#5 : in 337 days, I’m giving up my smartphone…
AN IDIOT AND A BUTT-NAKED MAN
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Once upon a time, there was an emperor who loved nothing more than having new clothes, made from the finest fabrics by the most skilled weavers. This emperor spent his days changing outfits, always looking for something new to wear so he could strut before his amazed subjects. “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a fairy tale by Andersen from 1837, begins this way.
Then a pair of merchants enters the scene—dishonest characters who fully understood what a man’s vanity can do to his critical judgment. They assure the Emperor that they are capable of weaving a garment from a fabric that is not only magnificent but also truly magical: the fabric remains invisible to the eyes of fools and the incompetent. If you are a competent person, then the fabric will appear to you in all its splendor; if, however, you are incompetent, it will be simply impossible for you to catch a glimpse of it.
The Emperor’s ministers and trusted advisors all go to see what the merchants are weaving on their loom—that is to say, as I imagine you’ve already figured out,
absolutely nothing. There is no fabric. No magnificent cloth. No, there is nothing at all.
But since everyone around the Emperor believes that admitting they see nothing would reveal their incompetence, they rave about the beauty of the fabric that does not exist.
Photo de Ashim D’Silvasur Unsplash
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is the story of smartphones: we all know that smartphones don’t do us any good, but we don’t dare say it loud and clear. We’re bound to one another by an open secret, by our shared fear of being mocked, or of no longer being invited to court. So we say nothing. Only our inner voice sometimes whispers that, for one thing, I don’t think there’s any fabric there at all, and that, well, the phone—which was supposed to be filled with friends and wonderful people—is as empty as the weavers’ loom. And even worse than empty: it strips us bare instead of dressing us up.
Because—do you remember the Emperor who loved to parade before his subjects to strut about in his new clothes? Well, what do you think happened to him?
He put on his finest nonexistent clothes, woven from the most invisible of fabrics, for a procession in front of the entire country and… paraded around
bare-assed, buttocks exposed, in Adam’s costume, with a crown on his head and his jewels on full display.
Among the onlookers who had come to watch the procession but hadn’t expected to see so much, no one dared say a word. This 1837 tale, as well as modern behavioral psychology (namely Solomon Asch’s famous study on conformity), teaches us that expressing and holding an opinion contrary to the group’s is hard—very hard. So much so that we easily fall in line with the unanimous opinion even if it’s obviously false—saying that the Emperor is wearing clothes when everyone else has said so before us, for example. The good news is that it only takes one person, a single ally, to break this social conformity and shatter the spell.
And as luck would have it, in the crowd watching His Nakedness Majesty, there’s a child who simply says:
Hey, but the Emperor’s completely naked!
And suddenly, everyone says to themselves and others, “Oh, no, it wasn’t just me—no, the Emperor really is bare-assed.”
I think it’s time to wake up and say, “Wait a minute—aren’t these smartphones we all have actually bad for us?”
To that end, I’m willing to offer myself up, humbly, like an innocent child. I’m willing to be the “idiot” in the etymological sense—the village idiot—and say that these devices are bad for us: for each of us, for us as a species, for humanity, for the future! And perhaps these words will spread like wildfire, and all of us idiots that we are will whisper them before finding the courage to shout them loud and clear:
Hey, Emperor, your butt is showing!
Let’s be idiots, let’s change the world one naive truth at a time, let’s write books and articles by idiots, organize conferences of idiots, put on parades of idiots, shouting: “Hey! The cellphone is hurting us!”
And if a march of the idiots gets organized, let me know—I’ll be right up front.
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Translation of the text by Deepl.com and her author