The Magic Box in My Pocket

An odd look at my phone.

I love my phone. It’s a marvelous piece of technology that was unimaginable twenty years ago. Heck, some of my phone’s capabilities weren’t even imaginable 14 years ago when the first iPhone came out in 2007.

We hear a lot about how awesome our phones are. It’s got a computer more powerful than the one that went to the moon, people say. That’s a bit of an understatement when you realize that today’s top-of-the-line phones are more powerful than standard laptops from roughly a decade ago, with a better screen, better processors, more memory, and more drive space.

I know I could go research how and why my phone works. I could find out how it connects wirelessly to a network, how the accelerometer works, how it predicts what I want to type (however poorly), and how the camera and microphone work.

On a more granular level, I could learn about lithium-ion batteries, microprocessors, and electricity to grasp how the thing works on a microscopic level. I could learn about processing rare earth metals and how to make plastic and glass. I could take a physics class on thermodynamics to start, in some small way, to grasp how this thing works.

I’m not going to, of course. It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just that I don’t have the time, energy, or patience to learn. I’ve spent so much of my life learning about writing that taking a hard left into computers seems a bit random at this point. Not that I’m ruling it out, just not right now.

So, for now, my phone will simply be the magic box in my pocket. It’s just this thing, about the size of a deck of cards, that I carry around with me everywhere and that runs my life. It’s made of metal, sand, and reconstituted dinosaurs, it’s powered by lightning, and it does things using invisible waves of energy.

With this magic box, I can access all of human knowledge at any point that I want and from nearly anywhere. I can project my voice and my face to someone ten thousand miles away instantaneously (or near enough, anyway). I can have a conversation with ten different people from ten different countries, I can translate one language to another, and I can see the wonders of the world in my living room if I wanted to.

My life exists inside of this magic box. All of my important things — my calendar, my written communications with friends and coworkers, my notes, my stories and articles — exist on or can be accessed by this box. I can manage all of my finances — my bank accounts, credit cards, investments, and anything else — instantly with this box.

There are also endless opportunities to entertain me with games and diversions. There are countless little colorful games on the magic box in a variety of styles and types. If I wanted to, I could play Scrabble with a friend in another city, or I could play any of a huge selection of solitaire games. I can read about local news from China as it happens, I can watch my favorite television show from 50 years ago, and I can listen to all of my favorite music without actually needing to own a single record or CD.

I also use my magic box to follow what my friends are doing. We are all part of a thing where we write about how our lives are, post pictures, or just share funny images of unrelated things or random bits of writing from other places. I particularly like looking at pictures of cats — whether they’re my friends’ cats or cats that I’ll never meet, it doesn’t matter. There are even celebrity cats.

I think we take our phones for granted these days. I know that makes me sound old — I have always been like that, though, so it doesn’t bother me — but sometimes we forget the power we literally hold in our hands. I can connect all of the appliances in my house together in a network and run it through my phone from 5,000 miles away if I wanted to. That was the realm of science fiction not all that long ago.

I am absolutely not writing this as a sort of “darn kids have it too easy these days.” I don’t particularly care for that mindset. No, I think that very often, we forget how far technology has come and take it for granted.

I always laugh when I’m watching something on YouTube and I have to deal with ads. When I was growing up, commercial breaks were four minutes and you had time to run to the bathroom and grab a snack on the way back. Now, having to deal with twelve seconds of unskippable ads is such a frustrating occurrence that some people pay extra to avoid it.

(And yet, some of our mobile games rely on us watching ads to get digital stuff, so I guess the point is to have control over how and when we watch advertisements.)

There is a common refrain in science fiction: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I say to heck with that. The technology we have now is magic. Most of the things that I described above were either expensive, difficult, or impossible to do twenty years ago. Fifty years ago most of it was speculative fiction.

So, taking all of that into account, please enjoy your magic box. If you’re into buying the latest and most advanced magic box, go for it. If, like me, you’re content with your older magic box, cool. I don’t even expect you to think about it beyond this point. I mostly just wanted you to stop and contemplate how awesome your magic box is for this moment in time.

Anyway, I mostly just wanted to marvel at my phone for a bit. I find that seeking the wonder in the world helps drive away the dullness and despair, and since there’s a lot of that lately, I figured we could all use a boost. Whether you never see your phone the same way again or you shake your head and move on, thank you for reading. Hope you have a good day.

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