How I Came to Drown, Smash, and Kill My Smartphone
It’s not like it was implanted in my head. Right?
By Anna L. Davis
The reality of my fiction haunts me.
I wrote it under a self-induced spell. Published my first novel in 2016. Cyberpunk sci-fi horror, or so I branded it. Hackable biotech. Neural implants, thoughts and behavior subjected to the whims of a misguided, technocratic cult leader. In my fiction, of course.
I wrote in coffee shops, the library, the park, at home. I’d write horrific things, pick up my kids from school, go to concerts and sporting events, make dinner. Raise a family. Be present. Try and fail to tame my own tech addiction, holding on to the last remnants of sanity.
I drowned my smartphone in the late summer of 2017.
Photos from our family mission trip to Belize were on there. Memories I can’t ever retrieve because I so effectively submerged my phone in a cup of water on the kitchen counter to make a point. I wasn’t tied to the tech. I could let it go. Sure, I was manic and paranoid, but I also wanted to prove that I could live without it. Not like it was implanted in my head, right?
After the death of my smartphone I switched to a flip phone. Old school. Fewer triggers — not as hackable. My world became smaller. Words took longer to type, I couldn’t access email, I couldn’t do much of anything besides basic one-on-one calls and quick texts. Life went on around me and I began to feel left out and archaic.
Illustration by Kim Meeker
So eventually I yielded and got another smartphone.
I walked around town boldly logging into public wi-fi and using Bluetooth, just for the hell of it. To show my paranoia who was boss. Nevermind that I still figured someone was always hacking me. That’s the thing about writing near-future sci-fi about hijacked brain implants — my thoughts always go to the worst case scenario.
I’d made a good show of this denial until a manic episode led to a sleepless night in the emergency room. Anti-anxiety meds didn’t work and I became increasingly agitated. Who can sleep in a busy ER under bright lights and surrounded by the noise of people in crisis? Clearly not me.
Deep into the night, the on-call psychiatrist recommended voluntary in-patient psych care. I won’t go, I said. You can’t make me go against my will, I said. I’ll just call someone and get out of here, I said. I rushed toward the exit and into the fresh air, logging into my newish phone.
Shadowed by a security guard, I triggered the automatic sliding doors and stepped into the ambulance bay. I’d made it several yards when the guard tried to take my phone from me. He probably just wanted to help, but in my state this was everything the free-press anti-surveillance activists warned me about. Like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and Barrett Brown. Like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU.
If I couldn’t have my phone, nobody else could. So I smashed it against a wall to keep it from the security guard. Not to hurt anyone. Just the phone — I only wanted to kill the phone before anyone could access it.
Thus I found myself under a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, which to me sounds somewhat sensationalistic, as if I’m a dangerous badass or criminal. It feels empowering to think of it this way. Writers need street cred and I was earning my stripes.
Since then I’ve been on a path to recovery, thank God. I use my phone for almost everything these days. Assimilating. Surrendering.
But it’s very much like I said. I’m still haunted by the reality of my fiction. I’m exactly the type of patient a neural implant would cure.
Neural implants are already in use for obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, paralysis. Why not bipolar? Never mind that I wrote an entire 95,000-word book about the dangers of it, along with the rest of the series that I’ve partially published. Never mind that my smartphone itself is practically like a neural implant, recording my thoughts on a daily basis.
I’m not enslaved. Not me. I’d never allow it.
Would I?
Anna L. Davis is the author of the Enhancement Series (Open Source, Ten Digit PIN), cyberpunk sci-fi horror featuring human augmentation, brain implants, and twisted hackers. Anna has a Bachelor of Science in biology from the University of Texas at Dallas and experience in medical editing. She lives outside of Dallas with her husband and an array of farm animals, in growing acceptance of the fact that she’s probably a cyborg.