My phone knows what I want before I do. That should be worrying – but it's oddly comforting
I awoke recently to one of those galleries of photographic memories curated for me by my phone. This one featured my best friend, M: admiring a dosa, stroking her cat, holding a pair of Parisian melons and lying in my garden. It made me smile and when I told her, she said her phone had had the same idea. 'It keeps trying to get me to put you as wallpaper,' she messaged, showing me its suggestions. Like pushy parents, it was as if our phones had got together and decided it was time we had a playdate. The worst of it is they are right: I really miss her.
It reminded me of all the other ways my phone parents me. When I get out of choir practice, it volunteers, unprompted, that it will take 12 minutes to get home by my usual route. It helpfully offers to count down a minute when I am at the gym and want to time my rests between weights sets. When I get into the car on Saturday afternoons, it always shows me the way to the supermarket. At bedtime, it offers a shortcut to TikTok because it knows watching cats confused by Ramadan and RuPaul explaining how to parallel park soothes me.
It should feel intrusive to be known so intimately by your phone – all that personal data harvested in the service of surveillance capitalism – but I find it obscurely comforting. I may be adrift in unforgiving adult life, but at least a handful of faceless, ideologically dubious corporations have my back – and will even dole out a little dopamine as a treat.
With the addition of some apps, it's possible to outsource all your self-care needs to your phone – mood, food, movement, menstrual cycle and more. Your phone can prompt you to text your auntie on her birthday, suggest a nice walk when you are down, nag you to drink more water or even to pee. It is, basically, your mum. You find that bleak, even frightening? Shh, there, there. It's nothing a cuddle from your nice, warm, all-knowing rectangle won't fix.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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