Shadowbook: Writing Through the Digital 2014-2018

programmatic love doesn’t end well either. Seduction and desire, only rarely do they get a happy ending. Technology has nothing to do with that.

10.

Am I another pathetic nutcase if I describe my phone as the substitute of my lover? I don’t think so. Technology has always been inextricably connected to humans and human relationships. That is not to say that it always leads to some kind of progression. As Ben Lerner puts it, something happens in the balance of things which makes the world rearrange itself. The device in your hand, against your thigh, on your breast and in your purse is an integrated part of your being. Sure, it’s a machine, a robot, but to quote Nathan Jurgenson, ‘it is still deeply part of a network of blood; an embodied, intimate, fleshy portal that penetrates into one’s mind, into endless information, into other people’.

Embodied, intimate, fleshy: might the smartphone channel desire and pleasure after all, let phonophilia bloom? Isn’t it possible that the wordiness of mobile communication, the ongoing practice in the use of the written word, turns out to be precisely the savior of the game of seduction? My summer of iPhone lust made me realize that real time pleasure can actually transcend the genre of ‘to like’. Whereas K. and I had played checkers, the game that started with J. took on the complexity of chess. The transition from text message to Twitter meant a transition from 160 to 140 signs, from paid to free, from five messages each time to fifty. We played Wordfeud as if our lives depended on it – word after word after word.

LLAMA. LEGS. STIPULATE. By playing the game – the one of Scrabble and the one of the direct message – we taught each other the art of seduction, I can’t call it anything else.

Or, maybe. The art of titillation.

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