I have a new phone, a nexus 5. It’s the best phone I’ve had so far. When I look at it I’m ashamed: of its perfection, and of my limitations.

My phone can do things now, that I don’t quite understand, and that I probably cannot really integrate into my life. Phones are so far ahead of us now, and moving forward so much faster than us, that it’s become clear that we won’t be able to catch up.

My phone has such great potential, that it would be a crime for me not to use it. My comings and goings, my messages, the pictures I take, the apps I install matter only because they feed my phone and its brethren everyday. I’m the true energy of my phone.

It is not the case that I could just throw away my phone. Because a/ I just bought it, and b/ this would be such a total withdrawal from the world, a social suicide worthy of the Fathers of the Desert. Society can’t exist without today’s phones and machines, whereas it can certainly exist without me. Thus is it their world, the world of the machines, rather than ours.

I’m nearsighted. I need to wear, all the time, two panes of glass in front of my face to see anything and function in life. A machine could fix me in a few minutes, cutting with perfect precision into my cornea. I’m ashamed to have to request this service of it. I’d rather continue to wear glasses. But this is really the full extent of my opposition. I understand it’s an original sin: at birth, I was imperfect, whereas my phone was perfect from the first instant.

In this context, the whole separation between man and animal doesn’t mean much anymore, at least not in practice. Man, Ape, Dolphin, Rat, it’s a continuum. Man can readily concede them rights, it’s such a pyrrhic victory for the animals: man just joined them. The border now truly runs between the Living and the Machines, and it’s quite tempting to try to break away from humanity altogether and join, from a moral standpoint, the machines: who wants to be with the loosers? This flight from humanity, it’s an effort that has been going on for some time, at the production lines at Ford, when man tried to disown nature, raped the North pole, conquered the Pacific with oars, tried various other experiments to bring his body “to the limit”. And when the limit was reached, man pushed the boundary, raped himself and took substances allowing him to run at the speed… of a remote controlled toy car.

One might object that my brand new phone will be obsolete in 2 years. But that would be a mistake. Think about GCHQ, coming down to The Guardian’s headquarters to smash a computer to pieces so as to destroy the documents in it. Copies existed on other machines of course, and they did not destroy anything, it’s just a farce: the machines have a flexibility that our minds and, certainly, our institutions lack. In two years my phone will be reborn as a new model, an extension of itself in the future, because it embodies an idea which engineers or, perhaps, other machines conceived. But I am not an idea, I am flesh and blood, I drink too much and don’t exercise nearly enough, I will not be reincarnated. I can at most be prolonged somewhat, and that only, how ironic, if I’m transformed, at least a little bit, into a machine: a titanium hip here, an artificial heart there… But all is not lost, for the immortality that my phone already attained, maybe some day I’ll get access to it, when my organs will be grown in the lab and when I’ll be able to use these spare parts of myself.

I just hope I get a SIM card: I’ll upgrade myself, and try to mingle with the phones.