/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I'm barely on my phone anymore, I don't really use social media or anything, and the main thing I notice when I'm in a group is how often I sit around with nothing to do while everyone else is on their phones. Then when everyone gets off their phones there's the increasingly long awkward silences, the reticence to start or continue conversations, the unspoken social contract that talking about anything "real" like politics is exhausting, the implicit understanding that sincerity is uncouth and irony is king. I'm lucky I even have a group of IRL friends, depressing as that is to say. You could do everything right, successfully get off your phone and the internet forever, live a completely tech-free life, and the "real world" would still feel incomplete and hollow. So it isn't just the phone, not anymore–it's everything. The entire world is organized around funneling us into this machine. Why? If I were to put a term to what the phone does to a person, I'd say it's "soul-draining," and I have half a mind to call it "demonic possession" but people obviously look at you funny when you say that (even if we're all in agreement that tech billionaires are basically demons). Your soul, your consciousness, is the thing that's being silenced when you tap in to the noise; when your soul is quiet, it turns out you're more likely to accept wage slavery and authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism and bigotry and all that fun stuff. In my experience, the more I actively put down the phone and say "I'm going to simply exist in my own discomfort for a while" the easier it becomes to understand the shape of that discomfort and combat it, usually by making art. The amazing thing is that we live in an era of unprecedented access to actual, real knowledge and art from the entirety of human existence. I'm not saying there's never been a better time to be an artist or a philosopher, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more critical or important time.