Footage went viral of a young woman suffering a meltdown, on a train, after her phone dies. It looks like it might be just another amusing YouTube tantrum, at first, but her anguish is so extreme as to be immediately troubling.
Perhaps it’s because she is “all of us”, writes Chris Matyszczyk: addicted to the magic box and increasingly unable to look away.
I defy anyone whose phone has suddenly died to claim that they haven’t felt like this woman, if not expressed themselves exactly as she did.
The video was shot on the Hong Kong subway, the MTR. My contacts in Hong Kong tell me that she simply wails over and over again that her phone has died.
I replaced my smartphone with a basic dumbphone recently. And I let that run out of charge about a week ago, because it turns out I don’t actually need a phone. I had a pocket portal to all human knowledge and Twitter. It’s genuinely difficult to not have that anymore, and it doesn’t feel like an achievement to have quit. The moments where I would compulsively whip out my iPhone to “check” it have become these weird glitch-in-the-matrix reveries, where the mind spins briefly in search of a missing gear.