A Ritual to Escape your Devices

for people trapped in the space between Real Life and The Screen

Your eyes are waxing rectangular.

Your neck hurts. You feel like there’s a sheet of glass between you and the barista, and yet you slip between the icons of your home screen and into the reality of the machine as if there were no such barrier. Do not disturb is on and you’ve switched to grayscale, but if you ever paid attention to your pulse you’d notice it races when your eyes stray to the phone turned face-downwards by your elbow. Eye contact with the barista leaves you cold.

Time has sped up. There isn’t space between this update and the next. Every scroll is tracked, every eye movement monetised. Your time is money. Their money.

It feels inevitable. As if the forces that want you to become their attention slave are omnipresent. They know the mechanism of your hands, they’ve studied the habits of your mind. Maybe you’re fucked. Maybe we all are. But that doesn't mean we shouldn’t go out fighting. Here’s a chance to reclaim dominion over your own thumbs. A ritual that’s so crazy it might just work.

You Will Need

An old phone that works well enough to play audio and display an image on the screen.

A USB charging cable

A recording of a ticking clock

A speaker or wireless headphones.

Coarse grained salt (lots of it) in a bag (paper or cloth, no holes)

The bleak knowledge of your average daily screen time.

A hammer

This ritual will take up to half an hour plus time to travel to your nearest urban centre.

The Ritual

In a dimly lit room place your old phone on the floor with this sigil showing on the screen. Or you can create your own, of course; this one derives from the word machine and is intended to capture the compelling poison of the digital. 

Play the sound of a ticking clock from that same device, loud. Pour a circle of salt anti-clockwise around the phone.

Glare at the sigil on the screen while pacing around it anti-clockwise like an animal sizing up an opponent. Keep circling until your focus is locked onto the sigil displayed on the screen.

Sit down in front of the phone. Stare at the sigil blinking as little as possible for thirty seconds then close your eyes. After a few seconds you should start to ‘see’ the sigil while your eyes are closed with the colours reversed. Keep your eyes closed until the reversed sigil fades away.

Lick your finger, put it in the salt and taste it. Continue to stare at the sigil while you experience the taste of salt in your mouth. Refrain from drinking from now until the end of the ritual.

Keeping a steady glare on the screen, take the usb cable and whip your back with it. Strike yourself once for every hour of screen time you indulge in on an average day. This part is optional. In fact everything is. Any one who says differently is selling something.

Smash the phone with a hammer. Feel free to shout whatever abuse comes to mind.

Gather the remnants and place them in the bag full of salt.

Journey to your nearest urban centre with the bag and dispose of it in a public waste bin in front of a premises that represents ‘the machine’ to you (maybe a bank, a social media company’s offices or a government building).

You may now refresh yourself with a drink and wash the taste of salt from your mouth.

Ritual Review

• Place phone sigil on screen

• Play the sound of a ticking clock

• Pour a circle of salt.

• Glare and pace around phone

• Taste salt.

• Optional self flagellation

• Smash

• Put pieces in bag of salt

• Bin it

• Refresh yourself with water