When I was a freshman in college, I frequently found myself in the worst kind of conversation possible, or so it seemed to me at the time. Say you have a cow. Say you cut off part of the cow. Is it still a cow? Why is it the case that pudding is still pudding no matter how much pudding there is left, and the same is true for milk and any kind of oil, but then also, that the cow seems different?

All of these are interesting questions to consider, and murderous questions to debate, particularly when young, and particularly when you go to a school where the professor’s favorite move is to sit back, steeple the hands, smile, and let you and the other freshmen go at it. In many classrooms, someone would have stepped in to answer your question definitively. One possibility, for instance, is that there’s no difference in any of these examples other than degree: each thing listed is an arbitrary grouping of smaller pieces. Your sense that a dismembered cow is not itself represents a certain kind of metaphysical sentimentality. At a different sort of school, someone else might tell you that the cow is an immutable essence straight from the mind of God, which, while not wrong necessarily, is easily troubled by a quick look at a Stetson breed website, promising the latest in convenience traits in a thick-built package.

Eric Pickersgill, Jamie, Jodi, and Aiden, from the series Removed. All photographs by Eric Pickersgill. Used by permission.

On the whole, as maddening as it was, it was better for me to be left in the indeterminate middle ontological distance without resolution. Most of all, I think my most important impression from these moments was that I would very much prefer it if we would stop talking about cutting up cows indiscriminately.

Flash forward to now, when every teacher I know carries the memory of the apocalyptic spring semester, where large language model (LLM) usage reached something like 90 percent critical mass, while gearing up to do it all again in the fall. What’s the difference between a thought you have, and a thought a machine cobbled together in imitation of thousands? To muster a response, I propose to face down the animal that is currently more entrenched: the smartphone.

It’s been phenomenologically obvious for quite some time that smartphone usage is bad for humans of all ages, particularly children, but also that the rest of us are not immune. Last fall, I had a student who wanted to read Ted Kaczynski in political philosophy class, because the idea that you could burn the entire world seemed more practically possible to him than the satisfaction of simply taking a sweet steel hammer to his phone.

It’s harder to make the case for abandoning AI in education and life when we’re also all holding smartphones. No doubt my philosophy pals could give a very literate explanation of what we miss when the lights and digital buttons and avatars distract us, with themes from Heidegger and so on. But the sort of basic falsity of the online world we access through the phones is making our lives and our arguments duller as we form our attack on the bigger thing, on what stands to render most university degrees meaningless, soon.

An LLM strikes me as an absolute evil, within my own field; even seeing little snippets of it feels like being covered in green slime. But the smartphone is the thing that was supposed to be a little good, a little bad, something that could plausibly stand as a necessary evil. I’m now convinced that that’s wrong, and I think it will help the larger problem to consider the smaller one first, since that’s the one each of us as individuals can do something about, now, today. In one recent description of what it was like to travel with a group to Peru without smartphones, as a pact, one woman spoke enthusiastically of “presence, pure presence.” If you have had a smartphone for several years, the chances are that moments like this are from ever-more-distant memory, not recent unlettered experience, no matter how well you can still philosophically explain them.

That’s a problem, and if you know me in person, yes I mean you too, and also I mean me as well. So, if you are concerned about LLMs, let me propose it’s time to give up the damn phone, too. You know some of the reasons already – their addictivity, antisociality, and more – but we keep making the choice to pick them up anyway (at a low average of 170 times a day).

In so doing, we are continually consenting to live in a smaller metaphysical universe, via a smaller stream of memory and sense. Why? Because it is easier, the alternative seems scary, and we’ve forgotten the difference. At times the phone has the imagined glamor of a cigarette we pick up to avoid the awkwardness of other people, and also, we not so secretly despair of recovering, thinking perhaps that alas, our brains are gone forever. To put this another way, I think we have a cow problem.

What do we see when we look at a cow? We see, almost blandly, one thing: a cow. Nothing so obvious as a cow. But this is usually the problem with being: our experience of it is rich but it hides itself in things; being itself hides itself in the hanging-together of each thing that we touch, taste, and see, and these are what we see at first, rather than being as such.

Eric Pickersgill, Mom and Dad, from the series Removed.

That the presence of the unity of each thing is so persistent is why we’re tempted to write it off as mere essence. The hiddenness of the unity within its blistering apparentness, the way this gives over into boredom with things, is why it seems sophistication to insist on the arbitrary character of its wholeness. Don’t make a thing out of it, we say, unaware that we are discussing the very stuff of being.

By contrast, what you interact with on the phone are nodes: each app is a node, each avatar a node, each data point that adds up into fun points you get for doing something stupid is a point, a node, a version of a single thing. A node is a somewhat debased sort of unity, derived in part from the way the mathematical reduction of being works, to take the unity of things and make of them a series of units. A node abstracts further; cow parts that go bloodlessly in any order you choose.

This February, I finally took the SIM card out of my smartphone, and managed to set up one of the prettier “dumb” phones, an aesthetic marvel with almost zero features that I purchased with grand intentions back in 2020. In the years since my first cellphone in 2005, a flip phone, and first Apple phone in 2008, I’ve gone back and forth between flip and Apple a few times, giving up the Apple for a few years when I realized I couldn’t drive home in a city I’d lived in for years without it, then going back to the fancier one when I wanted to make it to a state on the other side of the continent, and back. Practical reasons all.

But after a move to Manhattan, I had a choice, and I made the wrong one. Would I immerse myself in the city as it presented itself to me, lovable rats, unlovable dog excrement, and all, or would I fall back on the digital patterns I knew, and essentially continue to live there, instead? I chose the latter, and it’s taken me six and a half more years to change back.

Here’s what happened next. See if it sounds familiar.

When you first put it down, really fully get rid of it I mean, because, as you will learn, it’s not over when you switch the SIM – you will have to lock it in a lock box, or throw it away, or ask a friend to put it in a drawer in her own far distant house – it’s not just that you are going to be bored. As you will learn, inconvenience is the least of your troubles. What is going to happen is that you are going to be anxious out of your skull: you haven’t spent time in being-there rather than its image, in like, forever, and every small thing, the grossest boring thing you have at your house, will take on that lurid significance of the nightmare you were avoiding.

At first, you won’t be able to sit. In nervous motion, the absent phone will seem like the concatenation of all possibilities in all the world, exactly all the things you will, not might, but will be missing if you don’t figure out how to take another look, just a small one. You’ll stare at the dumb phone like it is the dumbness of bricks, a window painted over. Oh, how could one small look hurt you! And the funny thing is, when you jump up and look in through another mechanical window, immediately you’ll be able to tell it wasn’t that, exactly, but the phone itself that you crave. But logging on to the computer won’t satisfy the sharpness of that desire. After twenty minutes or so in this anxious state, you won’t be able fully to remember what the worst moments of phone were like. But gather a recollection: that feeling of overuse, the mixture of fire in the skull and a strange kind of intellectual dehydration, a wish to cycle and cycle and loop and loop through the nodes, till you get to the one sad or gross enough to give you a slightly longer break, and then forgetting, maybe you’ll reach for it again, and experience fog, like the static of old-time TV. This you forgot, so you picked it up again, then put it down, and this time you are sick, and this time is why you took out the SIM for good.

The reason why you scrolled is that each single node was insufficient.

It wasn’t a one, it wasn’t a thing, it was easier than a one or a thing, and smaller, more petite, with its own fake inner glow, each fake-one seemed to come with less and less cost to you; but each node’s presence lasted less and less long, filling you with more and more hunger each time you came to the end of its artificial presence. Moving so quickly between nodes felt like intelligence, the speed, you flattered yourself, of thought. But you knew! You knew those vaudeville-arrow carnival-lights you were pushing around with your thumb were not the substance of thought, and that indeed, the lights said as much each time, announcing with a grin their lack of being. It was salt water that you drank.

For many years now, I’ve had a recurring dream where just before moving out of a too-small apartment, I remember one, two, three more rooms that have been there all along; sometimes there’s even a whole other set of rooms down a long passageway in the back. The realization that they could make the whole apartment livable in a way I’d simply overlooked is always mixed with the sense of je ne sais quoi – must I still move, or is it possible to stay? Or could I somehow inhabit both?

This dream is about moving apartments, but it’s also about the soul. The experience of living in the phone, and through the phone, is bad enough, and shameful enough, on its own. But I think now that the phone also had me living in only part of my house, in less than half of the space provided by God; and the act of living now is different, for it is an act of recollection.

Say you’re on the subway. Say you don’t have a phone, and there’s nothing to do on the subway but sit, sleep, magazine, observe, watch. The empty space in between the people, trapped there in the small car with you underground, is newly large and newly impossible – will someone speak? – but no one is paying attention. Everyone is on their phone. Look at their faces: they’re all convinced that what they are seeing is something real, there in the flickering glow. While you watch them, small stories play themselves out – one teen’s smiles for her phone and scorn for me turned to face-falling envy, twenty minutes later, for the carefree teen tourists from France. The only ones aware with you are children – the ones who lack a phone, that is – an old woman maybe, the face of someone very tired or very sad.

The subway is truly no man’s land, where you are finally really adrift, in between spaces, no email in sight, nothing to break the presence that is always there, even in the most unlovely circumstances. Say what you will about rats, at least they’re paying attention.

Eric Pickersgill, from the series Removed.

After anxiety breaks, there is a slight sense of being displaced. Then across the mind there comes a certain sort of wind, not an emotion, but a definite sensation, long and thin, flat, and moving across, not cooling in temperature, at first, but curling across like a long and narrow cloud. For a while a few of these come and go. And then, at length, there is a sensation like a large aquarium filling, like a marzipan windowpane headache, not dull but specific, and very specifically like something in reverse. If you hold on to the reverse headache long enough, for several hours, then come the high notes, like a more refined sugar, and finally there is a space in the center, but not of emptiness; there is a sense of several things present, connected across each other, but each connection as a possibility that could lead to something else entirely. And finally, at the last, there is a sense of the self as through-line again, its own backbone; and then there becomes the possibility of looking between the lattice work; the exoskeleton slips.

If at this moment you pick up the phone again, you’re lost, worse static than before. The muscles in your hand have a crook where you are used to holding it. Can you keep it face down, keep it lying there? Other people are in it; and yet, they really, really are not.

All that I describe is a single day, played out again each time I walked away from the computer again, wind stronger, more marzipan, more sense of peering through some structure half built, more fog when interrupted. At night I went to sleep, and during the day I read, for work and for myself, awareness spooling out over a frameless space, each new sentence pure possibility delimited by each new word on the page, the light from the café window, and the flood of ever-more-vivid images of the past. Soon it wasn’t that I was bored, or anxious, although I often was; it was that the world was heavy with all the things I had forgotten, both an undiscovered country and somewhere I had been before.

Our memory saves itself when tied to something specific, something we smell or touch or see, and arrives back again by the same means. Walking down the street, eating fruit, dreaming of apples, I remembered so many things just by the briefest touch. What we have by force of recall may well be at our command, but memory unbidden often has more to say.

I so much wanted to tell all this to other people, but where had they gone? I could not remember how to find them. Most of them were too busy looking at their phones. Logging on via the large computer to join them there, the small fragments still available were after all so few, and so poor, so unmemorable.

Even in person, they were captured by something else: my host at dinner, bored with the conversation, would begin to scroll; I would be talking to someone and their phone dings, and we’d both know, neither one looking down, how much they wanted to break eye contact and look, like a western but sadder.

Then it was May, and I graded; and in my profession we all saw how things are – robot vomit, LLM slime, android piss, and all. No humanist was unaware of what the matter was. Previous semesters were bad but this one was the watershed. Real thoughts come straight from the center of the soul, straight from all its human senses, of which the soul is the heart, and the soul’s smallest question is the wellspring and arrow born of what we mundanely call its heart’s desire. No machine can do this, and while a machine, like in Roald Dahl’s 1953 story “The Great Automatic Grammatisator,” can imitate the aggregate of some of the cheaper five-paragraph examples of this, no machine can ever have a free thought freely sprung for you, of you; real thoughts begin outside in the world, then they go to the center of you, then come out again, apocalyptically, from you. If you’ve forgotten this, you’ve forgotten everything.

Say you have a cow, and a memory of a cow. And then you cut off the memory of the time the cow kicked you in the leg. Still floating on the chemtrails of recovered memory, it’s the cow talk, remembered, the sheer college boredom of it, that suddenly made the most sense to me of all. Lost in the cow weeds with a hundred other people I came to know too well, with, crucially, no way out, nothing but boredom and the cow; stuck not with answers but with the certainty that there was something to the wholeness of my thought about the cow, my sense of its presence, and my ability to attempt to explain it in God’s own logos, that was different in kind from stupid cow experiments that involved dynamite, farm shears, and very bad analogies.

Eric Pickersgill, Tanya and Addi, from the series Removed.

When bored in class my students get up and leave. They’re doing it to check their phones, obviously, but what I also noticed this spring was that it’s not just the ones already checked out who are getting up, but also the student I was talking to seconds before – someone who made an extra good point. The moment holds, we’re making eye contact, but only for a second – then the very person who just had the insight jumps up to walk out of the classroom going for that phone. Something tugged him away from his own best thought, so much so he left the room.

This has been happening for a while, but I finally put the pieces together when I noticed myself doing the same thing: thoughts arrange themselves with force and then something itches; I reach over, flip to a website in the middle of writing a sentence, and then forget not just what I saw, or that I saw something at all, but the possibility of sight. How many thoughts have my students lost that were meant to form their souls forever? Certainly no fewer than the ones I’ve had that are now lost in the node-stream.

While the android piss is bad and we must certainly do something about it, this ontological capture goes deeper. But it is also something we can immediately address. Have you ever given up alcohol for Lent? This is harder. But the choice is real, and it is staring your nose in the face.

It is perfectly possible to ditch the phone. While it’s still more practical, in one sense, to travel to work via and with your small computer, you do not have to, and there are manifold workarounds that you can and will learn, carefully, again. Get an alarm clock. The small notebooks you keep buying now have a use. Carry a pencil. Resolve to occasionally get lost. Get the number of the most reliable non-Uber taxi company where you are going, and save it in the dumb phone; the switchboard lady is going to love your call. The rest is planning ahead, printing things out, writing down the address for a friend, saying: I will meet you here at this time, and then walking out the door. Write down the thing you want to look up later; nothing trivial is worth breaking the chain of experience and memory, the slow build over hours. Make a plan which hours of the day you will look at the computer and which you will not. The first thing you should be looking for in the morning is the sky.

Of course, a machine that can break a resolution 170 times a day is going to leave a mark. These days I notice with more alarm, more regret, the sharp, small vanities and vinegar-pickling self-indulgence that are more a part of daily present life than I would have supposed. Looking at one’s self through the phone shapes the very planes of the face, the muscles built more and more around looking into a tiny space that is not another person’s eye. These habits of two decades, in all their unknown underbelly, are why the phone is a worse problem than AI in 2025. The phone is more a part of our souls at present than an LLM is part of the habits of the student who can’t write a paragraph in thirty minutes anymore. The good news is, we stand to recover more than most of us are capable of recalling. Remember the cow. It is boring, and in its bovine comfort, there is a world to win.

How does intelligence work? It works by the simple act of seeing, which begins in the senses, and stretches out over the joyous hum of all the things in the world, together. Every single thing you come across in the real world outweighs the entirety of anything you can see via artificial light, via debased and fictitious ontology. No cost-benefit analysis is possible if what we propose to trade is reality itself. And if you happen to suspect that at the back of this reality stands God himself, does not the falsity of what you hold start to outright burn your hand?

Everything in nature, art, the smallest, most cheerful rodent, the smokiest tunnel under the earth, it’s loud, and it’s calling your name. Please look at it. When you see it again, you will know. No tech is inevitable, everything we pick up with our hands is a choice. Take your hands off that stupid eschatology, and let the muscles in your hand hold the pen, learn to rest again, to see. How do we stop large language models from killing thought dead? When you join me in this world, we will start to be able to know.

Eric Pickersgill’s 2014 photography series Removed features portraits taken with a film camera of people in traditionally social settings who are isolated by their personal devices (although the devices have been removed from their hands for the photographs).