Positive Path

Imagine you are an alien being, on assignment to check out the inhabitants of planet Earth, trillions of miles from your home planet. You get the details, and realize the journey will take 72 hours because you have been booked on a clunky old intergalactic spacecraft that can manage a measly 2.5 times the speed of light. This pisses you off.

Your mission: Arrive on planet Earth and use your shape shifting ability to assume the human life form. The data sheet you were given reads ‘human’ with a footnote that states they have been chosen because they appear to be the most destructive, and dominant life form on Earth. It was a toss up between humans, cockroaches or diatomaceous single celled sea creatures simply based on the planet life form counts, however the last data collection point for lifeforms was 1954, when the Roswell Mission went horribly wrong, After that trips to planet Earth were limited until the ‘dust settled’.

“Speaking of dust..”, the document continued “..please do not assume the standard Ziggy Stardust identity..”. Meticulously designed to ‘blend in’ to populations found on planets in the Milky Way, the results were less than satisfactory, and in fact resulted in world-wide notoriety, three platinum records, and a motion picture in 1973.

Your mission is to assimilate into the population, avoid detection, and observe and report the activities and habits of these creatures. Then get on the carrier and head home. Sweet, sweet home. These intergalactic gigs are killing you.

The spaceship is parked on the dark side of the moon (standard for this type of activity) and you head to Earth. You decide to go for some friendly uncle persona. You use the shape shifting device and select the Earth:human setting. You see a friendly avuncular looking poor sod standing on the LRT platform. You are in the remote and sleepy population congregation area of Edmonton. Roughly on the west side of the great plains that roll up like a carpet to the spectacular mountain range that runs down the length of the North American landmass. “This guy looks ok”, you think. He seems different from the rest of these humanoids. The other life forms are strangely distracted.

“I actually don’t mind taking the life form of these disgusting human creatures,” you think, “but I’ll be damned if I choose something that’s half asleep.”

You board the next train, politely shuffling your feet and avoiding eye contact. ‘When in Rome..’ you remember from the training manual. As you stand on the train, and it winds its way through the city, underground, then out again to cross a river you begin to notice something. There is no need to avoid eye contact. There is no eye contact. Everyone’s eyes are glued to these black, rectangular slabs of plastic, or perhaps metal. Most of the people on the train in fact. It continues underground for several kilometres. You are impressed by the intentness of these humans. They are consumed by these devices. There really is nothing to observe. No interactions, no talking, no laughing, no sharing. These creatures are wedged onto the commuter train, close quarters, but they are not interacting. All of their activity and attention is on these black slabs. There must be something amazing, something incredible there. Those things seem to have overridden everything else that presents itself in life. Almost as if life itself is inside these black slabs.

Further investigation is warranted. Such an overwhelming influence. Perhaps they had found a device to connect everyone, to work to a common goal.

You are an alien. You do not speculate on human culture, instead you use the power of observation. Like a good scientist, these observations are sent back to the mothership. From there it is relayed to the home planet, where, a group of your fellow scientists will form new hypotheses about what the planet Earth and its inhabitants are up to.

You recall from the past when Earth’s humanity faced insurmountable odds, often existential crises. But what had happened was most curious. It motivated tremendous ingenuity. Such as the concept of divide and conquer, where a large problem is split in smaller manageable parts. Each part is solved by a single individual, then the result passed on to the next individual who had their problem to be solved, proceeding thusly, and so on, and so on. Eventually the entire group had participated in the final solution. That was brilliant work done by the human race.

You think of Bletchley Park, when teams of mathematicians and Alan Touring cracked the Enigma cipher.

Or NASA in 1963 when the human computer project solved the landing trajectories and orbits of the Apollo missions.

Or, on a darker note the Manhattan Project, where teams of mostly women were assembled to calculate the pertinent details surrounding the fusion of the atomic bomb, whose results were used to execute the most horrific act of warfare ever.

Perhaps a world-wide initiative to solve some impending doomsday scenario that they are all facing? You recall the fear that was felt – the threat of Nazism inspiring Alan Turing and company, and Oppenheimer with his dastardly device, or the J. F. Kennedy inspired teams that propelled the USA to win the space race.

These humans can be motivated to achieve great things. Your mind races ahead. “I must gather this data, I must see what they are up to this time.”

So you sally forth with an idea of sneaking a look at these enthralling handheld black slabs. If you can get a peak of the screens. See what calculations, what possibilities are revealed…

Recently a co-worker announced she was leaving the company. Not just any co-worker, mind you, one who toiled long before most of the people in the office had started. The kind of employee who knew everything. Where everything is, what the rules are, who to contact, and so on. The type who related stories about when the company actually started, “employee number 12”, that sort of thing.

She emerged from her cubicle, hidden deep into the dark recesses of the office, from where only the bravest ventured. She had been cleaning out her desk. Finding things of value that had long since been squirreled away. Things long forgotten. She approached my desk, a wry smile on her face. “Here” she said, holding out a vaguely familiar box that looked like something from a distant dream, that spoke of earlier times, when there were possibilities, not just probabilities that had already played out.

Inside the box was a Nokia 6085. There was a manufacturing date on the box that read 2007. This was a pre-smart phone phone. This is what the masses were using just prior to the release of the iconic iPhone 3. It was state of the art in 2007. In 2019 holding this phone felt strange, laughable, improbable.

It had hardly been used, all of the packaging intact, plastic still covering the cables and connectors. It felt strange to hold it, to open it, to boot it up. A tiny colour screen showed games, an address book, a messaging app. Upon looking around one thing became apparent. No browser.

No browser.

The contrast between this phone and the phone the average person carries around today is stunning. There is no question about the utility of today’s modern smartphone. The pioneers of the cell phone industry were creating something that no one can deny would alter the very fabric of society. Cell phones emerged as clunky, giant suitcase boxes in the ’80s, with a standard phone handset and usually the curly phone cord attached. That quickly evolved to become smaller, more convenient, more useful. But the introduction of the smartphone catapulted the venerable cell phone into the stratosphere.

The smartphone operating system gave developers basically the same platform, more or less, on which to develop applications, as they have with a computer. The same applications that would run on your computer. Nowadays you carry a computer in your pocket. And there are literally billions of dollars spent on the software that runs on that computer.

For me I happily bought in to the smart phone concept, “this is great!” I told myself. Forking over hundreds of dollars every couple of years to get the latest hottest new phone. But slowly and surely a dark, sinister feeling came to inhabit my mind. The first clue was the ubiquity of the smart phone, easily witnessed during my daily commute on the train. I stopped counting the number of people glued to their screens versus the people who weren’t. Many people on the morning train nodding off to sleep, ever clutching their phones in front of them.

Next I realized I was checking my mail, and text messages way too many times during the day. Place my phone down on my desk, not too far out of reach so I could see that delicious message notification blinking light. “What’s that a new test message, pour moi?”. Several years ago I realized I was much more productive, focussed, and, well happier if I simply turned message notifications off. I realized that I did not want to allow my phone to interrupt me for, well, anything.

Sitting there in the office holding this dinosaur of a cell phone, yet in perfect condition, hardly used gave me an idea. Why not use this cell phone. Put my smartphone away. See how that can change my life. See what value the smartphone brings to my life – by taking it away.

And so my co-workers were quick to pipe up, “Say what! You won’t last a week!”. Well it wasn’t long before the Flip Phone Challenge was born. I must use the Nokia 6085 for 30 days. My phone will be locked by a duly appointed adjudicator, the pin only known by him. My smart phone will be inaccessible to me and I must sally forth into the world with, gasp, 2007 tech.

Today is day one. Heaven help me.