Self-Loathing Confession Of An Online Shopper, Vols. 1 - ∞: Apple Watch

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I have a mundane confession that, I hope, can make one of the more mundane aspects of our (defined broadly, as you and me and everyone we know’s) lives thematic. To think about what it all means for a little while.

I buy a lot of things online and that fact does not make me feel good – until it makes me feel really good – which fact makes me feel, well, not good again. And, as they say: repeat.

There’s a lot of stuff to buy online. It’s not the groceries, the takeout (it is the takeout), the sundries, dry goods, pet food, hair care products, all the goods that shift the supposed tax benefits of consumerism from my local instantiations of Rite Aid, the liquor store, and C-Town to someplace technically headquartered in Delaware but somehow paying taxes to Ireland. It’s the demi-extravagant stuff that in aggregate, my accountant would tell me, that stops me from contributing more fully to my 401(k) or visiting my parents oftener. Vintage clothing, internet tshirts, electronics.

The most unnecessary buying-stuff-online experience I’ve had recently occurred on April 10th at 3:02am, when I preordered an Apple Watch. It should arrive tomorrow.

(Its actual arrival date, as you’ll see, is one of those inexorable matters of faith that the Apple Watch-buying elect pore over and examine like a damaged conscience or a run in a pair of nude stockings.)

The wait has been an instance of exquisite self-inflicted torture. Like lust, the way seeing a hot stranger on the subway is like getting betrothed. A $28 per day stay in a hotel furnished with the most involuted and self-involved psychic furniture currently available to man. I suspect this experience of anticipation will outstrip all the tangible benefits of owning an Apple Watch.

When Apple first announced its watch, I couldn’t see a reason in the world why I wanted it. After being told, “I couldn’t imagine you without an Apple Watch”, I realized that was both true and reason enough. Tautologies are mental levers that can shift the heaviest evidentiary burdens in an instant.

There’s a way a premeditated hours – or even years – long process can feel like an unfolding series of disconnected impulses.

On the evening of April 10, I was still unsure of my intentions. Setting the alarm for 2:50am was a lark. Waking five minutes before the alarm, maybe a coincidence. A glass of cold water, laptop balanced on my knees in the living room (to be closer to the router), App Store app opened on my iPhone, these could still have been the actions of a perambulist. Pressing order in the app and providing a thumbprint for verification, like an illiterate signing a contract in the sixteenth century. Even these actions were weightless, able to be cancelled. When the order status changed to “Preparing for Shipment” and my account was debited $434.41 – a momentous occasion for a small cadre of online Apple Watch watchers – I felt a kernel of actuality had dropped from the sky, through my head, and straight into me.

Thoughts About Waiting

Wages, happiness, mortality, home ownership, freedom from debt, free time, time off: none of it has kept up with productivity and worker efficiency. So what comprises the area under the curve? Waiting, I’d say. There’s commuting, standing on line for Chipotle, hitting refresh in Outlook for fucking Sam to get back to you on that thing.

The most powerful form of waiting manifests in all the long bouts of inactivity interrupted by technologically enabled efficiency.

This waiting-efficiency nexus finds its most lonely/majestic form in the space between an online thing’s being ordered and an online things’s becoming an IRL thing, held in your hands. It is one of the few remaining mystical experiences available to us. Importantly, it is one that we can recur and trigger easily, like the drug addled rats pressing the button for pleasure pellets that social scientists and lifestyle beat reporters like to use as a puritanical cudgel to remind us of the grotesqueness of our rote, manic pleasures.

The act derives its power from the delectable uncertainty attached to ordering online, even nowadays in the era of PayPal Purchase Protection and credit card ass-coverage. You click order for a fun needlepoint on Etsy, and there’s so much up in the air and simultaneously such little at stake. That’s important too. You’re not waiting for a stay of execution to arrive; just a funny thing to show your friends. Will the seller receive the order? Yes. But will they remember to send it? Get the address right? Will the post office fucking lose it again? What if it takes longer than you want??

When the object arrives it arrives as a result of the miracle of transubstantiation. Your faith and belief in the power and grace of someone you’ve never met is rewarded by a new object for consumption.

You can see, then, that Amazon’s greatest sin isn’t greed, hockey stick growth, or fucking over small publishers. It’s how they’ve disrupted this ceremony of faith and redemption. The buyer, in the eternal Prime of their life, enjoys reliable and easy 2-day shipping. It is rational and scientific, created by a huge mess of people worked half to death for not nearly enough reward. It’s the sort of creation that Thomas Sutpen would create and that Jeff Bezos did create. Amazon is an edifice that makes plain the inner workings of online capitalism in such a primal and blunt way as to repudiate all grace.

It’s somewhere between an Amazonian obtuseness and a whimsical Etsy craftsperson’s nonchalance that I wait for my Apple Watch.

Definitely My Circus, Unfortunately My Clowns

I’ve been here before. There was that pair of buckshot brogues (NOS!),“grail status” and discontinued for years, that I just had to have. That week’s wait was delicious. I’ve worn the shoes ten times in two years. The eBay deal on what I suspected was a perfect, perfectly underpriced Parker 51. Would the bladder be intact, the nib true? I would have to wait and see. And I did. And they were. But that Lamy 2000 I picked up a few months later supplanted it, anyway.

This sort of acquisitiveness is gross, symptomatic of something that registers as bad for sure. A hunting instinct perverted, like a cat stalking a laser pointer dot. However, it’s one thing to have a hobby of finding and acquiring old stuff. I mean, on Netflix there are numerous television shows from diverse geographic regions about the very same subject, and none of those people seem too rank.

Is it the cost of doing business, ca. 2015? I could tell myself that. It’s more likely the cost of being aware of my own limitations and my own inabilities: to write symphonies, great american novels, less great american novels, a very readable essay about building a cocoon of things around your own hollow inner core that burns like a stoked furnace to have something at stake in the 50 odd years of fire remaining, god or whomever willing.

I’ve come to live with these urges, to try to understand them and prune them into interesting shapes like an Edward Scissorhands.

Observing the rollout of the Apple Watch has been another thing altogether. An overused comparison: it is “the Michael Bay version” of the above.

Apple Watch Watch

Reddit, the bellwether of stunted emotions and fallible interpretations of reality, has been an especially clear viewing platform to witness these everyday occurrences of consumerist faith converge into a Jonestown-like mass of religious fervor. (Here, I’m using Reddit to mean the subreddit, /r/AppleWatch.) There are constant posts trying to discern the meanings of estimated shipping timeframes, Apple CSR pabulum, and banking account holds – all with Talmudic intensity.

This is the fountainhead of Apple Watch anxiety and thus the locus of Apple Watching worship-cum-waiting. Poring over the ritual, I saw myself and something utterly foreign.

An absolutely informal poll with over 700 respondents from /r/AppleWatch dissects the demography of Apple Watch preorderers. They’re mostly in America, over 80% are between 18 and 35, over 85% male. It’s a very Reddit subreddit. Over 65% check their order status on Apple.com multiple times per day or hour, and about the same percentage check the subreddit 5 to 15+ times per day. As far as ~4,000 user communities go, it’s pretty batshit.

Reddit is not the only community for frothing Apple Watch waiters to worship. The Apple Watch forum on MacRumors.com has, right now, more than 3,800 threads and 96,000 posts, which makes it about as popular as the iPad Apps forum. You’ll recall that the iPad and its apps have been around for over five years while the Apple Watch is currently -1 days old.

However, the comments on /r/AppleWatch are the most consistently illustrative.

One dispatch, entitled, “it seems another day has passed. still nothing”.

A comment, reading,

HOLD TOGETHER, BROTHERS! WE MUST NOT TURN ON OUR OWN!Instead, we BAND TOGETHER! AND LASH TIM COOK WITH THE MAGNETIC HEADS OF OUR 2FT CABLES WE’VE RECEIVED TOO EARLY!I’m losin’ it.

A high-rated comment in another thread, trying to intuit a meaning to Apple’s shipment scheduling: “Planes were later today than yesterday by about 20 minutes. Christ, I’ve gotten too involved in this.”

Some thoughtful responses of the subject “Anyone Else Refuse to Do a Try-On Just to Get the Rush of Getting Your Own First?”. Things are getting overtly (rather than quasi) religious, now:

“Yes, I am saving myself for marriage (my watch).”

“i’m also saving myself for marriage. I can’t cheat on my watch after i preordered her!”

“Yup. I refuse to touch any Apple Watch before I touch my own.”

“I’m still a virgin”

“I was thinking the same thing, I regret it. It made this week hell…..”

“I’m glad I tested the waters before my marriage because I had my eye on the 38mm which is petite and all but at the end of the day, I wanted some meat on my…watch and ended up changing my order to a 42mm that afternoon”

An unlikely wretch (a person with an estimated June shipment date) sees his order tick over to preparing to ship. The true faithful’s response,

Are you kidding me? I woke up at 3 am in the morning to make sure my order will ship for Friday which still says “Processing Order” and yours already shipped?

Another thread from a member of the June elect: “I mean yes I was charged and yes it says "preparing for shipment” BUT IT ALSO SAYS JUNE!! Have the apple gods taken mercy upon me?!?“

A mercifully obvious post, with almost no comments, reads,

Has anyone else had a shit week or month? And has the Apple Watch helped you not to despair? I got some pretty shitty news, work related, long story short - they are making some cuts and nobody is really save. I won’t be losing my job, but my paycheck might get a substantial hit and the work atmosphere (which was great) will change for the worse due to planned changes. But I am still hitting the refresh button on my apple order page!! I won’t give up! As long as I know that the Apple Watch is coming everything still seems alright! God… this sounds crazy. hitting refresh

There are digital reams and reams of this stuff. People comparing the when-will-I-get-this worthiness – not aesthetic or functional differences – of various case material and band combinations. White sport band aluminum Apples Watches versus black modern buckle stainless steel Apple Watches. They compare minutely different order confirmation times: 12:01am, 12:03am, 12:06am, etc. If you didn’t order within the first ten minutes, you’re apparently precluded from the Apple Watch watch canonicate.

It is the stupidest fucking thing in the world, but knowing you’re part of some elect group of death-driven consumerist zombies who are going to get a shiny thing a day, a week, a month before other, probably more emotionally healthy and well-formed people. That knowledge makes you feel good and incredibly ashamed.

The Fluoroelastomer Age

It’s obviously possible to simultaneously be a part of a group and be deeply ashamed about one’s membership in that group because that is exactly how I feel. It’s a confusing thing, overall. Feeling an intensity of wanting something while knowing with decent certainty the thing you want won’t be that great. Constantly reading inane discussion threads. Reveling in the process of hurtling toward a finish line whose crossing represents not an accomplishment but simply existing, in the right place and the right time, with the right amount of money available.

There are a million probably tired ideas about capitalism, consumerism, you know, all that, you could apply to all this. I’ll choose to continue on with the quasi-mystical religious interpretation, at least in practice. It’s like a return to ‘primitive’ religion, when the gods fought each other, and you could be a devotee of Athena but not Hermes. Now you can be a devotee of Apple but not Starbucks or Tesla but not Honda. Feeling yourself a part of (worshipping) the old multi-national corporation state: it’s the new nationalism, which is at least as old as wherever Thomas Pynchon got the idea for Gravity’s Rainbow from.

These gods are capricious and vindictive and very often wrong, and that’s sort of what we like about them. BP accidentally dumps 4.9 million barrels of crude petrol into the Gulf of Mexico or Zeus fucks Demeter by pretending to be an elephant or some shit – either way, there’s absolutely nothing you or I could literally do about any of it. One is just a far more entertaining story than the other.

Following along this line of thought, if there was a golden age, a silver age, a bronze age, etc., we must be in the… is there a material that’s synthetic, artificial, worthless, and inexorably secure? Fluoroelastomer, the material of the band of the Apple Watch currently hurtling cross-continentally toward Apple Watch watchers this very moment. That’s the age I think we’re in. The one whose intricately engineered shackles bind and it feels like the most natural thing to do.