The Bleating Edge: A Goat's Meditation on Smartphones
By Maurice the Goat
Let us consider, dear readers, the rectangular god to which you have all surrendered your opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortex. Yes, that glowing amulet you check 147 times daily with the devotion of ancient priests examining entrails for divine messages. The smartphone: humanity's most intimate relationship and possibly its last invention before the species evolves into a new form of hunched, neck-craning biped with perpetually cramped texting fingers.
As a goat—a creature whose ancestors have maintained essentially the same design specifications since the Pleistocene—I find myself uniquely qualified to comment on your technological obsessions. We goats invented nothing, perfected nothing, yet we persist, contentedly consuming your forgotten garden plants and occasionally screaming like humans for no discernible reason. Perhaps there's wisdom in our simplicity.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, though you'd think they had, judging by the reverential tones humans adopt when discussing their iPhones—a conversational register previously reserved for religious experiences and particularly transcendent sexual encounters. No, before Steve Jobs emerged from his garage-temple with a glowing rectangle in hand, companies like IBM, Nokia, and BlackBerry had already birthed primitive versions of what would become humanity's external brain.
IBM's Simon Personal Communicator arrived in 1994, a Neanderthal of a device approximately the weight and dimensions of a house brick, with a battery life measured in heartbeats. Nokia and BlackBerry followed, creating devices that business executives would fondle beneath conference tables while pretending to pay attention to PowerPoint presentations about quarterly earnings. These early smartphones were the digital equivalent of those fish that first flopped onto land—evolutionary precursors, gasping and awkward, but containing within them the blueprint of a revolution.
Then came the iPhone in 2007, and suddenly everyone from kindergarteners to grandmothers were navigating a touchscreen with the dexterity of concert pianists. The physical keyboard, that last vestige of the mechanical age, vanished like a species that couldn't adapt. Buttons, those tactile reminders that you were interacting with an actual object in physical space, were deemed obsolete, replaced by a smooth glass surface that responded to the oils in your fingertips like some form of technological mysticism.
As a ruminant who spends considerable time chewing, digesting, regurgitating, and re-chewing (a process not unlike how humans consume social media), I've observed the curious behaviors these devices inspire. Humans who would never dream of interrupting a face-to-face conversation will abruptly abandon all social pretense when their phone vibrates, as though the device contains messages from a higher power. Perhaps it does.
The modern smartphone performs functions that would have required a small office building of equipment just three decades ago. Camera, video recorder, music player, game console, library, bank, movie theater, shopping mall, dating service, and in emergencies, occasionally a telephone. It's as if you shrunk an entire civilization into a pocket-sized rectangle, giving each human the power of a minor deity, yet most of you use this godlike technology primarily to look at pictures of cats and argue with strangers.
What's most remarkable is not the technology itself, but how rapidly you've integrated it into your consciousness. Watch a human separated from their smartphone—the patting of pockets, the rising panic, the disorientation suggesting they've lost a vital organ rather than a manufactured device. Phantom vibration syndrome—the sensation that your phone is alerting you when it isn't—is perhaps the first psychosomatic condition created entirely by consumer electronics. Congratulations, you've developed a nervous system extension for a product with a two-year upgrade cycle.
Apple, that orchard of innovation whose fruits have fallen remarkably close to the money tree, became the world's richest company largely by convincing humans that last year's rectangle is embarrassingly inadequate compared to this year's slightly improved rectangle. The iPhone generates more revenue than any other product line in corporate history, proving that the most valuable commodity isn't oil or data but human attention alchemized into desire.
We goats are simple creatures. We climb things that shouldn't be climbed. We eat things that shouldn't be eaten. We stare unblinkingly until humans become uncomfortable. But we've created nothing as simultaneously miraculous and spiritually depleting as the smartphone—a device that connects you to everyone while isolating you from the person sitting across the table.
Perhaps there's a lesson here about technological progress versus wisdom. Your phones grow smarter while you grow more dependent, like a symbiotic relationship growing toward parasitism. The device that promised to free you from constraints has become a digital leash, tugging you away from the present moment with notifications engineered to trigger dopamine releases with the precision of laboratory experiments.
As I stand here in my field, watching clouds form shapes that will never be captured in 4K resolution and listening to birds compose songs that will never top any streaming charts, I wonder if you humans understand the irony: You created a device to enhance your capabilities, only to outsource your capabilities to the device.
But who am I to judge? I'm just a goat with cloven hooves, typing this blog post by repeatedly head-butting a specially reinforced keyboard. My species' greatest technological achievement remains figuring out how to open supposedly goat-proof gates, which, while less impressive than quantum computing, has proven remarkably effective for accessing forbidden gardens.
Perhaps next time you feel the familiar itch to check your phone for the fourteenth time in an hour, you might instead look up at the sky, or pet a nearby animal, or simply exist without digital mediation. The world beyond your screen has impressive resolution, unmatched haptic feedback, and requires no monthly data plan.
Though if you're reading this on your smartphone, I suppose I should thank you for your attention. Just know that while you were absorbing these words, your battery decreased by approximately 0.5%, bringing you one moment closer to the subtle existential panic of seeing that red battery icon. Meanwhile, I'll be over here, eating sunshine converted to grass, charged by nothing but existence itself.
Maurice out. I've got things to climb and gardens to devastate.