Fifty Shades of Black (21 page)

 

 

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Y
ou are sitting at a table—sweating, distracted and more than a little edgy—in a slightly skungy downtown San Francisco lounge called Jones. You are with a gaggle of people you've never met before. You are not here for the cocktails or the floorshow or to listen to stand-up comedian hopefuls. You are here for the same reason the others are and none of you is laughing or bantering or looking very happy. In fact you're probably wringing your hands and looking at your shoes right now. You are there because of one simple, ugly truth: you are an addict, a junkie and you are finally ready to acknowledge that you need help. And when your turn comes to speak you hope you will have the courage to stand up and say in a clear, loud voice:

“Hi, everybody. My name is Art and I am a . . . a . . .

“A nomophobic.”

Relax, buddy. Everybody at the club tonight is wallowing in exactly the same leaky boat. They are here because, like you, they are addicted—wired, actually—and they're finally ready to admit that their addiction is wrecking their lives.

That's what this get-together is all about. It's billed as a Device-Free Drinks event. The idea is to teach people how to survive without a WMD in their pocket or purse.

That acronym doesn't stand for Weapon of Mass Destruction; it stands for Wireless Mobile Device. These people are going to attempt to spend the next few hours separated from their iPhones, iPads, iTouches, BlackBerrys, Android devices, smart phones or other digital leg iron of choice.

Sounds absurd but it's real enough. An estimated thirteen million Brits suffer from nomophobia—the fear of being separated from their mobile phone. It's even worse on this side of the Atlantic. The average American mobile user is online 122 more hours per year than the average Brit. (That's the best part of a week wasted staring at a little box in your hands.)

A bad habit for sure—but an addiction? Absolutely, according to the experts. A report in a recent issue of
Newsweek
magazine claims that overindulgence in cellphone use, not to mention texting, tweeting and web surfing, can quite literally rewire human brain circuits. Brain scans of adults deemed nomophobic—which is to say people who use their devices more than thirty-eight hours a week—display symptoms that are eerily similar to those found in the brains of cocaine addicts and hard-core alcoholics. Those symptoms range from serious anxiety to clinical depression—even rage or acute psychosis.

This particular Device-Free Drinks get-together at the lounge has attracted about 250 digital junkies and they are offered a variety of diversionary pastimes to help wean them from their toys. There's a glass jar labelled “Digital Detalks” that's full of strips of paper, each one bearing a slightly-off-the-wall conversational opener, such as: “What's the best sound effect you can make?” and “What does your grandmother smell like?”

The idea is to derail your digital brain and rewire it to think outside the WMD box. To help in the weaning process there are a half-dozen twentieth-century digital devices available.

Typewriters by Smith-Corona. The manual kind.

Does it work? One participant says if you can make it through the first twenty minutes without running back to reclaim your checked-in cellphone or iPod, then you've got a chance of reclaiming your life.

But really, it's too early to tell.

Will there be more Digital Detox gatherings like this one in the lounge? You can count on it. Might even be one near you.

If and when it happens, you know how you're going to find out about it, right?

Somebody's bound to post it on Facebook.

 

 

Your Call Is Important—Har-Har

A
s I write, there are an estimated 1.3 million Canadian adults out of work.

I can fix that.

Put them to work, I say. Put them to work at the other end of my telephone line.

There is a galaxy-sized vacuum at the other end of my phone line and it is crying out for human beings to fill it. At the moment it is occupied by a cringe-making mechanical Robovoice. Every time I call my bank, an airline, a government office, the CBC or a large business concern, Robovoice intercepts my call with what has to be the most insincere statement uttered since Richard Nixon's “I am not a crook.”

“Your call,” purrs Robovoice, “is important to us.”

No. No, it's not. If my call was important it would be answered by one of the living, breathing 1.3 million unemployed Canadians out there who could use a warm, comfortable desk job answering phones.

What “Your call is important to us” really means is the exact, 180-degree opposite. It really means, “We've found a way to make even more money by firing our receptionists and replacing them with a recording. Incoming calls are so cosmically unimportant to us we're willing to risk offending the crap out of our customers by forcing them to converse with a vending machine.”

What's more, the messages from Robovoice (“This call may be monitored to ensure voice quality”—gimme a break) are so blatantly false they wouldn't bamboozle the most gullible and compliant customer this side of Elmer the Safety Elephant.

We don't all surrender meekly. Many of us instinctively punch “0” the instant we hear Robovoice warming up, and often that will put us in touch with a human operative. As for the more devious and sophisticated “Interactive Voice Response Systems,” there is a growing guerrilla network of websites that offers tips on how to sabotage the CCBs (cheap corporate bastards). One website counsels that we should abandon the frustrating practice of mashing button after button (“For help with overbilling, press 368”) and just holler “OPERATOR!” at the receiver until a
Homo sapiens
comes on the line. Another website advises us to swear like a paratrooper—apparently X-rated diatribes can trigger emotion-detection technology that brings a live operator on the run.

Feels good, but it's bad for the blood pressure.

Problem is, even if we shout or curse or use technological voodoo to bypass most of the commands, they've still got us dancing like trained monkeys—when all we really want is to connect with another human being with a brain and a heart.

Is that really so much to ask?

We could always take our business elsewhere—providing there
is
an elsewhere. But with businesses going global and conglomerating like cancer cells, too often Robovoice is the only game in town.

My friends say I'm a Luddite when it comes to phone technology. They say I'd be happier if the world communicated by smoke signals.

To which I say: Nonsense. I'm an up-to-date guy when it comes to telephone technology. After all, I do have Call Waiting.

If you call me and you get a busy signal it means you wait until I'm through.

 

 

Come On—Get Real!

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

—T.S. Eliot

I
don't get reality TV.

Oh, I understand why it's popular with television producers and entertainment conglomerates—they get entire TV series delivered to their door without having to pay for writers or expensive studios and sets; they get to use non-union “actors” willing to perform for free or next to it.

But why does anyone want to watch the result?

To see what happens when a gaggle of strangers gets marooned on a desert island? Puh-leeeze. That's no desert island and nobody's marooned. This is a celluloid entertainment, remember? At the bare minimum there's a camera operator, a lighting technician and a sound person riding the levels on hidden microphones. I'm also willing to bet there's a director, an assistant director and a gaggle of college dropout “special assistants” clutching clipboards just off-camera.

Not to mention a helicopter and crew on standby in case somebody wants fresh croissants with their coffee.

It's a shuck, folks—and the French, bless their mercenary hearts, appear to have figured that out. Last year the highest court in France ruled that contestants in the French version of
Temptation Island
were entitled to contracts and employee benefits, including a thirty-five-hour workweek, overtime . . .

And oh, yes. A base pay rate equivalent to nineteen hundred dollars per actor per day. French production company executives sobbed that they'll have to come up with nearly seventy-one million dollars in back pay.

Cry me a
rivière, chéri.
The
Idol
franchise brought in that much in just three months on air.

But when it comes to reality TV, the money is just, well, unreal. Consider the maximally mammaried, minimally talented reality TV star Kim Kardashian. Estimated salary for last year: six million dollars.

And then there's Planet Calypso, a mineral-rich frontier on which investors around the world have been snapping up properties and leases for the past few years. One of those investors, Hollywood filmmaker/entrepreneur Jon Jacobs, recently cashed out his Planet Calypso properties for a cool $635,000 US.

Not bad, for an investment of a mere hundred grand.

Especially not bad when you consider that Planet Calypso doesn't exist.

It's an imaginary asteroid, part of an online game called Entropia Universe. Jon Jacobs pocketed more than half a million real dollars by selling fictional real estate on a make-believe celestial body.

As usual, you and I are slightly behind the curve. Planet Calypso is only one of many mythical marketplaces on which online investors are actively “doing business.” A marketing firm called In-Stat estimates that online players spent seven billion dollars last year on the purchase of non-existent property and goods.

Which brings us to the Toronto Public Library. Thanks to the introduction of an innovative project, TPL patrons with an active library card can partake of a project called the Human Library. Participants don't take out a book, a tape or a CD; they take out a living, breathing, interacting human being. Some of the people waiting to be “signed out” (for a half-hour at a time, conversation only) include a retired police officer, a comedian, a former sex worker, a model and a person who has survived both cancer and homelessness.

The idea is to facilitate conversations between library patrons and people from other walks of life whom they might not otherwise get to meet. The Human Library is an attempt to “travel back in time,” in effect, to an age when, as a TPL official put it, “storytelling from person to person was the only way to learn.”

Sounds like a great idea, the Human Library.

No doubt some Hollywood hotshot is figuring out how to turn it into a reality show.

 

 

Dear Siri: Please Marry Me

P
ssst. You lonely? Looking for a little ... female companionship? Have I got a girl for you.

She's not cheap, but she's very, very good. Knows how to . . . take care of business, if you get my meaning.

No, I mean really take care of business. She'll call a cab, text-­message your kids, book you a table at a good Thai restaurant and make sure you remember your dentist's appointment. When you're heading out the door she'll remind you to take along your wallet, your travel mug and the car keys.

She's sharp, reliable, available 24/7 and what's more she'll never quit on you, no matter how big a jerk you are. If you curse her out, she just tut-tuts and says, “Now, now.” If you're a perverted jerk and ask her to “talk dirty” to you, she sighs and says, “Dust. Silt. Gravel. Mud.”

And if you really go bananas and start cursing her out she'll say, “How can you hate me? I don't even exist.”

Well, yeah . . . there's that.

“Siri,” as she's known, is not a living breathing human; she's a voice-activated app that comes along with Apple's iPhone 4S. But she doesn't talk in that familiar, annoying automaton drone we all know from bad movies and our GPS. Siri's voice is unnervingly warm and real. What's even freakier: Siri is actually getting smarter all the time. Not only are her canned answers updated by Apple experts regularly, Siri can also store the questions to and answers given from her tens of millions of customers and draw on that info to answer your queries. And Siri is fiercely loyal even if it means a walk on the wild side. “Where can I hide a dead body?” one owner facetiously typed. Siri responded with a list of nearby municipal dumps, metal foundries and swamps.

Many customers have come to rely on their new best friend Siri rather a lot. This trend could have been predicted. Last year, Martin Lindstrom, a consumer advocate, recorded the responses of subjects when they heard their cellphones ring. Magnetic resonance imaging detected a frenzy of brain activity, normally associated, says Lindstrom, with feelings of intense love and compassion.

Big surprise. Remember Tamagotchis? Back in the 1990s a craze swept Japan (and eventually much of the world) for a tiny gizmo about the size of a rabbit's foot that you could attach to your key chain. Owners were encouraged to feed, train and even medicate their Tamagotchis every day.

They had to—otherwise the Tamagotchi could sicken and even “die.”

This, remember, was not a gerbil, a cricket or a teddy bear. It was an electronic gadget that changed its image depending on what its owner did (or didn't) do with it. Neglect your Tamagotchi even for a few hours and you could come back to find that it had “grown wings” (in other words, died).

Tamagotchis were not remotely human-like, yet many owners developed alarmingly deep personal relationships with them. There were stories of owners attempting to adopt their Tamagotchis as members of the family.

Tamagotchis were a passing fad that waxed and waned, like the hula hoop and Britney Spears. But Siri? I've got a feeling she's going to be around for a while.

Siri's persona is so lifelike, says one customer, “you almost forget that the intelligence we're dealing with is artificial.”

That's no big surprise either—but apparently Siri can handle it. She's already fending off marriage proposals.

Yael Baker, a New York media consultant, was so smitten with Siri's expertise that she impulsively typed, “Siri, will you marry me?”

To which Siri responded, “That's sweet, but let's just be friends.”

A Dear John letter from your phone app. How lame is that?