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When Alex Lykos decided to quit his smartphone for 30 days he knew it would be a social experiment worth documenting. But the playwright and filmmaker wasn’t initially motivated by any grand thesis. Rather, it was envy that drove him.
Much of his scroll time – four hours a day, on average – was taken up by social media feeds, and the relentless stream of humble-braggery was wearing him down.
Alex Lykos decided to detox from his phone for 30 days, and made a documentary about the experience.Credit: Joe Armao
“I started waking up in the morning and trying to focus on gratitude, what’s good in my life,” he says. “I’d put myself in a good headspace and then I’d get on social media and look at people on holiday in Europe, or buying a new car, or a new house, or having career success, and all those attempts I’d made to focus on what’s good in my life were offset by being put in a bad place by focusing on what’s not good in my life. That’s what social media was doing.”
The time he spent on his phone wasn’t good for his marriage either, he admits.
“I just wasn’t connecting with my wife, I wasn’t present. I was doing that thing where she’s telling me a story about her day at work and I’m nodding, half listening, but half on my phone scrolling.”
In February 2022, he took the big step. The phone, laptop and iPad all went in the safe at home, where they would stay for 30 days. And with the cameras rolling, his digital detox would become the subject of Disconnect Me, a documentary that is both intensely personal and far-reaching in its ambitions.
The scenes of his father yelling at him in Greek down the landline that Lykos had installed at home because he couldn’t be reached on his mobile, and telling him to get a proper job instead of being a bludger, were, he concedes, re-enacted for the camera, with a “little added sauce”. Not because they weren’t true, he hastens to add, but because “if you say to him ‘express how you feel’, suddenly he becomes mute”.
In truth, Lykos insists, “he’s 10 times worse” than the version in the film.
What wasn’t worse was living without social media. “Honestly, after two or three days, I completely forgot about it,” he says. “I realised for me how inane it was, and when I got my phone back, I immediately took the social media apps off my phone. It was the easiest thing to do.”
What he did miss was the ease of communication, and the utility of having maps in the palm of your hand (he claims in the film to have narrowly avoided an accident while trying to use a printed street directory while driving).
Could our reliance on the smartphone be a harbinger of a transhuman future?Credit: Joe Armao
“Not for one second are we trying to say phones are bad.” he says. “They’re not. They’re great tools. It’s about how do you find a way to use the tool, so it serves you better and isn’t controlling you and putting you in a bad state.”
That’s a modest enough proposition, no matter how difficult many of us might find it to enact. But Disconnect Me eventually pushes into far more ambitious terrain. The impact on kids’ mental health and body image issues, the way handheld digital games groom users for gambling, the existential threat posed by AI, even the possibility that the smartphone represents an evolutionary bridge between the human and the transhuman phases of our species.
It may be a stretch to suggest that our dependence on the smartphone is a harbinger of the transition from a purely biological form to an augmented, technology-enhanced personhood, Lykos concedes. “But if I’d said to you 30 years ago, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have this device that we do banking on, we communicate with, do FaceTime on, do all kinds of stuff with’ you probably would have looked at me and said, ‘You’re raving mad. That’s not gonna happen.’ But it has happened.”
And given the pace of technological advancement, who can say with certainty that widespread transhumanism is not just around the corner?
“People we interviewed said, ‘I’d never put a chip in my brain’,” Lykos says. “But what if everyone else is, and everyone else’s brain is working much faster, they’re all making more money because their brain is more efficient. Are you going to not do it?”
And there you have it – the inescapable power of envy again.
You might be able put that phone away, but changing our nature might be a much bigger challenge after all.
Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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