I dropped my iPhone in the bathroom.
A Thom Browne-esque stripe of white lines appeared across the screen.
The lock screen won't open.
Touches on rows 7, 8, and 9 of the unlock pad just don't register.
For now I moved the SIM to my sleeping Light Phone.
( Light Phone is a phone I backed on Kickstarter about 2 years ago - a pretty piece of junk that only does calls and texts. From here on I'll call it Yesu (pretty-trash, abbreviated). True to its nickname, Yesu has no contacts. Syncing with a smartphone isn't easy. And while it does have a texting function, it doesn't support Korean input. It can receive Korean, but there's no Korean keyboard. Around now you probably understand why I call it pretty-trash.)
Honestly, for a forty-year-old submerged-herbivore-type single, the phone breaking and being unreachable isn't that big of an issue.
But this time the problem is a little different.
Because last Tuesday I went on a blind date. No less than a forty-year-old single guy going on a blind date with someone seven years younger.
And it's Saturday. Right now, at what should be the time for the second meeting... I'm sitting here writing a blog post.
Because I have no way to contact the matchmaker, no way to contact my date, not even a way to contact my family.
Back when smartphones first came out, I naturally memorized my family's phone numbers. But after everyone's number changed two or three times, it's been a year or two since I let that habit go.
OK, I'll just log into KakaoTalk from my PC... but when I tried, the PC version asks for an ID and password.
"Ah - did KakaoTalk have an ID? A password? Was there a password? I feel like I've always just used Face ID and a pattern unlock..." I tried logging in with my Daum ID one after another, but failed.
Eventually I went to the "find ID and password" flow. There are three options, but essentially it's either verifying via phone number or via Daum mail.
I clicked phone verification first, but my Yesu doesn't respond. Why isn't it receiving? I left a 1-to-1 inquiry with the carrier, but no reply. And so, KakaoTalk login failed.
For Daum mail, I'd set up 2-factor authentication, so login is impossible. I'd have to verify from my old phone, but that one can't be unlocked. Yesu of course has no app to receive the 2FA code.
Around this point, this herbivore-type man who's just entered his forties - for the record, my birthday hasn't even passed yet - started thinking a lot.
First,
I started thinking: "Oh, so this is what a digital colony life looks like."
In a digital-colony world, refusing to live analog is basically volunteering to be a stranger. An analog life isn't simply a matter of attitude. It was isolation.
At some point, KakaoTalk - like email - filled up with spam and started to feel like a burden. So I was cutting back on using it. With Facebook, after their last security incident they kept telling me to change my password, and after two or three changes, every time I log in I end up resetting the password. Most of the time it's auto-login, of course. Same with Instagram.
Not doing KakaoTalk, Facebook, and Instagram. No - being in a state where you can't use them - is more than just disconnection. It creates a situation where it's as if the disconnection with those around you never existed in the first place. Like a colleague or family member who lives and talks and eats with you but lives in a completely different world depending on which services they use, whether KakaoTalk, Facebook, and Instagram apps are on your smartphone or not plays out as a radically different situation.
Maybe because I do planning work... words like "frame" and "template" come to mind. In everyday language, it's probably something like "lifestyle." And as everyone knows, humans make tools (templates or lifestyles) and tools in turn make humans. The categories where everyone can agree are probably things like common sense, culture, morality, and human dignity. To bring it closer to daily life: conversational etiquette becomes text-message etiquette. Text-message etiquette becomes KakaoTalk and Instagram etiquette. Recently it's spreading even to things beyond the sender's message - the receiver's timing (the state of their device, whether the app is installed*) is included too. - My situation right now falls into this. A delay in receiving a message because someone doesn't fully understand KakaoTalk and its usage environment can be judged by the other person as a discourteous attitude. For an elementary schooler it can be data; for an influencer it can be a video tool. You can often see the comments on a YouTube live stream turn quite aggressive when there's a delay or sound issue. They say no comments is scarier than bad comments, but of course viewers leaving outright is even scarier. In the hardware infrastructure and in the ways we use it, a lifestyle - a so-called frame - exists.-
And on top of that, one more issue gets layered on. In the past, voice conversations, phone calls, and text messages were mass-communication channels in which nearly everyone participated. - These days,it seems like KakaoTalk, Facebook, and Instagram are also mass-communication channels. And I've just been kicked out of them - The templates of the lifestyle I mentioned earlier are diversifying and localizing, much like a market's long tail. No - they already have, and they're getting tighter because of digital tools. On the SNS that teens mostly use, a lifestyle of their own is being refined; services mainly used in China, Europe, or Korea each refine their own lifestyle in their own way.
Quantitatively (or physically), we still form nations and regions, but qualitatively (or in state, substantively? cognitively), we're shifting into a fragmented state. Of course, what's different from the past (Spring and Autumn Warring States, or democracy vs. communism) is that the conflicts between each fragmented style are triggered not by "good traits" (or preferences) but by "bad traits" (minimum common sense) *(To put it more concretely, in terms of lifestyle: it's not preference criteria like "I'd like them to be pretty, hardworking, healthy..." but minimum criteria like "they have to at least be taller than me, or I want them a little shorter than me...") that's what's happening.
The next thought that came to me,
Was the more direct, subjective, personal realization: "If I die like this, it becomes a lonely death."
It's been about 52 hours since I dropped my phone. In that time I've received delivery-start and delivery-complete text messages. And faintly, the sound of someone leaving a package at my door. Plus a few loan calls delivered by robo-voice and some stock-tip texts.
And those two thoughts made me ask: Is my life right now adapting, or is it depending?
