A Paradox of Note

I have this strange obsession with fully charged batteries. There is just something about a phone being on 99% or lower that does not sit right with me and feels like a bit of a slippery slope to being stranded with a dead battery.

So I think that if you own an establishment like a club or bar or restaurant that people spend a lot of their time at, it is extremely important for you to factor the position and availability of power outlets into your overall design.

Even clothing stores and banks should join in on this and let us power up while we run errands.

I think this far into the new millennium, we as patrons and customers cannot continue to come to places and not be able to charge our phones.

I absolutely swear that it’s very high on the list of things that customers care about when leaving the house, aside from the availability of wifi, beer prices and who else is gonna be there.

A lot of the time, I honestly don’t care about anything other than being close to an outlet because I want to sit and work for a few hours and not have to worry about running out of power. Other times, my phone just happens to be close to dying, and I desperately want to prevent that. Either way, I think the option should be available to me.

My iPhone is newish so the battery actually lasts quite a while, but streaming and surfing are just not the same when you are uncertain of when you will be connected to a power source next.

As I type this column right now, I am sitting in Olivia’s Kitchen. My laptop and phone are usually both plugged in for most of the day and even when they aren’t, the dreaded battery-anxiety isn’t something that will plague me.

This actually got me thinking about our devices and the reliance we have on them. Why are we the way we are?

I mentioned in another column recently how Elon Musk explained to a crowd that we – those of us with privilege and adequate access to technology – are all technically cyborgs already due to the fact that we already have our phones as digital extensions of us.

A cyborg, in case you aren’t familiar, is a “person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements”, according to the Oxford dictionary.

Musk says that the only thing currently separating us from the half-human, half-robot characters we’ve seen in science fiction is the speed/rate of data input and output, but he adds that even that won’t be a problem for long as technology is constantly improving.

Meaning, as time goes by, we will be more and more augmented with the digital world. I mean, that is the whole mission of his company Neuralink (a discussion for another day), so it makes total sense that I should be able to always be fully charged at all times.

I’ve seen some improvements of course, it’s not all bad. Some places have these charging stations where you lock your phone inside and pay N$10 for like an hour of juice.

The people who own and run these machines are on the right track, but don’t seem to understand the potential they have to take over the world quite yet, or else these things would be literally all over Namibia.

On one hand and in the bigger scheme of things, I really worry about how deep down the tech rabbit hole we as a species will go, but on the other hand and right now in this moment, I just want my phone to never be flat.

I want to scroll down my for-you page, laugh at hashtags and binge-watch video essays as I see fit, and I don’t want to compromise on that. But I also don’t want to be overrun by technology.

Maybe it’s a consequence of being a 90s baby and remembering life before cellphones, but loving every bit of the advancements.

It just is what it is.

– Anne Hambuda is a poet, writer, social commentator. Email her at annehambuda@gmail.com for more.

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