February 2026

The Everything Device

The iPhone is widely thought to be distracting because it does everything, but is it genuinely good, distraction aside, to have one device that does it all? To have our attention hyper-localized? What does it do to our social fabric, but also, what does it do to our ecological self to be disconnected from many different sources of utility, information, and support?

A different way of thinking about this is as follows: If you were a god creating mankind, and you had two options—create five devices that together do everything, or create one device that does everything, which would be better?

With option 2, your ecological self becomes narrowed to a point. In other words, you’re less integrated in your environment, as more problems can be solved from your pocket, rather than relying on other resources, including other people. What is the consequence? A sense of becoming more empowered, or becoming smaller and more fragile?

It can be both, depending on the context. In the long run, the complete dependence on one object to get most things done, and the reduction of the rest of one’s environment to an alien landscape that, at best, one only engages with through the medium of that first device, seems precarious. It may increase the likelihood of conflict between atomized individuals who have little direct use for each other, each armed with their own god-wand. If the god-wand has its own aims or is responsive to some other force, it also increases the subordination of its user.

It's nice to leave the phone at home when going for walks. Perhaps it’s not guaranteed that having one device that does everything is a good thing, but what about the endless possibilities afforded by the everything-device? We think of possibility as a universal good, but when you have a device that does it all, it’s never just in your pocket. It’s constantly in your mind because you can always be doing something. Shutting it off doesn’t do the trick, and being out of service only partially works. You have to leave it behind. We know that standing in front of rows and rows of options in the grocery aisle leads to anxiety and decision paralysis. What about holding a device that was designed to be as irresistible as possible, which can do almost anything imaginable? Is it empowering, or debilitating?  

It again depends on the context, but to retain our agency, the context has to be something that we create for ourselves, not something created always by the device, its platforms, or its engineers, when the device’s presence is the default setting of our lives.

Language and Advertising

What are the long-term consequences of being referred to as an individual who is truly interchangeable in the eyes of the advertisers?

When you start looking for it, you’ll notice it everywhere. “You.” Not in the universal way that I’m using the word “you” now, which is the universal-you. When I say, “you’ll notice it everywhere,” the vast majority of people could be instantiated as “you.” When Dave sees an advertiser say, “Because you’re worth it,” (Dove) “Your escape starts now,” (Cinplex) or, “We’re here when you need us,” they are not speaking using the universal “you.” The point is that this term could not be instantiated by just anyone, the point is to speak to you Dave. The ad is successful if it is true for Dave, or made to seem so.

This is step one.

(1)   The advertisement intends to speak directly to an individual, as an individual.

It is not that anyone would do as a referent, as when I say, “you’ll notice it everywhere.” I’m not speaking to Dave as an individual, I’m not speaking to Obama, or Margaret Atwood either. I’m speaking to anyone (who is capable of noticing something). But what the advertisement is doing is they are attempting to speak to whomever connects with the ad as that person, as themselves.

Why is this troubling? Given step 2, which will sound like a direct contradiction of the previous paragraph.

(2) For the advertiser, anyone could be the individual whom the ad is attempting to reach as an individual.

This is not the same as my making a statement which I believe is true for everyone, like, “you need to drink water to survive.” That is true for everyone, or at least, every human. It is true for any individual who reads it, but it is not true for them as an individual; it is true for them as a member of a set – the set of humans who need water to survive, which is all humans.

When Allstate says, “you’re in good hands,” they are trying to connect to someone (1) as an individual, given their specific qualities of “needing to be in someone’s good hands,” but it is also true that (2) anyone will do. 

So, is this troubling?

I think a dissonance could occur in the mind of the person who is reading the advertisement, and it’d be interesting to see some empirical work that explores this dissonance. A potential research question could look like this:

What is it like (what’s the psychological impact) of being referred to as an individual, but as an individual who is truly fungible? Normally, that which is fungible—that which can be swapped out for any other thing—is necessarily non-individuated. A screw is fungible because any screw will do for holding two planks of wood together, provided it’s the right size. There are no cases where you need one one-of-a-kind individual screw to do the job. Screws are fungible, along with toothpicks, charging cables, face clothes, shoe laces, and most of the mundane utilities of existence. This speaks the reason why fungibility counts as one of Nussbaum’s criteria for objectification: while not all objects are fungible (you’re great-grandmother’s cast iron, a skeleton key that opens a safe), all fungible items are objects, because to have the capacity for subjectivity means that no other possesses your spatial-temporal perspective on the world, and your unique perceptual profile for experience. You are necessarily not interchangeable with any other (except to one whom does not recognize or does not value your subjectivity, e.g. one who likely objectifies you).

Usually, what it means to be individual is that you are specifically non-fungible. You might not be important. There are individual paintings that aren’t important to me because I don’t like them or because I’m just not an art enthusiast. But if they did matter to me, they would not be fungible. Toothpicks matter to me, screws matter to me—I need them both, but they are fungible.

To exist in the advertising landscape today, to be the object of an advertiser’s messaging, is to be a fungible individual. There is a disorientation that comes with this, a kind of “double consciousness.” If the ad speaks to you (and, I wager, even if it doesn’t speak or speaks very quietly to you), you think, “you understand me as me,” and then, simultaneously, “I could be anyone.” As with any recurring, systematic disorientation, especially those that are the function of man-made processes and institutions, it’s worth evaluating for being incidental-power functional.

It's not unlike the bot-girlfriend in Bladerunner 2, who, after it would have appeared that she formed a tight bond with the protagonist, when her subscription is cancelled, says, “thank you for using our services.” She treated him and connected to him as an individual, but anyone would have done. The same can be said of relationships formed with AI Chatbots, as has been on the rise.

The theoretical question is: can someone be a fungible individual, or does this always result in a double-consciousness? I assume, for reasons stated on the nature of fungibility and subjectivity above, that the answer to that question is no, and yes, it does. An empirical question, then, if I’m correct, is: “What are the consequences of being inundated with ads, on a several-times-a-day basis, which regard you as a fungible individual.

For some, they may say, “Look, you’re overreacting. Advertisements are just words on a two-dimensional surface or sounds emitted from a speaker. Just ignore them. No one is actually speaking to you.” This is true in a sense, but there is the intent of those who created the ads, and their intent is wrapped up in the attempt to speak to or create fungible individuals. Secondly, we know when we are being referred to as individuals. We can pluck our name out of a cacophony in a bus station or café. When someone asking for donations around the holidays says, “You there, spare some change?” we know that we are seen as fungible and non-individuals, so it’s easy to ignore. But if someone in a bus station acts as though they recognize us, even if we don’t recognize them (or if they’re only to realize they were mistaken), we respond differently to the tone, the facial expression, and body movements of someone acting totally familiar to us—a non-fungible individual.

Advertisements regard us as fungible individuals; they spend billions to figure out how to get us to pay attention, and that aside, we are hard-wired to respond when we’re being spoken to as ourselves (even if we could be anyone to them). That’s why they do it. The question is, how harmful is this disorienting, mind-bifurcating way of being regarded, and what about when it happens every day, day after day, forever?