Illustrated by Kyle Fletcher, then written by Michael Kiser

So Windows Phone 7 wants us to get a life. They want us to believe that they’re intentionally developing a smartphone experience that delivers the lightest surface-level interactions we need. Surface indeed. 

To be fair, WP7 makes a real case. We might spend too much time with our phones and miss the cool shit happening around us. But they miss a couple of important points about the lives they’re supposedly trying to get us to return to. 

1) Most people don’t have nearly enough cool shit happening around them to worry about missing out on. Even for the most ambitious and active of us, life is slow, boring and excruciatingly low res at times. And there’s nothing you can do about most of it. Smartphones don’t always take away from our lives. Sometimes they add exponentially more value in places where no value is otherwise available. Because smartphones are connected to people, places and activities happening elsewhere, they’re a parallel universe where there’s a good chance that something interesting is always happening.

2) We’re not just naively obsessed with our iPhones. We’re in love. For a world that throws out their phones every 8-12 months to get a new phone, iPhone owners feel a deep, lasting affection for their devices. And when they get a new one, they’re not discarding their old iPhones — they’re trading them in for a new, young, hot body with the same imprinting, personality and fundamental experience of the previous model. I’ve had three iPhone models from the original to the 4, but it always been the iPhone to me.

That brings me to data transfer rates. The other day I had a friend waiting on me to head out to Watershed for a few drinks. In order to prepare him for how long it’d be before I could depart I had to decipher how long it would take me to upload a number of client files to Basecamp. Did I tell him that it’d take me about 15 minutes? Nope. That seemed devoid of context. I told him I had to upload 1.8GBs. Not only did he understand the inherent weight of the task, he also understood the relative amount of time involved. He went and ate a sandwich while he waited. But a year from now? He’d probably just lean against the wall of the project bay for 2 minutes while I finished dealing with that kind of data load. In other words, data transfer rates affect our perception of time, and what kind of rote processes we can possibly take care of in that amount of time. In a world where data transfer rates and time are treated with similar priority, what is the constant? 

These are people who think fast, talk fast, and drive fast — then there’s people who handle digital information quickly. These are the people who stand behind you while your navigate the web (backseat drivers) and have a panic attack that you take forever to click on a fucking link that’s so obvious a monkey could do it accidentally before you’d figure it out. In your social life, these are the people that look shit up on their iPhone so quickly that the data available on the web and what they had available in their brains is almost one and the same. 

For these people, the world is starting to slow down around them. They’re like squirrels watching bears. Their hearts beat faster, they twitch a lot and guaranteed they could navigate a Ninja Warrior type obstacle course to eat bird seed. You probably think that these friends of your should slow down before they hurt someone. Lapse in your convo? They’re on Twitter. New band you’re trying to tell them about? They just started streaming it to your car stereo from Rdio. You can’t slow these people down, but like squirrels, they too have to hibernate. But what makes the hyper digital person slow down? 

Loneliness for one. The very thing that makes smartphones so wonderful — their ability to obscure loneliness — is the very thing they can cause when it’s confirmed that yes, nothing is happening, even in the parallel universes of our friends lives on the internet. When you scroll to the bottom of your Facebook feed and all you saw was a bunch of Happy Birthdays to a pseudo friend, your have truly reached the end of the internet. Life suddenly seems less like the cracked-out hyper-speed perspective of a squirrel, and more like a bunch of drunk sea lions beached on the shore of some barren island, or Fisherman’s Warf. 

Shortly following this “end of the internet” panic attack is a familiar realization: You’re bored. When you were a kid,  you got bored all the time. You’d call your friends, or ride you bike over to their houses, or play some video games. But now, you’re already aware of “what’s up” with everyone. You know if they’re home, on the Playstation network, or checked-in to some restaurant in SFO. Now, when you’re bored, you’re truly bored. You’re on your own. You can check your email 40 times an hour (the american average) and look at your Hulu queue one more time, but you know you’re screwed. 

It’s during times like this that I start to get nostalgic for my former pre-digital instincts. When hopping on my bike didn’t require a specific destination. Or my mom could yell up the stairs at any moment: “MICHAEL, RICHARD’S HERE, WANT ME TO SEND HIM UP?” and I’d instantly have a non-CPU player for Tecmo Super Bowl. But mostly I daydream about the fantastic boredom that would come at night when I was 16. 

When you were old enough to drive, or a friend was, suddenly there was a whole new world of possibility in your hands. You could go for a drive for no reason. You could drive around town from one friend’s house to another, just to see if they were outside on the deck, in the pool, or mowing the lawn. Sometimes you would just cruise by, never bothering to stop and inquire. But it felt good just to confirm: “Yep, that’s Brian’s place. Nothing happening there. Cool.”

Cars were the original smartphone. They opened up a parallel universe of exploration and potential entertainment that didn’t even have to deliver. It just had to maintain the promise of ownership and instantaneous freedom to find out what was happening elsewhere. Cruising the circuit in a small town has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter. Popping the hood in a grocery store parking lot is the new “check out this app” for my generation. And the guys that modded their Mustangs or kitted their Fieros? Hackers with a developer ID in the App Store or a jail-broken iPhone. 

I’ve had a lot of cars in my life. A Ford T-Bird with fuzzy seat covers, a Honda Civic hatchback that burned more oil than gas, A blue-and-bondo-colored Dodge cargo van, and a couple of Subaru Outbacks. And while the hardware always felt new, the soul of the experience was always the same, because they all let me drive. So I don’t feel bad, at all, when I turn to my iPhone for a digital fix. In my mind, I’m still flying by the billboards for Burlington Coat Factory on route 6, pounding Metallica’s black album with the moon roof open. Sure, I might reach the end of the bi-pass that night and nothing new happened, but at least I got to drive the car again. Faster, and faster.