Rilla’s iPhone continues to ensure that I feel like we all live in the future. Having just watched that TED talk about Bing maps we headed out to a friend’s house in Amagerbro here in Copenhagen. This meant we did all kinds of insane technological things that are just par for the course these days.

We looked at a map of the area on Google Maps and got directions, figured out it was easier to walk than metro. Saw there was a Føtex on the way so that we could buy some drinks to take with us. Looked at the satellite view to try to understand why a particular area wasn’t walkable (cemetary, as it turns out).

Then, of course, we set out with the iPhone and saw ourselves as a little, illuminated jewel floating down the abstract shapes of the roads. We walked along the purple line the maps app had drawn for us to follow, all the way to the supermarket and then ours friends’ front door.

Part of me wants to say this is all kind of trivial and obvious these days, but other parts of me are still in some kind of psychic shock. The level at which we operate with our technology is just so completely ridiculous compared to just a few years earlier. It’s not like we’re comparing it with even ten years ago. Everything is changing damned fast.

Can’t wait for that flying skateboard Michael J. Fox had in Back to the Future.

So, Rilla has an iPhone, obviously. Earlier today I needed to make a phone call, so I used the iPhone. And when I did punch in the number and start to use it like a phone, it felt really weird. Specifically, it felt a lot like I was holding the internet up to my head. I remember thinking that very distinctly. It felt like a very wrong way to be using that device. You shouldn’t be holding the internet to the side of your head like that, I thought.

Perhaps it’s just the thing of holding a big screen to the side of your face and thus not being able to see it? Or is it that the iPhone is such a device of many purposes that the specifics of it being a phone are sidelined?

Just spent some time playing Drop7 on Rilla’s iPhone. It’s one of those highly addictive games, much like Tetris. You ‘just’ drop numbered tiles and try to match numbers on tiles with numbers in rows and columns. And so it goes. Forever.

I certainly have an addictive personality when it comes to these sorts of games, and I did find myself getting lost in playing it. But, at the same time, I felt this weird feeling, almost a kind of low-level horror, at the endlessness of the game. The music looped away, I dropped tiles, and each time I cleared a row away I felt conflicted. Clearing rows meant keeping on clearing rows in the future. It was a Sisyphean task and I was the one kicking the boulder back down the hill!

I’m probably being over dramatic, but I was intrigued by that feeling of regret as I played, stuck in the feedback loop and knowing it.