Bricks
It's one damn ping after the next
Everything—everything—lives in the brick. The brick contains the world. It pings you when you’ve got a text; when your pad thai has been delivered; when your mother has died at the hospital. It pings the same for them all.
The old bricks know your fingerprints; the new ones know your face. If you’re lucky, you have two bricks: two gleaming bricks so that, at the end of a long day, when you’ve finished pinging your boss and boss’s boss and colleagues, you can relax by pinging your friends and family and the colleagues you actually like.
Some days you wake up (the brick woke you up, it has an alarm) and dream of throwing your brick out the window. How sweet it would be to watch the brick’s glittering plunge to the pavement—its spray of glass and silicon.
But suppose you regretted it. Suppose you changed your mind and had to buy a replacement: How would you even navigate to the brick store without your brick to guide you? What would you listen to on the way over—a CD Walkman? Jesus.
When your brick is still and silent, on airplanes or at church (you wouldn’t have gone but for your mother’s funeral), you feel like someone is watching you. You feel naked without your brick, you crave its constant pings. When the ordeal is over, you rush to bring your brick to life—to let its pings wash over you like waves.
But all there is is an email from your boss’s boss’s boss; a software update; a news story about either plastics in the water or the First Lady’s plastic surgery (it’s hard to tell from the thumbnail). You ping your friend the story without reading it. They don’t respond.
What are we even building with these bricks? An economy? A brighter future? We sure as hell aren’t building cheaper housing—just look at any street corner. I’m starting to think it’s a pyramid scheme. I’m starting to think I need a new brick.
Sent from my iPhone.