My fears had been confirmed; it was an exceedingly stupid place to rest my phone. I either knocked it with the pot lid or the wooden spoon I was stirring with, and unlike how I had hoped when placing it my phone tumbled forward, not back, off of the lip of the Coleman two burner and the overflowing foam to join the pasta and water in the pot.

After a couple of seconds the flashlight turned off but I couldn’t just empty the pot onto the ground. It was full to the brim with pasta for everyone and the water, which couldn’t have been more boiling, bubbled continuously over the handles. I aborted my first attempt at scooping my doomed phone out to put down the lid my left hand still clutched, smiling at the terrible story unfolding despite myself. Two hands weren’t much better than one since the flat spoon I had was about a third of the width of my phone’s height and it was conspiring with the curved sides of the deep pot to keep my poor phone submerged.

After a swim long enough to ensure destruction I finally managed a successful rescue. I was planning on doing the technological equivalent of mouth to mouth and throwing it in the bag of dry pasta, but remarkably, the screen was on. “Temperature / iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it,” it told me, apparently ready to let bygones be bygones and forget about the pasta water fiasco. After a minute I pressed the home screen button, transferring starchy stickiness to my finger tip and discovering my phone hadn’t been lying. The screen lit up and I was left staring in wonder at my wallpaper. The cracked pasta phone, my comrade, lived on.

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism by Filippo Marinetti

As an introduction to the Futurist manifesto Marinetti recounts a night spent discussing, debating, scribbling, and driving with his friends. At the opening the traditional sounds of their city, canals and creaking timber, are juxtaposed with the roar of automobiles and the might of a passing tram. Suddenly, inspired to "shake at the gates of life," Marinetti leads his companions to their cars and they take off on a joyride through the city.

Disaster strikes, however, and in order to avoid two cyclists Marinetti rolls his car into a mud filled ditch. He survives and surfaces to feel "the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart." A crowd assembles and together they rescue the car from what they assume to be its grave. Marinetti has more confidence and is vindicated and excited when it starts first try. They take off again, having gotten what they desired, danger, but like addicts only desiring more.

In the manifesto itself the Futurists make explicit their love of danger and "speed." They don't love technology itself, but rather the "speed" it makes possible. Really, they're expressing love for excitement and risk. "Speed" functions to describe experiences defined by these two things, and is synonymous with anything adrenaline inducing. Both when Marinetti himself emerges and when his car is rescued and revived, the joy he expresses is actually excitement at being able to do it all again. He is not celebrating the events themselves, but the potentially for more "speed," more adrenaline.

Likewise, the love Marinetti feels for his car, which is rooted in the possibilities it creates, is only strengthened by its survival and thereby the survival of these possibilities. In demonstrating its robustness the car, already portrayed as a beast greater than man in its strength, endears itself to its owner and driver. The windows it opens remain open.

After a few weekends spent out of town I had been looking forward to a night in Berkeley. I met my old roommate Michael at a bar and we caught up there. He had departed for the frats so that was the next stop. By the time we made it to Nick’s a couple of hours later I was wide eyed and drunk. Michael and I were about to leave when another group of my friends showed up, so I ended up staying to catch up with them as well. Our phones, windows into other parties, were telling us we should leave and so we followed Brian to his old place.

When we got there I saw bubbly L across the room and it awakened the latent childlike excitement in me. In the ecstatic arm waving that functioned as our greeting I flung my phone across the room. Or at least that’s what people told me happened the next day. Regardless, the minor cracks on my screen had exploded into a mosaic from the screen's meeting with the floor.

The blur of the night faded by the early morning and I know I was sat, recently harmed phone in hand, when I saw Becca. I turned the phone to her with a comic frown, tapping the screen to demonstrate it’s loss of functionality. She came over, and with initiative and deftness at that point beyond me, restarted my phone. The screen did work, but even still the little shards meant there’d be at least one thing I wouldn’t be using it for anymore. <Thanks> I smiled, and went back to sitting next to Danielle.

A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

Haraway defines a cyborg as "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well a creature of fiction." She uses the imagery of cyborgs to break down the normative dualisms of Western society, dualisms that "have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination." However, in doing so, she by necessarily approaches the idea of the cyborg from the human side of the concepts own dualism. In the imagery Haraway presents, it is always humankind being augmented with machine.

Ultimately, there is no reason not to imagine a machine being augmented with organic parts. Furthermore, if humankind gave a machine artificial intelligence would that not be an organic addition, since it would be from our own organic minds that we had made artificial intelligence? Even if not literally organic, the resultant computer would be a combination of machine and human thought. If the comparison must be more literal, since our brains rely on dual and simultaneous electronic and chemical signals if we created a computer, even with no literally organic elements, that utilized a combination of electronic and chemical signals, would that computer be a cyborg?

If either of propositions is answered with a yes, or even a maybe, and we also accept Haraway's conjecture that all dualisms should be broken down and removed from our understanding of reality (or at the very least transformed from one dimensional lines to multidimensional spaces), then many of our computers are already cyborgs. My laptop and my phone exist somewhere within the space between machine and cyborg. Even if they rest near one side of that scale, it is better for all the arguments Haraway presents to understand their status as hybrid rather than absolute. Haraway concludes her essay with a plea to embrace "the skillful task of reconstructing out daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts." Something as personal and as central to our lives as a phone deserves not only to be considered one of our parts, but also, in it's status as a cyborg, a status by nature hybridized, fluid, and partial, as an other. Thus, in our reconstructions we must not only consider social relations affected by science and technology, but also our technologies themselves.

Gradually but seriously I’d been pushing my trad climbing game. I’d learned the basic skills of placing gear, building anchors, and managing the logistics of long routes a couple of years ago, but it was in the spring with Evan that I had begun perfecting them. Our end of summer coup-de-grace, however, involved none of that. The Tuolomne Triple, climbing Tenaya Peak, Mathess Crest, and Cathedral Peak back-to-back would be about suffering through the hiking then climbing fast despite our fatigue.

The psyche for a 5am wakeup the morning of dissipated as soon our alarms went off, but my 5:30 we had rolled into the car and were snacking while driving to Tenaya Lake. At 6:30 we were hiking through the reverse twilight, at 7:30 climbing through the sunrise, and at 8:30 beginning our hike down from Tenaya. Four miles, a false destination, and a horrid uphill slog later we started up the southern tip of Mathess. So far the backcountry hiking had taken longer than the climbing.

We had brought a short rope and some gear, and I honestly expected to tie in at some point, but we cruised through the most difficult parts of the day solo, our harnesses sitting comfortably, but unused, on our hips. We snapped some more photos on our phones once we reached the midway summit of the ridge, relaxed because the end of the day seemed in sight. Of course it was only hours later we could say we were done, having done the second half of the Crest, climbed Cathedral peak, and done another two stretches of hiking to boot. Amazingly, because we climbed it solo, overtaking everyone else as was our right, we were actually the second party to finish Cathedral that day.

The next morning we could barely move, but somehow found the motivation to climb Higher Cathedral Spire, a short but classic and easy route in the Valley. I took my phone out on the summit to snap some photos and noticed a web of cracks. It had been in my pocket, like it almost is when I'm climbing, but I guess it got knocked while the screen was facing out, not in. It didn't stop me from taking the photo that is my current wallpaper, and in a way it was only fair my phone was hurting too.