By Arthur Dash

Copyright newsday

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

I PERIODICALLY visit my Highway Reroute colleagues. I call these residents from Debe to Mon Desir the rural gentry, for most are genteel folk living in well-appointed homesteads and gardens. Not long ago, I visited an elderly couple with my colleague Chaitoo. We sat on a high breezy porch attending to our official matters.

From inside the home, I heard a lively racket. An awesome fussing and fighting. Soon, through the glass door I saw a child, a little boy, jousting with his father. His father was trying to keep him inside, but he was wriggling and squiggling trying to open the door, bust out.

He soon got the better of his poor father. He scrambled onto the porch, bolted to his grandfather. Frantically, he began to pat his grandfather’s front, then back pockets. Not finding what he wanted, he scrambled towards his grandmother; but she had no pockets. This seemed to mesmerise, shock him.

Then onto the complete strangers he rushed. First to Chaitoo, who seemed to have numberless pockets; all his pockets were feverishly patted down. Still not discovering his holy grail, he came onto me. Patted. Pocket to pocket. But I carried not what he wanted. He appeared stunned, psychologically catspraddled. Down the stairs he fled into the yard.

Not wanting to further distress the father, I asked no questions. But ten minutes later I heard my phone ringing. It was not on me, or in my car. It was coming from the SUV of the boy’s father. Instantly, I figured the thing. The child had climbed into my car, taken my phone from the glove compartment, escaped to his father’s vehicle, locked himself in. It was a phone, dummy, a phone! That is what he had been after!

I was taken aback by the extreme obsession of the boy for the machine. But it is symptomatic of a global affliction. Such cases of “addiction,” “obsession,” are parodies of we ourselves, just lite versions. Most of us, lite or regular, suffer from “mobilephilia” (my word); an uncommon love of our mobiles. Not just children, the Gen Zs, but the elderly. Day in day out, we head dong in we phone. Swiping and surfing. We know the story.

In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the head of a prestigious fashion magazine, attacks her hired assistant, who had casually used the word “stuff” to describe the stock of fashions:

“You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean…

“And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic, casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin.

“However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of ‘stuff.’”

You may think you’re a free and independent mover and shaker, a chooser of your own products and destiny, but your choices are ready-made, already designed; even before you were born.

Streep’s “people in this room” are in your phone. The human makers of the algorithms in your phone and the algorithms themselves. An algorithm is a data-tracking system which tracks your browsing history and habits. It maps what you are likely to buy, think, choose. And if you think you are making your own choice, it has already been chosen for you.

Your phone grows to know you so well, it could make you with the proverbial mud, like the God of Genesis. Its goal is to programme your choices. So you are no longer homo sapiens, thinking man. You are homo servus, a functionary or servant of your algorithm makers and algorithms.

The duty of your mobile/algorithm is to win your time and attention, the absolute maximum amounts. To inculcate mobilephilia. So as to impress and imprint its design upon you. Not just to programme what you buy, but how you act, what you think. And what not to think. It vies to obsess you with its own plan, programme, to the exclusion of your own. To inundate, re-imperialises you with its own politics and ideology. To knock out other views.

The information it provides gratifies and reinforces the biases it has inculcated in you. And its information bytes are filled with missing parts, gaps, blanks, the facts. It walls you off, shepherds you away, from fact, truth. Not everyone can resist this formidable entrapment, capture, domination. It makes you numb to, ignorant of, your own interest.

Ignorance is as old as our hills. Who would want to own a bright serf, peon, slave, cool–? But manufacturing ignorance has now become cheaper, more efficient. Imagine billions of this evolving species, homo servus, machined-trained, manufactured to be servile, obedient, ignorant. Or likewise, a million “bright” Trinis. All ignorant of their own ignorance.