Can You Tell a Phony?

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n a recent piece in City Journal, former Time essayist and current Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Lance Morrow zeroes in on the essence of the smartphone:

The smartphone is… an absorptive miniature self and a megaphone and magical extension of the user, a Swiss Army knife of the mind: a genius, it must be admitted, compared with the dope who holds it in his palm. The self plunges into the little screen, Googling or texting with double thumbs, posting away, begging to be liked or shared.

Yet the transaction is not what it pretends to be. You’re not using the phone; the phone is using you. The smartphone is a Trojan horse, and you are Pavlov’s dog. The machine studies you with an alien’s eye, serving you with injections of warmth and affection (grandchildren, frolicking dogs) in order to suck out information, assembling a dossier — noting where you have been, what you have said, what you have bought and thought, your very footsteps and heartbeats — reproducing you as a useful commercial or political object, as if in a 3-D printer.

You’re a customer, a thing: fodder for algorithms. It is ruthlessly done. A suspicion of the fraud — since you were seeking love in the “likes” and “shares” and emojis — is why you come away vaguely depressed after a Facebook session. Your Facebook “friends” may or may not be your friends, but the intelligent machine is, in a deeper sense, your enemy: a predator with a repertoire of flashy metaphysics at its disposal, a hall of mirrors. The sleek machine is in the business of harvesting souls.