If you’re not interested in astrology, bear with me for a minute.
Astrologically speaking, Mercury is currently retrograde. This means that from our vantage, it appears to be moving backward through the skies. Mercury is the planet of communication and technology, and during these phases, astrologers advise double-checking your emails and travel plans, and being more conscious of how you speak to others and how you listen to and read others’ words.
Mercury went retrograde on March 15. Three days in, the morning of March 18, my mobile phone started rebooting itself over and over. It was a Pixel 6a, a few years old, and many of my past Android devices have kicked off their death processes with the dreaded boot loop, so I began making plans for its demise.
I was born with Mercury in retrograde, and I sometimes have this internal debate over whether this makes Mercury-retrograde periods easier on me than on others (with the occasional minor crisis, like this one), or if it just puts me in some kind of perpetual, low-grade communication/technology miasma. The jury’s still out, but I did manage to hardlock my laptop by connecting a game controller a day or two after my phone started glitching.
D. managed to get my 6a out of the loop by putting it in airplane mode, but that evening, while we were trying to manually back up my photos, its touchscreen began reacting erratically and, while we were both in another room, my phone spontaneously blared an alarm and called 911.
My phone was literally calling for help! All the same, I’m grateful the local dispatchers didn’t send an ambulance to the house.
I ordered a new phone the next morning. While I waited for it to arrive, I thought a bit about phones as conscious beings; the hardware as the body, and the software, apps and all of our personal touches as the soul. I’m someone who strives toward animism, the idea that everything — plants, stones, clothes, coffee mugs — has a soul, or some kind of independent consciousness. I often imagine, for example, what the pebbles and gravel in our roads and freeways think about; how they feel about their current circumstances, and what they remember about their lives before they were turned into pavement.
Our phones are made of so many disparate materials. In mine, the aluminum housing is made from recycled aluminum, but the original ore is mined in Eurasia. The glass screen is made of sand, soda ash and limestone, abundant materials that have been with us for millennia, if not predating humans entirely. The silicon in the chips is forged from sand and quartz.
And then there are the rarer ingredients. Indium gives touchscreens their ability to respond to your fingertips; tantalum prevents internal components from corroding; yttrium and others make phone screens more vibrant and luminescent. The batteries run on lithium and cobalt, while other components glitter with gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
What is the consciousness in each of these components? What souls do they carry?
Over the weekend, I heard a talk by New Zealand artist and author Charlotte Rogers, whose animism embraces the idea that objects contain not only consciousness, but memory. I brought up the disparate elements in mobile phones, and she remarked on the fact that many of those elements are mined unethically, without respect for the earth or the miners, some of whom are children. She asked: If these components have the capacity to remember, what do they remember about the process of being extracted in this way, and what does it mean for us to hold such an object in our hands, or press it to our ears?
Look, even if you don’t believe in animism, it’s an interesting mental exercise. Give it a try.
When my new phone arrived, I was able to copy everything from the 6a onto it, connected by a USB cable like an umbilical cord or blood transfusion, soul moving into a new body. I factory-reset the 6a and sent it back to Google to be refurbished and, perhaps, reincarnated with a new buyer. I hope whatever frightened it — whatever caused it to reboot, glitch, and call for help — is over now.