Sweet, sweet technological dependence

There was a time when your phone could die and basically nothing happened.

You couldn’t make a phone call, obviously.

Except, actually, you could.

Because if you had an old-school landline, the phone company supplied the power through the line, so you could make a call even when the electricity was out.

Which, now that we think about it, is actually an even better example.

Your phone used to be one thing. A phone. If its battery died, you temporarily lost access to that one thing.

We have since voluntarily engineered a civilization in which a dead phone can strand you despite being surrounded by working cars, money, buildings, transportation, and other human beings.

You used to get a taxi by standing on a curb and flapping your arms.

You used to pay for things by handing someone a credit card.

Your boarding pass was a piece of paper.

Your concert ticket was a piece of paper.

Your hotel key was a little plastic card.

Your car key was a key.

Your house key was…also a key.

If you wanted to park somewhere, you put some coins in a meter. You would not discover that this particular six-block section of downtown requires the ParkSmarterNow app, download it, create an account, verify your email address, enter your license plate number, add a payment method, consider push notifications, and then discover that your phone has 2% battery left.

Ahem. Sorry. That one hit a little close to home. Anyway…

…directions came from a map.

Menus came from menus.

Proof of insurance lived in the glove compartment.

And if somebody needed to verify that you were really you, they generally found a way to do it without sending a six-digit code to the very device you were trying to use.

This is progress.

And mostly it actually is! We’re not going to sit here pretending we want to go back to navigating with a AAA TripTik and carrying seventeen pieces of laminated plastic everywhere we go. Your phone can summon a car, pay for dinner, navigate across the country, unlock things, buy things, identify you, get you on an airplane, and tell you exactly how many minutes until the Thai food arrives.

Which is amazing.

Right up until the battery dies.

At which point an impressive chunk of modern civilization simply stops recognizing you as a participant.

So here are two AUKEY Spark Sling power banks.

Each has a 10,000mAh battery, 30-watt USB-C Power Delivery, and a digital display that tells you how much power is left. More importantly, each has its own built-in USB-C cable, eliminating the unique humiliation of carrying around a fully charged emergency battery that you can’t actually connect to your phone without bumming a cord off of somebody.

And you get two of them.

Keep one in your bag. Keep one at work. Give one to somebody whose phone is somehow always at 11%. Put them wherever they’re most likely to be available when the tiny battery-powered master key to your entire life starts begging for electricity.

Because we’ve made your phone responsible for an unreasonable percentage of your ability to participate in society.

Might as well keep the damn thing alive.