A special report from the Institute of Duh says you’re miserable, upset, anxious and casually delusional because you look at your phone too much. If you’re reading this now, the authors say, you’re probably moments away from seeing a rapid spate of things that could destabilize your brain for the rest of the day. Teenage thots, race hate, mass media slop, live footage of atrocities, local festivals, 9/11 conspiracies, sweet little kitty cats and much, much more are all packed into a pocket-sized device you take everywhere and have an obsessive-compulsive relationship with. Maybe that’s bad?
Worse yet, you pay for this service and volunteer information for the chaos-making everything machine to make your life specifically a petty hell. And you probably don’t even think of it as a choice you’re making anymore, do you?
Though it drastically reduces both the quantity and quality of face-to-face interactions, you paradoxically find yourself more desperate for the attention and approval of other people. Your standards have dropped so low that it only takes a fleeting heart emoji to reward this desire. And if you don’t get that heart, you feel like you want to die. It’s really, really fucked up, man.
Some scientists call this the problem of the singularity, the phenomenon where humans end up serving the technology they invented to serve them. Moreover, researchers say humanity is so entrenched in technology that, at this point, the singularity problem is doomed to replicate itself over and over. So get used to your misery under the robot overlords, idiots! Other scientists are asking why you don’t just liberate yourself and throw the damned thing into the river.