There is a thief afoot in the night. He is creeping and creaking over the floorboards, skulking in the shadows, busy feeding off the broadband router. This thief is no ordinary home invader, but a pure electronic gadgetry shoplifter of the world.
This is a switch-up and grab raid, a clammy phone palmed intruder who has come to hack and crash the consciousness party of the should-be-sleeping souls. And he has come to sprinkle a little digital spice into our night lives.
I am listening to the rhythm, the hypnotic churn of the dishwasher, in the depths of darkness. The darkness is only offset by the illumination of my lonesome blue light filter – as across the nation, and wider planet – millions of teenagers, young adults and validation seekers, flock like moths to this light. The search is on, for external domination, levity, and deep data meaning, in the heat-seeking algorithms of the social media world. And it’s first-degree larceny of the hearts and minds of the next generations.
So, I have just stumbled on the thief, trapped in the moonlight, beyond the slatted blinds of streetlights, inside my girl’s room. He was invisible, undetected to the eye, but a swarthy pirate brigand of the Unicorn promising night ship.
She was plugged into her phone, wired-up charging through the dead of night, searching for deeper meaning on the networks that never sleep. She was searching for the next digital crack rock, the next snap, the next FOMO score, as I interrupted the broadcast, pondering whether phone network addiction could be the new deadly eighth sin.
The big teenage bucks stop with the power of a handheld computer device that can slide easily into the skinny jean pocket. And as the quest for bigger technological toys sweeps the globe like a crack epidemic, sitting in my battered leather throne, I contemplate the future for my girl in black upstairs.
One girl, who like many millions of boys and girls, for whom the digital thug life is the only brightly glossy advertised pathway to cool lifestyle nirvana.
I wrestle in the coal blanket night with an image of the girl in black, scrolling like a Pacman data eating icon, hunched over her mobile. Frozen, and glowing in the digital half-light, manacled to the screen. An angel on one shoulder, demon on the other.
Climbing the stairs, I open the bedroom door. The thief has faded like a ghost in the night. All is quiet on the Western Front, and the girl sleeps the deepest of sleeps in her blacked-out room.
The phone is, however, within a robotic arm’s reach – ready for magical meme’s, chattering snaps, and digital banter at the crack of dawn. So, the circus of circuitry continues. Closing the door on the doors of perception, I quietly surrender to trying to make it the best digital life possible for the girl. The thief will be back, as will the battle for young impressionable hearts and the gardens of their minds, as I let out a silent primal scream into the dark night and wander upstairs in search of the Sandman.
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