Chris Gassner | November 28, 2025 |
A smartphone in Shenzhen is not a device. It’s not a tool, it’s a body part. You don’t hold it – you are it. It buzzes, vibrates, beeps, blinks, as if to say: “Without me, you’re just a sweaty ape with loose change in your pocket.”
Faces? Almost gone. What you see now are silhouettes behind glass. People are only recognizable by their cases: pink with bunnies, black with skulls, transparent with crumbs. Sometimes I catch a face in the elevator and it startles me – like an archaeologist stumbling over a fossil he thought extinct: human expression. And the creepiest thing: in the dark, whole crowds glow like a colony of deep-sea fish, faces eerily lit from below by their screens, eyes hollow, skin bluish. It’s less public transport, more séance.
Cash? A relic. Whoever pays with coins in Shenzhen today is either a tourist, a time traveler, or part of a historical reenactment. Everything runs on QR codes – literally everything. The vegetable vendor with three heads of lettuce on a crate? QR code. The guy under the bridge selling used socks? QR code. Even the granny serving noodles out of a steaming plastic bowl has a laminated code taped to the wall – greasy, crooked, but absolutely scannable. Without a phone, you get nothing. Not even the toothpick that once came for free, floating in the oil film. And if you dare to offer cash, they look at you as if you just suggested paying with seashells.
The smartphone is a camera – but not in the old sense. It’s a belief system. Nothing is real unless it’s documented at least four times: top view, side angle, slow motion, and with a beauty filter. In restaurants, meals begin with a photographic foreplay ritual. Five minutes of filming noodles, five seconds of eating them. And heaven help the one who dares to take a bite before the camera rolls – they’ll be glared at as if they gnawed on baby Jesus.
And of course: the flashlight. Once a practical tool, now a worldview. Looking for keys, opening beer bottles, finding the right bus – all by phone light. I’ve seen people shine their phone into a chicken to check if it was “done.” That’s Shenzhen: high-tech colliding with chicken soup.
The smartphone is also a decibel meter. In bars, someone holds it up proudly: “118!” – as if it’s a new Olympic record. Noise used to be an annoyance, now it’s a screenshot. If you can’t post your noise level, you weren’t really there.
And it’s the buddy you always carry. Sit alone in a café? Don’t drink your coffee and read a book. No, you prop up your phone like a dinner guest, nodding and murmuring answers as if you’re in deep conversation with an AI that has more patience than your spouse. People don’t talk to people anymore – they talk to their algorithms.
The smartphone is music, television, calendar, office, doctor’s office, therapist, and dating agency rolled into one. Who needs therapy when you can be shouted at by TikTok for fifteen hours a day? Insomnia, stomach pain, existential crisis? No problem – there’s an app. And of course, it’s free, with ads.
And then: WeChat groups. Three hundred people in one chat, no one reading, everyone sending stickers: ducks with sunglasses, pandas with hearts, cats dancing in circles. And in between, like a message in a bottle, a serious reminder about taxes. Nobody reacts, but everyone feels “connected.” If I put my phone on silent, it takes exactly 0.7 seconds for 58 new notifications to land. Nobody will ever read them, but everybody fears missing the one crucial line: “Meeting moved to 7:30.”
At business meetings, the smartphone is already the real boss. Five people at the table, nobody listening, all staring at screens. The project update runs on an app, the minutes come from an app, and the coffee is ordered by an app. At the end you wonder: why did we even come in person? Probably because there’s no app yet that shakes hands for you.
On the metro it’s even more grotesque. A hundred people shoulder to shoulder, not one head lifted. Everyone glued to their display, each in a parallel universe: one bingeing on a Korean drama, another selling lipstick on livestream, another scrolling through photos of grilled intestines. Only when the signal drops does a collective silence spread – heads lift, eyes meet, a brief moment of humanity – until the bars return. Then, instantly, heads back down, the human sardine can resumes its digital monologue.
And the functions keep stacking up: the phone is therapist, flashlight, bedside lamp, fitness coach, weather station, breathalyzer, vibrator, karaoke machine, parking assistant, and virtual pet all at once. It replaces friends, calendars, notebooks, childhood memories, and sometimes even your opinion. No stance on an issue? Download one.
And as if that wasn’t enough: the smartphone also educates you. Every app comes with tips, reminders, recommendations. It tells you how much you drank, how long you slept, how many steps you took. You don’t know your own body anymore, but your phone does. Your body only exists once the app has confirmed it.
Smartphones in Shenzhen are not phones. They’re permanent electronic organs. Without them you feel amputated, half alive, useless. With them you don’t feel better, just busier. And so they all stand: in elevators, in the metro, in the office, in restaurants – heads down, screens glowing, everyone living in their own private parallel world that nobody dares to call “reality.”
Because reality is nothing more than what lights up when you swipe.
The greatest innovation of the smartphone is not the camera, but the fact that we’ve long forgotten how to look up at the sky without it.
Chris Gassner
September 18, 2025