My smartphone has become an extension of my body and mind. I received a notification informing me that I spend an average of six hours a day in front of the screen. I’m alarmed. I’ve realized that I check my phone compulsively, even while walking down the street. With a simple gesture, I disappear from reality and enter a virtual ecosystem—a seemingly paradisiacal promised land that in fact generates anxiety. The anxiety of being here, there, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Hyperconnectivity is altering my mind and body. I feel abducted, trapped in the cloud, hypnotized, lacking willpower, with my head bowed and my back curved. What would Charles Darwin think of this behavior? I drift between two worlds: one of possibilities, absence, intangibility, sedation, and emptiness—and another of facts, presence, tangibility, fear, and corporeality. I am completely lost, floating in space and time, trying to break the spell.

Smartphone use has invaded cities. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han states, we no longer inhabit the Earth, but the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, murky, and ghostly. It is a new era: the era of the Phono Sapiens.