Quit Your Phone and Change the Nature of the Universe

obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition) (Apologies for a substack link but this one is worth it.) Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe! What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to us to give that moment meaning. Walter Benjamin called this fixture of modern life homogenous, empty time and believed it to be a real sickness inhibitive of social progress, though these days it’s nothing special…>we find ourselves stuck in the cafeteria of ultramechanized capitalism where the sushi of time goes round and round on the carousel. How tragic that we don’t pick a plate and eat it because we’re on our damn phones!!!! Or something! …Thus, invoking (whether unwittingly or not) the…