You’ve Always Done It And You Carry On Doing It

On the joy, and importance, of the single-function device

They’ve gone out of fashion, from what I can tell, but for a while there TED Talks really had a stranglehold on the culture. Remember that? Remember listening to enthusiastic people talking about the little things that might change the world? An exciting time. Foolish, almost certainly. But exciting. Remember being excited that things could change?

The only two I remember with any clarity were both by the late Sir Ken Robinson, an early TED star for his rousing presentation on the ways that schools, as currently designed, kill the creativity of children. In his follow-up, “Bring on the learning revolution!”, there’s a moment where he asks everyone in the audience over twenty-five to raise their hand if they’re wearing a wristwatch, and then compares that to the experience of asking a room full of young people the same question.

Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don’t mean they can’t, they just often choose not to. And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And by the way, you don’t need to either; it’s just that you’ve always done it and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who’s 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, “It's a single-function device.”

Fourteen years later the world has changed enough that these observations probably seems pat, if not bordering on irrelevant. Everyone is like this now, for the most part; phones have won the war against every generation’s preferences. (And the only real “learning revolution” that’s happened since 2010 is the one that digitized—and financialized—everything, for the worse.) But I still find it interesting, if only because these other truths about the role that smartphones play in our lives now have come to overwhelm and depress me to such a degree that I find myself seeking out opportunities to once again use my single-function devices in place of my infinitely-functional ones.

I was never a watch guy. To my knowledge the only one I’ve ever purchased was a pewter Marvin the Martian one from a kiosk at the mall when I was in middle school, and shortly afterward I went through a phase where the idea of “wrists” really grossed me out and I couldn’t stand anything touching the veins or tendons that I could see there. So Marvin mostly just sat on my bureau, rather uselessly telling the time directly beneath the clock in my bedroom. That was, I thought, the beginning and end of my watch experiment.

Recently, as our dog recovered from surgery, my wife and I were put on a strict schedule by the vet, building up walks by five extra minutes each week until she was fully cleared. I don’t like to bring my phone when I walk Orla—typically, that’s a precious 30-45 minute window where I leave all distractions at home—but saw no alternative until my wife reminded me that she had a perfectly good watch for these sort of occasions. For the first time since probably 1998, I put it on, and wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t want to throw up from thinking about my tendons and arteries. Mission accomplished. I’ve started taking it with me automatically when I go out now, and it’s allowed me to meet Orla’s needs and my own.

That’s the thing, ultimately, with the little infinitely-functional devices we carry around with us. Because they can do everything, every moment we carry them also contains the possibility of doing everything; in my experience, this rarely lends itself to doing any of those things well. Sometimes you really do just need one tool that can accomplish one thing! I didn’t get that for a long time. I think I do, now.

Recently Apple put out a commercial depicting a whole host of artistic tools, instruments, materials, and such all being crushed by a giant hydraulic press and turned into an iPad. I can’t think of a better encapsulation of why I’m so annoyed, why I feel so constantly frayed and ragged, as my phone comes to do more and more things for me. (Apple did have to issue a hasty apology, because it turns out I am far from alone in hating this shit.)

Austin Kleon, who I’ve cited more times than I can count in this newsletter, had a similar reaction:

I’m not a parent, and I’m certainly not going to try to tell people who do have to try to raise kids how to do it. But with each passing day I am more and more grateful that I grew up at a time where this wasn’t even a choice available to my own parents and the parents of my peers.

The choice of objects in that iPad ad feels telling, too. The piano in particular is hard to miss. It makes sense as a creative choice, given what Apple is trying to sell; it’s hard to imagine a more obtrusive, old-fashioned, eminently single-function device than that particular instrument. And damn if that isn’t what makes it such a cool thing, a thing worth hanging onto and fighting for. I’ve never played a lick, but my dad’s partner Michelle has one that sits in their living room. Michelle’s mom, Ellen, is in her eighties and sliding into that long and murky valley of forgetfulness that comes for us all if we’re lucky enough to get so many years. But man: put her behind the piano, even still, and the decades fall away, and the beautiful music is there. It’s a neat trick of the human brain, a wonderfully prescient act of self-preservation, that habit and routine and long-term skill are stored in the cerebellum and basal ganglia rather than in the hippocampus, where the day-to-day memory resides. I can’t help but wonder what the screenification of our lives might do to that divide; when my generation gets old, will our grandkids be able to fire up GarageBand and have us play them a tune there? Or will the divide between tablet and instrument be so obfuscated that we lose it all? (And will GarageBand, and iPads, even exist at all, a half-century down the road? I doubt it. And mostly I hope not.)

A piano might be billed as a single-function device, but in the right hands, it’s so much more than that: it’s a time machine. It’s medical equipment. Somehow whatever Tim Cook is offering to jam into my pocket doesn’t seem to hold a candle to that.

“It was really important to me that he grow up with a piece of furniture he could walk over to and play his feelings on,” Kleon wrote back in 2020, having bought a piano before the birth of his son. Now when my nieces and nephew visit their Nana Michelle and Grandpa Jimbo, they get to do the same thing.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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PPS: If you need any further proof that the tech revolution, having hitched its wagon to AI, needs to be killed before it kills all of us, see below. Again: the tools that are purported to do “everything” don’t seem to do any of it well. Specialization of our tools and our knowledge matters! That picture is of a variety of Amanita mushroom known as “Destroying Angel.” Bon appetit.