What is my attachment to my smartphone if not an unrealized desire for a Pokédex? In this essay, I will breathlessly explain to you over drinks how The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy taught me that the pinnacle of human knowledge is having every answer in the universe at your fingertips, that Wikipedia is a contemporary manifestation of this shared vision of the future on which I was most ardently sold, that the stories that shaped my childhood were the ones where nobody wondered, where you weren’t blocked by not knowing, where they just looked it up and moved on. Have we, as a society, fully come to terms with the fact that carrying a Game Boy was training wheels for modern technology, or how desperately I wanted in when the name alone should have tipped me off to how unwelcome I’d be if we ever achieved that dream? Look, what I’m saying is this is ultimately a date we set up on our Pokédexes, that didn’t Kim Possible also have some like Palm PilotTM/T-Mobile SidekickTM gadget too, and could I not take basically the exact same thing out of my pocket right this second to double check if I’m remembering correctly? I need you to understand that now I am an adult spending ten hours a day pushing pixels and it is clear to me that we have strayed so far from that wildly naïve, barely noble idea that knowledge is power — rainbow shooting star the more you know gif — that as we speak, on our handheld devices there is an algorithm powering an app that will exhaustively catalog for us that this was a night that neither of us thought went well.
