Six machines in a rectangle the size of a hand.
The phone is rarely described as an object, which is odd, because that is the first true thing about it. Before it is a habit or a worry, it is a thing you can drop.
Pick one up and the first fact is physical: a flat sheet of glass over a metal frame, cold at the edges, warm in the middle after a while, heavy in a way that surprises people who expect small things to be light. It sits in a pocket and reshapes the hang of a jacket. It slides off the arm of a sofa. It cracks. Every account of the phone that begins with behaviour skips this step, and skipping it makes the rest harder to think about clearly. The phone is not a mood or a trend. It is a manufactured article with a mass, a temperature and a limited working life.
What makes it strange is not the shell but the count of things inside. It is a radio, in the plainest sense: a device that turns speech into waves and back again, quietly, dozens of times a minute. It is a camera, and for most people the only camera they own. It is a clock, and for a great many the only clock consulted. It is a map, a torch, a wallet, a ticket, a filing cabinet, a stack of letters, a shelf of records and a small library. None of these is a metaphor. Each was once a separate object, made by a separate trade, kept in a separate place in the house.
No previous object absorbed so many unrelated things. A pocket knife gathered a handful of tools that were all, broadly, for cutting and prising. A desk gathered instruments that were all about paper. The phone gathers functions with nothing in common except that they can be expressed as signals: sound, light, position, money, memory. That is the genuinely new part. The combination is not an improvement on any one of the objects it contains. A dedicated camera is better at photographs and a paper map is better at showing a whole valley at once. The phone wins on the fact that it is the one you actually have with you.
The consequence of that combination arrives the first time the object goes missing. Losing a wallet used to cost you money and cards. Losing a camera cost you photographs. Losing a phone costs several unrelated capabilities in a single stroke: you cannot be reached, you cannot find your way, you cannot pay, you cannot see the time, you cannot look up the address you were heading to, and you cannot ring anyone to explain, because the numbers were never in your head. The failure is not deep in any one direction. It is wide, and the width is the shock.
This is worth stating without alarm. A house key opens one door and losing it is a nuisance with a known shape. A phone has no known shape of failure, because its uses were never listed anywhere, not even by the owner. People discover the inventory of their own dependence only in the hour after the object slips out of a coat on a tram. That hour is a fairly good audit. It is also, in a small way, the only time most of us look at the thing squarely and ask what it was actually doing all day.
So this is a magazine about the object. Not about how long anyone looks at it, and not about whether the world has gone to ruin, which it plainly has not. It is about the rectangle: what has been folded into it, what fell out of our pockets and off our walls to make room, what it now proves about us, and how a person might hold a sensible working relationship with a thing that does this much. The phone is unusual enough to deserve description before it deserves an opinion.