On And Off Again: Love In The Time Of The Machine

When I was seventeen years old, I got my first mobile phone. I say first because, as I write this four years later, it is still the only one I’ve ever had, but I know that it will not be the last.

I also say mobile, even though nobody says it anymore. We leave it out. It’s implied: the phone goes where we go. It moves with us. Moves freely.

It moves—but does it move, transitive verb? Does it move me?

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Have you seen the new show? It’s on Tubu. It’s literally on Heebee. It’s on Poodee with ads. It’s literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it’s on Gumpy. It’s a Pheebo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It’s on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

—orcboxer on Tumblr

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We live in a time of—what? How do we define the time, the times, we live in? How do we define anything at all when we ourselves are defined by the machine? When I say machine, of course, I don’t mean one big machine, or many little machines—at least, I don’t only mean those things—so much as the existence of the machine. The shadow of it. The way it looms, maw wide open and menacing, even when you think you are alone.

How do you define something that is always swallowing you whole? And then, having defined it, if such a thing is even possible, how do you defend it? How do you try to make sense of the beast even as it chews you up, refuses to spit you out?

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You look down at the machine in your hand.

< Middle French, French machine < classical Latin māchina (compare macigno n.) < ancient Greek (Doric) μαχανά (compare ancient Greek (Attic) μηχανή: see mechanic adj. & n.), probably related to μῆχος ‘means, expedient, remedy’, perhaps ultimately < the Indo-European base of may

—Oxford English Dictionary

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I look down at the machine in my hand—four years old, steel blue, screen shot through with cracks because I drop it every few months and the tempered glass takes the worst of it every time—and I ask it, what are you? I type the words into it: machine etymology. With my own hands. What are you?

The machine we are born into predates us. But the word machine predates that machine in turn. Is there a world, I wonder, where you could say machine and have it mean means, expedient, remedy all at once? Is there a world where machine could lead, as logically and elegantly as any mathematical equation, to the delightful fullness of possibility that is inherent in may?

Is that world still within reach?

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Did you know, my best friend said to me once, when I come to your house, my phone automatically connects to your Wi-Fi.

Modern romance, I laughed.

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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal.

It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

—Ursula K Le Guin

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When I was eighteen, my family and I went to South Africa on vacation. The four of us, two sun-filled weeks in May, and one rented car. I was the one who played the music while we were on the road, the one in charge of the aux—except nobody really calls it that anymore. Maybe we call it that sometimes, but really, it’s all Bluetooth now. Thirty years ago it might have been radio. The brief life that the aux had in our collective consciousness pains me when I think about it. I try not to.

It was Bluetooth then, too. The car—a white Toyota Corolla Quest that was handed over to us at the Port Elizabeth airport—and I were paired for eight days. It would show up on my phone as CAR MULTIMEDIA. There was something odd and wrenching about it, turning my phone’s Bluetooth on, then the car’s Bluetooth, and then waiting, for one fleeting moment that sent my heart into my throat, as the two devices sent out signals that we couldn’t see or hear, but had to believe existed. Then they’d latch onto each other, so seamlessly it was hard to believe they’d ever been disconnected.

After the trip, when we dropped the car off at the airport in Cape Town, my finger hovered momentarily over the ‘Unpair’ button. I would never see that car again, I knew. I would never live that week again. But I didn’t want to be unpaired. I wanted to keep the memory close.

Even when I am scared of the machine’s shadow—and I’m terrified—I know, with unshakeable certainty, that I am within the machine and it is within me. It has no intentions of its own, though it is made by people who want me within the machine, and then to forget that I am within. But it also has every piece of me that I have poured into it despite myself. That I have poured into it since I was born, because I was born into it.

CAR MULTIMEDIA is still on my phone.

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I tend to be a hoarder of personal memorabilia… I can’t pinpoint exactly why I keep allowing Google to archive my searches, but I think it has something to do with wanting to preserve the record for myself. If it’s certain that Google benefits from maintaining an archive of all that I’ve searched for, almost since the beginning of my relationship with it, it’s also certain that I derive some benefit, too.

—Vauhini Vara, Searches

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My love—the monuments of my love, the prosaic documentation of it—can be found, memorialised, in the list of WiFi networks and Bluetooth devices my phone remembers. Remembers is a strange, poignant word. But my phone does remember everything—all the hotels I’ve ever stayed at, the café my friends and I frequent with the English breakfasts and pancakes and the cheesecake we always take back home, my friend’s Air Pods from when I borrowed one so we could listen to music together.

And forgetting, which is what it’s called when you sever the connection between your device and a WiFi network, is even stranger. There is a WiFi connection called M003_Airtel saved on my phone. It’s the home WiFi of someone I was friends with once. Someone I loved.

We don’t talk anymore. But I can’t bring myself to forget.

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Where I live right now is not where I come from, not the place I call home. I live on a college campus, and anyone who has lived on a college campus knows that it is a country of its own, one that makes all other logics feel distant and unreal.

Two weeks after I moved here, I opened the Clock app on my phone, tried to set a timer for something. The default time setting, from the last time I’d used the app, was eighteen minutes. So specific, my friend teased. What could you possibly need an eighteen-minute timer for?

It tugged sharply at my heart. At home, I used to set the timer every day to cook rice. Fifteen doesn’t quite do it; twenty is just slightly too much. But eighteen is perfect, and the machine remembers perfection. The machine tells me that there is a place like that, far away, where rice takes eighteen minutes to cook, where rice is cooked just the way I want it, where I cook the rice because I love the people I’m cooking for. Where eighteen minutes is built into my life, along with the cooking, and the rice, and the love. Where I once was, not so long ago, and where I will be again.

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i rmbr you saying to let you know if they did charlie at the mallrat show and i filmed a little bit of it for you!

—Text from my friend R, who lives in New Zealand. Video attached.

I told R in passing that I liked the song Charlie six months before they went to the concert where it was played.

There are certain acts of love that can only make their way to me through metal and circuitry, glass and wire. Abbreviations and all. I am still trying to come to terms with this.

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Before modern romance was my phone remembering someone else’s Air Pods, it was sharing wired earphones on a crowded bus, leaning in close so the cord wouldn’t stretch too taut and be yanked out of our ears. And before that it was probably fighting over car radio stations, and before that making cassettes for somebody.

How far does it go, I wonder? How far till the oldest of all the modern romances, which I like to think of, naively perhaps, as simply—listening? Listening, together, to the trees and the wind and the crackle of the flame?

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When I was a child, my parents made me memorise their phone numbers in case of emergencies. I learned the numbers by heart, but I also came to learn the way they sounded, the tune that would play out when I pressed each button on our old landline phone, whose connection we gave up years ago. I knew that one sounded like four, and nine like six. I knew that when you pressed all the buttons and waited, it produced an entirely different note altogether to signal ‘call’ before the dial tone began. If you asked me, right now, for my mother’s phone number, I could sing it to you.

The machine of communication is musical. Necessarily and fundamentally.

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It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, “far” and φωνή, phōnē, “voice”, together meaning “distant voice”.

—Wikipedia, on the word telephone.

Distant voice.

See? Necessarily and fundamentally.

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The machine only works because on the one hand humans make it work and on the other hand humans let it work.

—Ali Smith

I despise the machine, I’m scared of the machine, but I’m far more scared of forgetting, and I can’t bear to let go of any of it. I want to keep things and people close. I want to remember. I want to stay paired. I want to stay connected, please, yes, connected and secured, thank you, connect automatically. Please.

I am still trying to come to terms with this.

But here’s the catch: the distant voice of the machine—and every machine has it, telephone or not—is not the machine. The voice is not of the machine. The voice is not the machine.

I was born into the machine. I will die before it swallows me whole, maybe, but I will still die in its maw. I will pour everything of myself into it, even when I don’t want to. This, I know, will not change. I cannot throw my hands up today and declare that I will stop making and letting the machine work this very instant. (The truth, actually, the far more insidious sting of it, is: even if I could, I probably wouldn’t. There are a hundred moments every single day where I am given that choice—and I always choose the same thing. So maybe I’ve already been swallowed whole, after all.)

But when I find myself afraid of forgetting and unpairing and disconnecting, I tell myself sternly that it is not the machine that wants to remember and pair and connect. That all this terminology, though it may have come from the machine, doesn’t matter one bit in the face of the awesome resonance of my voice. The machine is musical because my voice, necessarily and fundamentally, is musical. The machine remembers because I remember. The machine holds on because I hold on. My mobile phone moves me, transitive, only to the extent that I am willing to be moved. And I am moved every day. Does that make me a mobile person, I wonder? I wonder. And then I laugh, because there are far worse things to be. Far worse things to do than to remember, to pair. To connect.