An App-solute Life
How I learned to hate my phone and love my wallet
App makers these days promise to simplify our days at a tap or swipe of the screen. If you want your clothes dry-cleaned, you download an app. If you want to call a cab, you download an app. If you want to call a doctor to your home, you download an app.
Now, whole chunks of our lives which may have been spent on annoying tasks and time-consuming hassles could be outsourced to these simple programs, each only needing a few megabytes of storage on our phones.
But could I live on apps alone? What would it be like to live on the IV drip of technology? To see if this was possible, I decided to spend an entire day without cash or any form of identification.
At first, I thought my challenge would be easy. I lived in New York, a metropolis considered at the cutting edge of technology in numerous key industries.
The city possessed its own knock-off of Silicon Valley, branded as Silicon Alley, perhaps a reference to the scarcity of office space in New York. In 2014 more than 100,000 workers were hired here in the tech sector , according to the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy think tank. If there was a city where I could get by with just a phone, New York would be it.
The easy solution to my test would, then, have been to hole myself up in my apartment over the entire day. But the idea was to see if normal life was possible with solely a phone. Would I become the technological equivalent of a man in a wheelchair, limited to performing only some activities unlike my wallet-in-the-pocket brethren?
So, I drew up a list of possible activities that would run the gamut of an average New Yorker’s day in a weekend, all of which I would simulate in my experiment. Making a visit to the museum, buying a cup of coffee, shopping for a pair of underwear, I wrote them all down. I took photos of all my identification cards and installed the apps I thought I would need for the day.
At the outset, I knew that public transportation was off-bounds. So, the immediate radius of my travels was now limited to a thirty-minute walk. It would have been unreasonable to expect someone other than a vagrant or a tourist to trek any further.
But knowing I could pay for my taxi journey with Way2Ride, a payments app for yellow cabs, I took a taxi to the Whitney Museum. Relying on taxis, however, as my sole method of transport would become prohibitively expensive, even on a good day without traffic.
Entering the museum, I presented the screenshots to the lady manning the admissions counter for free entry into the exhibition. Bemused by my attempts to thrust my phone over the counter, as if I were trying to pass off monopoly money as cash, she asked if I could present the physical card. As I quibbled over the validity of my particular form of ID with her, a younger staff member came to my rescue and said it was not a problem, and printed out a ticket.
Social norms mattered. Until everyone was used to the idea of showing identification through his or her phone, I would be left in the lurch. It was pointed that a younger person acknowledged my screenshot of a student card as an acceptable form of ID, while the more white-haired workers looked askance.
After a quick tour around the exhibition, I then left the museum to see what I could buy with my phone at shops in the West Village, an affluent residential neighborhood.
Many retailers and cafes around New York support mobile payment apps. But stuck with an Android phone, whole swathes of cafes and shops hooked to rival payments services like Apple Pay, were off-bounds. As a result, I spent an hour looking for a cafe supporting Android Pay to get my caffeine fix.
But with my frustration growing, I gave up and downloaded the Starbucks’ app, a payment service for Starbucks alone, to order coffee from , instead. It, then, slowly dawned on me that I had to download a new app for every activity I wanted to complete. I was signing away all my private information to dozens of companies, just to make my life that much easier. Though usually comfortable with every aspect of my behavior being monitored over the web like a zoo animal, even this prospect was too extreme for my liking.
Now I was hungry, but I could not eat. I did not know of any restaurants which allowed payment by phone. And I didn’t like the idea of surviving on almond biscotti or overpriced bananas from Starbucks to get me through the afternoon. Luckily, I had scheduled a meeting for lunch with a friend, who I could pay back with Venmo, an app which allowed me to share payments with known contacts.
Without knowing, I had taken a back-door route to my challenge, which tested my ability to survive on a phone alone. Using a friend to bypass the inconvenience of having to get by with my phone, I realized, was cheating.
The day was drawing to a close, and my phone was nearly out of battery.
We have grown so dependent on these slabs of metal and circuitry to run smoothly that when they start to run out of juice, we suffer a minor panic attack. And my specially constructed scenario had compounded these emotions tenfold.
Knowing I had no wallet and that I was stranded in Downtown miles away from my apartment, I broke down. I could not rely on my phone for the cab ride home. There was a good chance my phone could have run out of battery by the time I arrived at my destination.
Encountering each new obstacle to my challenge felt as if a new car was flinging itself onto a multi-vehicle pileup.
But in my panic, I had forgotten that I had slipped a few twenty dollar notes in my back-pocket for such a contingency. Putting my hands in my pocket for warmth, my fingers grazed the cash, and immense relief followed from that revelation. The dollar bills had been too slim and light for me to notice.
On the cab ride back home, I tried to sum up my thoughts. For all the ease and convenience of phones, they could not replace our wallets. In time, technology would surely advance to the point that even cash would be rendered pointless.
But for now, cold cash in its simplicity and reliability was the ultimate killer app.
