Zero

Smashing phone skins, dragonflies and dreams of glass.

… in aerem …

( … into air … )

I smashed my phone the other day.

Oh cool, you’re thinking. She hates her phone, she did it on purpose, she’s so angry. Smashing phones like the patriarchy. I don’t need this, I’m going back to a flip phone. Woo! Yeah!

Nope.

Actually, I just dropped it and it just smashed.

It happened the same day Apple dropped its latest ad. You know the one: for the new iPad.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hydraulic pump smashing all of human creativity—trombones and toys, paint and pianos—into a little glass cuboid.

Joel showed it to me and I couldn’t believe Apple could be so tone-deaf and so misread the zeitgeist. People are trying to escape their shiny screens, Tim, not dissolve into them. Don’t you know that? Or have you lived too long in your own glass cuboid echo chamber?

Apparently it was the first time Apple ever apologised for one of its ads. Tim Cook actually admitted, boy howdy, did we mis-read the mood. That was tone-deaf as fuck.

When I watched the ad, I had the same feeling I had in the cinema, watching the bomb-dropping scene in Oppenheimer.

This feels disgusting to admit. These are not comparable things. It feels cheap to even write it. Some things shouldn’t be written about, should remain a great void in which words fail.

But honestly? It feels like the nerve Apple were trying to touch.

The music, the slow motion, the destruction. The empty holocaust of the final shot. Watching the pump smash the tools of human creativity felt like an intentional, wanton violence. It felt wrong in a deeply uncomfortable, anti-human way.

I wanted it to stop. No, what are you doing. Stop. This is wrong. Cartoon horror, and revulsion.

And it worked, because everyone hates it.

At the end of the ad, all that’s left is a desert of reflective surfaces, a wasteland of stainless steel.

All we have left is the reflection of ourself in a glass screen.

And all I can think is: what if the glass screens were all we had, and there was nothing else?

How fragile is humanity if that’s where it lives. If it can all be contained in a glass screen. If it can be dropped and smash in an instant. Back to nothing, reset to zero, in an instant.

We’re already so awash in gen-Ai filler that we don’t notice when it’s showing us something that isn’t real.

Samsung got into trouble last year for gaslighting its users by inserting pretty pictures of the moon whenever it detected a moon in shot.

The lens of a smartphone camera? They’re not big enough to capture the moon. Those craters and aesthetic shadows? Totally made up, gen-Ai filler, in the outlines of an Ai-detected moon.

What about all those gorgeous photos people posted lately of the northern lights? I can’t help but wonder is that what was really there—or is it filled-in colours in a detected ‘night sky’?

Odds are if you can only see it through a phone, it’s not real.

So, back to my smashed phone. How did I drop it?

Well, it was a busy morning, getting my son to school on time. It was also the first morning it’s been warm enough not to need any outer layers so the scarf was shed and clenched in hand, along with phone, and keys, and coffee.¹

Whoops, there goes my phone and yes, it had a case on and yes, I’ve dropped it thousands of times before, playing Russian roulette, like, whatever, I don’t care about my phone anyway (privileged rogue) and it’s always been fine and I’ve just shrugged.

But not today.

Today, it landed face down on concrete points and smashed, shedding flakes of glass like feathers. Facial recognition immediately stopped working, touchscreen all but stopped working (or at least became very inconvenient because I got a fingerful of glass with each swipe).

The phone was old and battery-shot anyway.

Time for a new phone.

I showed the builder. We’re having building work done, did I mention? Story for another day.

“Ah, that’s a shame. Who’s your carrier?”

“My… carrier…?” For a smart gal, I can be really dim.

“Phone company?”

“Oh, um, I can’t remember. Begins with an E I think…”

“EE? There’s a shop.” He named a town not too far away.

“No, not EE…”

Turns out my carrier is GiffGaff and definitely does not begin with an E. Why am I like this.

He offered some recs for other places nearby to pick up a new phone and then:

“At least it was insured, obviously.”

Obviously, reader, it was not insured.

I’m a bit, how can I put this, slapdash when it comes to these kind of things. It is literally my job to read the fine print and not miss things but, in my personal life, I never read the fine print and miss things all the fucking time. I suspect it’s a reaction—possibly a protest?—to getting paid to be on it for most of the day. When I unplug, I really unplug (my brain).

Luckily, I have Joel.

Joel is a software engineer and younger than me. I never feel older—or that we are (generationally-speaking) worlds apart—than when he takes a device from me and, fingers a-blur, tap-swipes his way out of whatever mess I’ve landed myself in.

In the binary world of tech skills, he is a one. I’m a zero.

He’s also a tough customer when it comes to gadgetry. He test drove a Tesla recently and the indicators were on the steering wheel. Can you think of a stupider place for the indicator buttons? I can’t. They move, you see. If they’re on the steering wheel, they spin around with every single turn. Sometimes they’re over here, then they’re over there, then they’re upside down. Why would you put the turn indicators on the one thing that you have to move when you’re making a turn?

Suffice to say we won’t be buying a Tesla.

As for robotics, well, Joel said he’s waiting for the robot that can fold laundry.

“Humanoid, robot-dog, whatever. I don’t care. Just fold my laundry. Please, take my money.”

Do you see what I’m saying? He’s all about the optimal tools for the job. A perfectly formed, titanium-sheathed smart phone is his manna.

He was very excited when the smashed phone meant I finally had to buy a new one.

I was less excited.

Was it Euripides who said ‘whom the Gods would destroy, they first make restore a smashed iPhone from backup’?

Or something like that. No matter.

Here will now follow an account of me setting up my new phone.

I share this account to illustrate a point: if this glass screen ends up being all I have in this world, because everything else has been smashed into it, I am well and truly fucked.

Shiny phone straight out of the box.

Hello.

Phone is turned on. Set up using another device?

That sounds easy. Yes, please. Find device.

You need to open other device.

Attempt to open other device.

Face not recognised. (This is my old, broken phone. It will never know my face again, a melancholy² thought.)

Type in password (nineteen characters, for optimal security, at Joel’s insistence). Glass dust wafts off the screen and I breathe it in, deep in concentration.

Find device.

Make sure Bluetooth is activated on both devices.

Deep breath. More glass dust. FIND DEVICE.

Device not found.

(Old phone locks)

Swipe up (glass feathers spray again). Face not recognised. Type in password again (nineteen characters, again). Glass, again.

Return to new phone. New phone has shut itself down and returned to the start screen.

Hello. Phone is turned on. Set up using another device?

For fuck sake. Ok, let’s skip this.

There’s another option. Install from backup. Let’s try that. That’ll work.

Wait. When was my last backup? Two days ago. Fuck. A lot happened in the last two days.³

Ok, run backup first.

Wait twenty minutes while old phone backs up to the cloud. During intermission, eat croissant and accidentally swipe old screen for no reason. Transfer several glass feathers unnoticed to fingertips and thence to croissant.

Old phone finally backs up.

Hello. Phone is turned on. Set up using another device?

NO.

Install from backup. Last backup: Today.

We’re in business!

Estimating time remaining….

Estimating time remaining….

Why isn’t this working.

Joel over my shoulder: “You’re not on wifi.”

Yes, I am.

“Check internet speed.”

It’s fast. “I definitely am. Why isn’t wifi showing as connected?”

A shrug. “Turn it off and turn it back on again.”

Get him to show me how to turn off the new phone.

Wait for new phone to power down and then power up again.

Wifi is connected.

Estimating time remaining….

Estimating time remaining….

“Oh wait, did you run the latest software update?”

“Software update? Are you kidding me? It’s a brand new phone. I literally just took it out of the box. Why doesn’t it have the latest software already on it?”

It just doesn’t.⁴

Of course it doesn’t. Apple doesn’t have to explain itself to me, a walking user-error.

If Apple, in its infinitude of glory, wishes to ship phones into the world before the software that goes with them is ready, who am I to query it? Who am I but some sad dipshit who must download the software update I’m told to.

Software updated. Wifi connected. Back-up backed up. Here we go!

Estimated time to restore from backup: 58 minutes.

For fuck sake.

Leave phone exactly where it is, without touching or breathing in its direction, lest I disrupt any of the delicate waves of power wafting gently over and through its titanium surface.

While waiting, eat a panini and more glass feathers.

Return at length. All the old apps are back in place.

It looks **EXACTLY** like my old phone.

[Incidentally, it just me or is this the biggest let down on the planet? It looks the same? Are you kidding me? I just spent a grand on the latest in shiny phone technology and you’re telling me it’s the exact same, just a bit faster and with “exciting” adventures-in-cobalt that only excite people like Joel?]

I should have just got a fucking flip phone.

I flex fingers and open Substack.

Welcome. Set up account or sign in using password.

What the….

Yes. That’s right.

As you, a reader wise and nuanced in the ways of the smartphone, could have warned me, I have been logged out of **everything**.

Everything.

Bank cards? Gone. Chat history? Hollow laugh.

Every single hot, blessed app on my hot, blessed phone pretends we are strangers. Pretends I am making unwanted passes at it and it’s just not that into me anymore.

All the apps are there, just as I left them. But I have been logged out of *every *single *one of them.

Imagine if this was all I had—and then, in an instant, I had nothing.

I almost lob the new phone out the window. But it cost me a fucking grand.

Joel is downstairs. I try to text a sad face and mindblown emoji. These two, in fact:

😔🤯

But I can’t find them. Emojis are gone too.

“Right, that’s it.” I troop downstairs, brandishing expensive rectangle.⁵ “Everything’s gone wrong. There are no emojis.”

“What do you mean there are no emojis?” He’s such a patient man.

“They’re gone. See? This just toggles between letters and numbers. It’s supposed to bring up emojis, like it did on my last phone.”

Joel is a patient man but, sometimes, even he struggles.

“See that big button at the bottom with the smiley face on it?”

I see it. Now.

“It’s in a different place. It’s not where it’s supposed to be.” Mulish. I hate change.

He made the nothing face. You know the one:

😐

To this face, I recounted a brief but emotive synopsis of new phone infinite sadness⁶.

He was not as sympathetic as I might have wished.

“Restore Signal? Why are you trying to restore Signal? That’s not what Signal is for. Signal doesn’t store a copy of your messages on the cloud. That’s the whole point of Signal! You would have to transfer phone to phone but that’s silly, why do you even need those messages anyway? And why aren’t your passwords in the password manager? You can’t remember them all. No, you can’t. What’s your password for Zoom? See? What’s your AppleID? Told you. Look, you’ve got loads of passwords just saved to iCloud. They should be in 1Password, not iCloud.”

“What the… I don’t know.” Weakly. I didn’t. “I had nothing to do with it. My phone did it.”

He’s rapid-firing at my laptop keyboard, not listening.

“153 passwords saved to iCloud. Well, that’s ridiculous, let’s just export these, yep, done. Here’s the CSV file.” He offers me the laptop, then looks at me. “Never mind. I’ll just import to 1Password. There you go, look, they’re all saved now. Delete this CSV …. let’s bypass Recycle Bin and just go to the Terminal⁷ … and deleted. Right, so now just use 1password and log in again to all of your apps.”

Whizz-tap-swipe. He’s speaking a different language. He has evolved past me. He is so in his element all I can do is exhale in awe. I am clearly not designed for this.

Believe me when I tell you the arc from elder to spritely millennial is long, my friends.

I settled down to log back in to all the apps that I was already logged in to this morning and wondered, why, when, did I become a person so laden about with digital baggage. I am reduced to a little emoji animal, scruffling around in the dirt trying to regather my precious, scattered apps. Like a Tamagotchi, except it is I on the chain. Feed me, water me, clean me.

Joel smirks.

“For someone who professes not to care about these apps, you sure seem to care a lot about having them on your phone.”

To put things into perspective, he told me about the stupid design of the Humane AI pin badge that pulls at your T-shirt because it’s made of aluminium instead of lightweight plastic and doesn’t connect to your phone, so any conversations with friends happen on a different phone number. Also, it’s designed to be worn on your shoulder, just out of peripheral vision, at the exact spot your seatbelt crosses.

Ace.

Basically, he explained, it’s just a pointless and very expensive hardware wrapper for one single app.

Imagine what it would be like if I had to carry around a separate device for each app. Imagine pockets full, bags heavy, with poorly-designed hardware. Shit, now where was my Air BnB app. I know it’s here somewhere. Pulls twenty apps from pocket and rummages in pile. Booking.com falls and breaks. Someone runs off with Monzo. Google Maps slips down between the car seats on a sharp bend.

Shudder. Perish the thought.

So, ok, fine. I guess smartphones with twenty apps in one neat, little package are kind of nifty. I know Apple makes some of the best designed stuff on the planet, I really do know that.

But, at the end of the day, it’s still just a glass screen and I’d still choose a real piano.

Clearly, I still have lots to learn about tech design but that’s ok because so do the experts over at Humane AI and Tesla.

Still, I figured out where they keep emojis on the new iPhone—and at least now I know better than to turn my nose up at phone insurance.

So that’s something.

—

Speaking of dropping things, I got shat on by a bird yesterday.

In some cultures, that’s lucky. This isn’t even the first time it’s happened to me.

Truly, my cup of luck doth overflow.

I chose to take it as a good sign. It felt momentous. Joel has a new job. It’s summer now. The garden, which has been quiet for months, is now a rustling thicket of unseen creatures. There’s a determined path through the hedge, made by who knows what: a muntjac, or a fox or maybe even a badger. Perhaps one day I’ll set up a wildlife cam so nothing passes unseen.

Or perhaps not. I’m quite content to just look at the trails and signs and wonder.

I don’t need to see it all.

The cherry blossoms lasted a minute, they’re gone now. Poppies and columbine have opened in consolation. One is a cup turned upwards; the other, a bell hanging down.

There’s a river in the garden and yesterday, with time on my hands and no children for a blessed, quiet day, I got down into it and padded upstream from the steps at the bottom of my garden. Just like when I was a kid, perspective alters from river height. I ducked low under overhanging branches of a sycamore already dense with new leaves. Iridescent unnamed beetles populated the colts-foot. I examined the wild herbs and weeds springing up. There is medicinal gold in them: hedge woundwort, willow herb, red-veined dock and palm mallow. There’s a mat of cress and the nightshade, then the wall of lilies behind which the house disappears. From the garden, the lilies look insignificant—but from the river, they’re a world unto themselves.

This river is really just a stream here and it’s wild. There are otters, apparently, though I’ve never seen one, and crayfish and trout.

We let the garden grow pretty wild too. It hasn’t seen a lawnmower in months, nor will it anytime soon. The dandelion forest looks way prettier to me than a short-back-and-sides lawn.

You cannot improve on nature’s design. It’s already optimised.

Last year, Joel and I were in the hammock on a late summer evening and heard a scurrying.

“Shh! Listen.”

“Oh Jesus, is it a rat?”

“It’s a hedgehog.”

And so it was. A surprisingly quick little fellow trundle-darted under us on the hammock and made for the compost pile at the far end of the garden, there to gorge on worms.

Today in the river, no hedgehogs but an array of dragonflies.

Dragonflies are amazing.

I didn’t know they like moving water as much as still water. They are positively languid even while their wings are an invisible blur. They have compound eyes and detect lightning-fast changes in light and movement. They cross oceans and ambush prey. They were around hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, descendants of the largest insect ever to have existed (Meganeuropsis from Oklahoma, with a 30 inch wingspan). Dragonflies preserved in amber from 90 million years ago look just like the ones in my garden.

Basically: dragonflies are designed perfectly.

I read once that the Pentagon put them in wind tunnels back in the fifties to unlock their secrets of flight, but despaired of ever being able to mimic it.

These days the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA—for the “design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions”—still hasn’t been able to reproduce dragonfly flight—but it has designed a little tech backpack for a real dragonfly to wear that hijacks their flight patterns.

Don’t believe me?

The smallest aerial drones mimic insects in many ways, but none can match the efficiency and maneuverability of the dragonfly. Now, engineers at Draper are creating a new kind of hybrid drone by combining miniaturized navigation, synthetic biology and neurotechnology to guide dragonfly insects. The system looks like a backpack for a dragonfly.

- Equipping Insects for Special Service, Draper press release 19 January 2017

I remember seeing the cracked brown carcasses of the dragonfly nymphs⁸ along a pond’s edge as a kid and feeling sad: had something eaten them?

Now I know better. They’d just crawled up out of the water, shed their exo-bones and smashed out of their own skins.

They’d been eaten with longing to take to the air.

I too long to smash out of my skin and take to the air. If Draper releases a human-sized harness that mimics dragonfly flight patterns, I’ll be first in line.

Take. My. Money.

I don’t turn my nose up at a well-designed tool or an optimised piece of kit. I just don’t make it my everything. Those toys are fickle. We go from nothing to everything to nothing in an instant. The line between one and zero is infinite—and infinitely delicate.

Plus, there’s still a world out there.

Even if you could squash all of human creativity and humanity into a glass cube, you’d never capture the garden. You’d never see the beetles, the dragonflies or the beauty of moving water.

My phone is just what it is: a tool. It helps me do some things more quickly and easily. That’s it. It doesn’t hold humanity in its innards. It facilitates, but does not contain, creativity.

If it smashes?

It’s not the end of the world.

A face in dreams of glass.

1. I am a walking meme of Dakota Johnson with eighteen things in her hand because, well, no pockets.

2. You’ve spotted it right? Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a great album and the lyrics to Zero? Worth a careful listen.

3. I was in Paris. I took cute pictures of my niece and noted what ‘les aises’ means and the name of that epic brasserie we found (I’ll tell you which one if you DM me, ask nicely and maybe upgrade to a founding membership ☺️).

4. Joel would like the record to show that he did not say this and, in fact, explained exactly why it can’t have the latest software, which is because it’s in a sealed box without power. 🙄

5. Yes, I know it’s not a rectangle, strictly speaking. My tech inabilities include geometrical dissonance.

6. Ref. fn2.

7. Addendum in a different tongue, courtesy of Joel: rm~/Downloads/Passwords.csv

8. Dragonfly nymphs—wingless and water bound—are called naiads, before they crawl up onto the shore, desiccate and crack out a dragonfly. There are about 3,000 species of dragonfly and they have some of the best names on the planet: hawkers, petaltails, cruisers, tiger tails, treeline emeralds and—my personal favourite—vagrant darters. Did you know NASA is deploying a Dragonfly Mission to Saturn’s largest moon in 2028? Titan is the most Earth-like body in our solar system. It is also the one most likely to harbour organic life.