If you have an iPhone, you may be reading this with an app. A newspaper? Made of paper? Go and suck an arrow and protest against feudalism by dying of plague, Luddite. No. I, iPhone person, am superior. I am having a virtual bath before going on a virtual walk and maybe, eventually, hopefully, realising I am segueing into a virtual person. Look. Your despised human form is melting. You are a puddle held together by a pixel. Get thee gone, avatar!
It was bad when people just had mobile telephones. "I am in Surbiton," someone would scream into the handset, as you sat on the train, innocently reading Hate magazine. "Now I am in Berrylands." It was like watching the world's most boring episode of Poirot. Would they make it to Clapham Junction or would they alight at New Malden? Would the Nokia explode and leave a man with half a face loitering in the car park at Wimbledon Chase, jabbering into the telephone with the half that remained? Who knew? Who cared?
But that was only, as we say in apocalypse-speak, the beginning. Now, we have the iPhone and, since Christmas has come, burped its contempt and gone, many more former humans are infected. They are easy to spot and easy to pity. They have a rectangular wound in their hand. They cannot look up, or down, or in your eyes – they look only at the wound. They seem confused – sometimes happy and giggling, sometimes withdrawn and empty. It is as if Steve Jobs™ has kidnapped them, implanted something terrible, and returned them – as iZombies.
It is not the phone itself that I object to, even though its name suggests that if you do not own one, you do not deserve the personal pronoun. It is its monstrous conjoined twin, the app. The word "app" – not so much a word as a flat, bored grunt – is a clue to where we are headed with the Apple that is not an apple (although, if you want an apple but can't be bothered to get an apple, have a picture of an apple! For more cash we will include the smell of an apple! Hungry, you say? Eat your face).
Customers, you see – actually, I prefer the word hostages – cannot be bothered to say "application". That is three syllables too far for the avatars. They have better things to do with their time – like having a virtual pint with iBeer. (Hilarious if you are six years old or, because you are a software designer, other people have only ever been a fascinating but terrifying idea to you.) Not drinking? Have an iMilk. It's the same, but it's milk. Except it isn't.
In labour, trying to squeeze a baby out? Try the Birth Buddy app – it will help you track the frequency of your labour contractions. "I can't remember anything about the moment I brought you into the world, child, because I was playing with my iPhone." "I hate you, Mum." (This sentiment was brought to you by iPhone.)
Want to fart, but can't? iFart will fart for you. "Set your phone on a flat surface. The next time the phone is moved, it will fart." Is this where science has brought us? To a farting telephone in a joke shop world?
Can't be bothered to smile? Crazy Mouth will smile for you – hold the telephone up to your face, and a murderous smile will appear. Want to experience virtual condensation on your telephone? Yes – there is an app. Of course there is. There is even an app where you have to press a virtual button for as long as you can bear it. I know that some poor soul will spend its entire life pushing this button that is not a button to win a competition that has no prize.
You will say that there are other, better apps. Useful apps, such as one I have just invented. It is called Panic! and it tells you when, where and for how long to have a panic attack. It links to shrinks in your area and it rates those shrinks: "This shrink yawned. This shrink fell asleep. This shrink smelt of cat." It has a choose-your-own-mantra option. It tells you when your parents – or other psychological threats – are approaching.
But still the apps meddle with the ordinary processes of life. Do you really never want to get lost again because you can't, because your app always knows where you are? Do you never want to look up and down the street for a restaurant? (A bourgeois desire, I know, but still stolen, because your app has chosen for you.)
There is even an app – how I wince, typing the noise – that stops you from telephoning people if you are drunk. This is a deadly app, because drunk dialling is a necessary phase in the recovery from alcoholism. People hate you because you drunk- dial and spout nonsense, like a vomiting thesaurus. And so you stop drinking – unless your app colludes. This I call the death app. And there are many more.
Someone once told me that the larger my fantasy life, the smaller my real one would be. It was good advice, and I give it to you. The larger your iLife, the smaller your real one. Could it be, you are only an absence now?