Gustave Moreau: Jacob and the Angel (1874-1878)

"At least there's no toll taker, trying to assess me for roaming now."

I have a long and perhaps overproud history of resisting technological change. I have not yet successfully completed the leap from analogue to digital, and I not so secretly hope never to fully consummate that leap. When cell phones first came into fashion, my partners forced one onto me. I was never able to complete a call. I’d try, but get no further than some toll collector who’d explain that I was roaming. Roaming was apparently a minor felony punishable by an immediately calculated and extracted financial penalty. This served as a necessary gate through which a caller had to pass to successfully connect. I’d declined the invitation and go find some landline payphone to complete the connection. My partners insisted that the phone would prove to be convenient, though it never once was.

Later, once that technology had advanced beyond the roaming phase, The Muse leased an early model of a smart smartphone. It was not nearly as smart as today’s models, but it seemed too complicated for a guy like me to ever learn. This was before iPhones, so she acquired a BlackBerry, which required learning unique languages, like MS-DOS miniaturized and on steroids. I declined that invitation and chose a little thing called a Jazz, which allowed telephony, after a microminiturized fashion, and primitive text messaging, which I never figured out how to do. I was wary and fearful, concerned that the technology might encourage the atrophy of certain essential parts of me. I feared having access to a map app in my pocket, lest it disable my fairly mature original intuitive navigation system. When we relocated to Washington, DC, I refused to even carry a paper map with me, lest I lose the ability to effectively read and learn from my surroundings. I eventually had a superior orientation to my surroundings there than most natives.

My first iPhone was both a revelation and a huge distraction. I found it almost impossible to use but also irresistible. I flushed innumerable otherwise memorable moments fussing with that damn phone’s protocols. I swore at first to never use any apps. I’d keep the phone for telephony. That commitment surely eroded, as digital technology continually sank its talons deeper into me. Rather than an advancement, the technology always seemed more like debasement to me, as if I were resorting to utterly unnecessary alternatives. I suppose one of my forebears might have developed a digital dependency back in the early seventeenth century in Germany. My heritage seemed to scream that I should avoid depending upon those things, a sense that I suppose I was ultimately destined to lose.

I don’t suppose my story seems in any way extraordinary. I suspect that many have tried and failed to avoid assimilating emerging technologies. We might all be Luddites, fearful of losing whatever tenuous abilities we inherited from prior generations. The new stuff sure seems shiny, but also mighty suspicious. What does it promise? What were we lacking before that demanded we abandon our hard-won facilities for? We seem to assimilate externalities, ultimately regretful of every technological advancement. I still remember when I didn’t have social media to feed, when I still sent out periodic newsletters. I’d enlist my kids to help stick address labels and stamps and staple them closed. I felt inordinately close to my subscribers then. It was as if I reached out and physically touched them. Even with my weekly Friday Zoom Chat and nearly continually updated comment feeds, I feel no closer today. At least there’s no toll taker, trying to assess me for roaming now.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz