Dialed
Mid-press, Midjourney
The experiment has become so famous that it feels trite to describe, but it will help me tell you what you are.
B.F. Skinner, after casting off Christianity but before becoming the prophet of radical behaviorism, designed a box. Inside the box was a lever. Into this box, he would place a rat. He would then study the rat’s behavior vis-à-vis the lever in response to experimentally-varied rewards or punishments. If a lever press yielded nothing, the rat would quickly lose interest. If a lever push yielded food, the rat pressed the lever until it was satiated, and then sporadically only when it was hungry. But, and this is the good part, if a lever push yielded sometimes nothing and sometimes food, the rat pressed it incessantly, compulsively, unceasingly.
On the couch after work, as the heat from your laptop and the microplastics from your Thai takeout dinner effect a further reduction to your already low sperm count, you pick up your iPhone 13 mini from the coffee table. It wasn't ringing or flashing, but you picked it up. You can't remember why, so you check your "ScreenTime" stats: you've opened your phone 116 times today. Some quick mental math — you've always been decent at that — tells you that, on average, you've opened your phone once every 7.5 minutes.
Time to brush teeth. Before applying paste to brush, you turn on a podcast. 117. May as well learn something. The algorithm recommends one about new research on human attention. It’s just what you wanted. The interviewee tells the host that the length of the human attention span has dropped 68% over the past 20 years to 47 seconds.
That seems long.
On the bus, you look around for a place to stand. A couple pairs of eyeballs flicker toward you, assess you as neither threatening nor novel, and return to the blue glow of their respective screens. After a long day of staring at larger screens, they take their chance to stare non-furtively at a smaller one. You find a spot and scan once more as your right hand drifts towards your pocket. The riders seem to be aging in real time, facial creases deepening, as if the light from their phones were UV-laced and they'd forgotten to apply their sunscreen moisturizer. You wonder if that’s how you look to them. There's one other person who hasn’t yet unlocked. Your eyes meet. You notice them noticing you, catch them wondering what you find so interesting about the contents of this city bus that you'd forgo the wonders that await you in your pocket. You break their gaze and pull out your phone.
Hello, little friend (or, with apologies to N.K. Jemisin: hello, little enemy).
Just inside the entrance of the building where you live, the sticky trap that's been there for two years has finally caught something. It's a mouse. Unfamiliar feelings of disgust and sadness yield to a familiar feeling of superiority.
The elevator to the ninth floor takes 22 seconds; you timed it once. There are no new HOA notices in the elevator, so you take out your phone. Phone... is that what it is? Of the 225 minutes you spend with it per day, maybe five of them are “telephone” related. What would a better name be? Tracking device...? Probably wouldn't test well with the focus groups.
Whatever it's called, it offers no new information other than 6 minutes have gone by since you checked it last before stepping off the bus. You’d glanced up, but the owner of the wandering eyes had gotten off already. Back it goes into your right pocket.
Why rats? Skinner was interested in animal behavior in so far as it allowed him to make statements about human behavior. He put pigeons in the box too, but pigeons are winged, small dinosaurs. Rats are our cousins.
In the age of the king lizards (Jurassic / Cretaceous), when being a large mammal was evolutionarily impractical, our ancestor-rodents scurried from tree to bush, dodging death from above and below. After the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event vacated many previously occupied ecological niches, the rat-squirrels and their descendants descended from the trees and emerged from the ground to their place in the sun.
We owe our existence to those enterprising tree shrews, and the proof is in our cells: we share 90% of our DNA with the modern rat (although the statistic is less impressive when you know that we share 24% with grapes).
Though genetic sequencing hadn’t yet revealed the exact degree of our kinship, Skinner felt comfortable extrapolating what he learned about rats to humans: they were similar enough to be predictive and simple enough to be predictable. Plus, rats have other attributes that recommend them as subjects. Unlike many of our closer cousins, they continue to thrive in the Holocene, with a population in the billions. They fare well in captivity. In laboratory settings, rats can live long and healthy lives, mating, exercising, and oh what does this lever do?
You’ve tried. No one can say you haven’t. No social media, screen in black and white, no phone after 9pm. No avail. Could this be addiction? Could it be anything else?
You used to write: poems, stories, essays of thousands of words supported by weeks of research. For school, but still. Now, weaving together ideas and balancing arguments feels beyond your capacity. You leave more and more work to the reader.
Now, you only write in montage.
You awake to a staccato sound, the same one that's roused you every weekday morning for the past ten years. You could change it to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song or something, but you won't.
The article you read yesterday during your lunchtime marketing sync call advised against phone use first thing in the morning — something about training your brain to feel immediately anxious. You’ve read that same article tens of times before. You know you shouldn't, you know you'd feel better if you didn't, but it's already in your hand.
This piece was written for an assignment for a writing course. The assignment is below:
A turning point in the history of nonfiction occurred with Ambrose Bierce's "What I Saw of Shiloh." This essay is credited with being the first to dispose of transitions, telling its tale in the form of sections separated by white space. The parts reflect on each other, add to each other, and provoke the reader to think out the connections. This organizing principle is similar to collage in the visual arts and montage in film.
Write a piece built on montage.