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All of this strikes me as a truth we have unlearned: watching children film their own genocide in HD, watching those videos flash onto my screen, sharp, immediate, unbearable, reminds me how deeply false the smartphone narrative really is. The ruling classes, bourgeois, technophiles, pundits, like to see it as a luxury, a marvel, a tool of expression or emancipation. It is not a luxury. It is a concession. A high-tech handout hurled at the dispossessed, the global South, the unwanted, so we will shut up, so we will feel “equipped,” when in reality we have been stripped of everything. Children with no roof, with most of their loved ones already dead, no sleep, no future, but still a phone to record their own agony.

The whole world can see, but does not anymore. Because everything passes. Because everything is designed to circulate, dissolve, be forgotten. I hold a smartphone in my hand, or rather a glowing coffin. A toxic offering from the world they are leaving us. It is neither a luxury nor a privilege. It is a bone thrown at the defeated. The bombs fall. Families vanish between two Instagram stories. No more homes. No more water. No more society. No more pause.

And yet, in the middle of the devastation, there are still those damn smartphones, gripped in the hands of the survivors, even children, who must, or choose to, film their own end. The smartphone is not a luxury. It is the fetish of terminal capitalism. What it leaves us. What it throws at us. What it implants in us to make up for all it has destroyed.