said, with a slightly solemn air. I realized he had a baltic accent. I really did like the way he said Jack Black.

“Have you watched any of the Tenacious D stuff?” I asked.

“The what?”

“Jack Black’s early thing. It’s funny.”

At this, the room service man broke out from his daze and he quickly bid me farewell, stepped out the door. I ate the burger. It was good. I cleaned the plate and, around the time of the battle of the bands started in the movie, I walked outside my hotel room, overlooking the aviary at the center of the hotel where dozens of elaborately white midwestern families drank too much and played card games four floors below, and, leaning against such a rail, I felt the dull craving for a cigarette.

I returned to Chicago at 6:30am the next morning and watched the sun rise from the rattling windows of a blue line train bound south.