The social contract around phones is broken

I’m just an NPC to you.

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I have made my problems with dine-in movie theaters known, but have always held a begrudging respect for Alamo Drafthouse because of their aggressive no-phones, no-talking policy. Those are two things that should go without saying in a movie theater, but Alamo had not one, but two loud, flashing warnings ahead of the feature presentation that said them anyway. You’ll notice that sentence is in the past tense.

For those who haven’t been, Alamo used to work entirely analog, with guests writing their orders on cards the servers then surreptitiously took while the movie was playing. About ten minutes later, chicken fingers would be delivered. There is literally only one way to make getting chicken fingers delivered to your seat in a movie theater bad, and Alamo drafthouse just did it.

I’d classify this as more than just mildly infuriating, Reddit…

Gone are the pencils, papers, and even the physical menus. Now, everything is done on your phone—not just before the movie starts, but during it, too. You can even do it while the PSA that says you’ll get kicked out if you’re caught using your phone is playing, because they’ve updated it to have a little caveat: unless you’re using your phone to order.

Obviously this is insane. The dam has broken. Allowing people to have their phones out at all means the phones can come out any time. The only way to know if someone is using their phone for “the right reasons” is to monitor them. But I didn’t come to Alamo Drafthouse to watch someone else’s phone. I came to watch a movie. But I don’t even know what happened in Hokum, because a family with all their phones out (including the phone flashlight, at one point) had me agitated the entire time. Yes, we asked them to stop, and yes, we hit the “help” button on our phones (for fuck’s sake) to alert a manager when they didn’t. We got an error: no managers available.

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This was just one particularly bad experience, but it’s endemic of a larger attitude shift. As my friend Rachel pointed out during the many, many texts we exchanged about it after, what’s maddening is that, to some people, this is no longer maddening.

“if people want to pull their phones out just to check em who the hell are you to stop them,” goes one reply to a Reddit post about phones in movie theaters.

“I have ADHD” began another defense I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

“As long as someone is not answering a phone call during class, then it really is not that imposing,” reads a reply to a Reddit post lamenting phone usage in yoga class. “Shift your mindset and focus on your breathing instead of worrying about your neighbor! Your practice is in your control :)”

There’s no amount of yoga and mindset-shifting that’ll stop me from wanting to smash that smug smiley-face with a hammer. What happened to our social contract? Now, it’s on us—the sane people—to stay home or adapt if we dislike people using their phones inappropriately in public. I understand that some have emergencies or accessibility issues for which a phone is necessary, but not all of you can, and you can’t keep citing those things when you, personally, just want to scroll Instagram because otherwise you know it’s stupid to say “well I just want to scroll Instagram.” I can only imagine what you’re asking ChatGPT for help with.

I should have known things were headed this way when, in another memo I never got, it was announced that headphones were no longer required when listening to things in public (by the way, I know I’m on the right side of history when Adrian Chiles is ranting about the same issue).

There have been attempts to curb this decline, like signs reminding people to silence their smartphones and events prohibiting them. But I don’t want the only thing standing between a person and their rudeness to be a venue-mandated plastic pouch. In the words of Jennifer Aniston in The Break Up, I want you to want to do the dishes. I want the default way we exist in public to be one in which we don’t need to be reminded that other people are also having an experience. We already know and respect it.

Instead, nothing matters outside the world we’ve created between ourselves and the device in our hands. We might even be vaguely cognizant of the fact that our behavior is disruptive, but to who? If our most important relationship is with our phones, then everyone else is essentially an NPC. And if playing computer games as a kid taught me anything, it’s that NPCs are for running into over and over again to see how much you can annoy them. Now, as a grown-up, and apparent NPC myself, I know the answer—it’s a lot. You can annoy me a lot.