September 24, 2014
I’ll admit it. I’m a little afraid of the Apple Watch. I’m afraid that if I put that shiny smartjewel on my wrist, it will someday glow red, telling everyone that my time is up, it’s time for Carousel. Children of the 70s will remember the hit movie Logan’s Run. Under a post-apocalyptic dome in the 23rd Century, population control is achieved by limiting everyone to a 30-year life span. As citizens approached their “last day”, the life-clock crystal on their palm changed colors and finally turned red. They were called to Carousel, for a quasi-spiritual “renewal”, during which they floated into the air and were vaporized, but revelers in bleacher-pews shout their approval for what they think is their ascension to some Cloud above. It looked a bit like an Apple press announcement. “Just one more thing,” indeed.
I do live under the Apple dome; I’ve exalted its devices since teenage days spent programming in my public junior high school computer lab. Since that time, technology has become a religion. Cyberism has its objects of worship, communion rituals, and promise of transcendence, and its dome seems increasingly irresistible, inescapable, and irrefutable. Don’t Steve Jobs and Tim Cook seem like prophets and preachers to enthusiastic worshippers? Hardware and software have become manna from heaven, data and code our new scripture. Everything will be perfect in our friction-free silicon future. The body and mind seem to become more powerful with our Borg-like blessings. Wearable technology, smartphones, microchips in everything from cups to cars – it all can feel like living on the tip of a pyramid of gadgets, their possibilities elevating us skyward. Alternately, it can feel like you wear the equivalent of the carbon footprint of several African villages on your wrist. This is all supposed to make you feel healthy, lighter, less burdened and more hopeful. “One more thing” is heady – but at what price this consumer delirium? Is Google Glass a lens or a blindfold, or some strange small mirror of our misshaped desire? Does the Apple Watch track guilt at our use of the Earth’s resources, or will we have to invent some other device or social network to magnify our conscience about our consumer appetites and human values?
While most wearable devices get unworn after a brief trial, perhaps the Apple Watch, the “Strapple”, will fare better. It has the potential for renewing its novelty and becoming an eye-catching, mind-pulling distraction. Imagine new artwork by, say, Banksy, Fairey or Hockney beamed directly to your watchface on a daily basis. You could subscribe to Deepak Chopra’s messages, alerting you to the hum of the universe with a buzz of your wrist. The Buddha could ping you, nudging you gently towards nirvana with reminders for mindfulness and compassion. The Muslim call to prayers could emanate from your arm, the Sermon on the Mount could be your personal siren.
But will you feel like you are wearing the Watch, or that the Watch is wearing you? Will we begin to develop form of somatoparaphrenia, and begin to feel like our wrists and arms are not really parts of us anymore? Interactive, wearable devices cross our boundaries in subtle ways, and may impinge on our identity and integrity in ways we can’t foresee. Will your wrist feel yours, or a part of Apple’s expanding territory? Is this the next stage of an imperial occupation by the technological superpowers?
Devices and apps already impinge on our consciousnesses; the Watch makes further inroads. For example, it is supposed to be an integrated “health tracker”. I’m sure there are those who benefit from micromanaging their bodies, downloading their steps, sleep cycles, vital signs and calories into a spreadsheet, the first incarnation of their verisimilar digital avatar. But outsourcing our awareness this way seems problematic. First, it exacerbates our obsessional, addictive mind, of questionable benefit to our mental health. Instead of improving our intuitive sense of our bodies and minds, we become dependent on a cyber-superego, which views us as objects to be manipulated and controlled, and a little less as whole, living beings. We might take personal responsibility for ourselves with this technological lever, but then ignore the societal components of our health. It can seem like a diversion from the choices that could have a bigger impact on us, from what gets to our grocery store shelves to improving public transportation and civic engagement. We might live longer, but have less of life. It’s not the bargain I’d like to make.
Perhaps someone will create an app (called “Morbid”?) which will not only track your stats, but also give you real time updates of how much time - and how many paces - you have left to shuffle this mortal coil. Your Watch should come preinstalled with Chicago’s famous song. Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? We’ve all got time enough to die.
Near-centenarian Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs (now ill and entering the last days of her life), active in civil rights, labor and other movements for the last seventy years, famously asks “What time is it on the clock of the world?”
I don’t think the Apple Watch will tell me.
We’re here, I think, to live, and to help life. How technology helps us or keeps us from that task is a question we must take to heart, the same heart that beats out our transcendent, human rhythm.
© 2014 Ravi Chandra, M.D. All rights reserved. Subscribe by RSS above. Sign up for a quarterly e-newsletter to be the first to find out about my upcoming book on the psychology of social networks through a Buddhist lens, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, at www.RaviChandraMD.com. Facebook page: SanghaFrancisco-The Pacific Heart. Twitter @going2peace. Thanks for your shares on Facebook, etc.!
You might also like some of my other PACIFIC HEART articles on technology:
We Need a Surgeons General Warning for Social Media!
Spike Jonze's HER: Existential and Emotional Questions
10 Reasons Facebook is Not the Happiest Place on Earth
I Have Met the Internet and It Is Not Us
