Good news from the mayor’s office! It’s a proposed new law that may restore Seattle to the quality of life it had when I first came here in 1952.
But first, how many of you remember when tourists asked directions?
I’d always like to say, “I love to give tourists directions — to Sea-Tac!” But now, that happy zinger has lost its zest. Tourists don’t ask directions anymore. They have an app for that.
You can’t even ask them for directions. Or what planet they think they’re on. Because they’re so busy staring at the little screen in front of their faces, and they can’t hear you.
But do you care? Probably not. You’re staring at your own little screen. What the heck are you all looking at that’s so engaging? Please tell me it’s porn. I’d hate for it to be Angry Birds, or kitty pictures. I want to think better of you all.
City governments everywhere have been mulling over the repercussions of these behaviors on the quality of city life. You may have heard of the Broken Windows Theory, which states that minor but ugly misbehaviors create an atmosphere of disorder and lawlessness that encourages significant crime. A Broken Conversations Theory has emerged.
It’s simple. If people don’t ask directions of each other on the sidewalk, if they don’t share small talk at bus stops or in coffee shops, then they won’t communicate in more important ways. The gift of speech has to be, uh, fed dry-food treats all day, so that, um, well, I lost that thread. But, anyway, I think we get it.
No small talk, and people stop knowing how to communicate. City Council meetings will regularly break out into brawls, not just in the audience but among the councilmembers. Families will unravel. We’ll forget how to speak. We won’t remember what “zero dockus mucho crockus halabaluzabub” means. Or someone in a fast food restaurant will hand you a piece of paper that says “42” on it, and they’ll say, “Your order number is 42,” and you’ll walk away dazed. You’ll return to the little screen.
As I’ve said, city governments all over America are taking the Broken Conversations Theory into consideration, including ours. Ed Murray’s solution is simple and direct. He will ban smartphones wherever he can legally do so.
The law can’t reach into homes or coffee shops, but it will apply to all public spaces. That’s public parks, bus stops and sidewalks. No devices will be confiscated. The law will be enforced by fines.
In a funny twist, the plan is to come up with an app you can use to get an electronic version of each ticket right on your mobile device. So the message is, “we don’t hate technology, we only hate what you were doing with it.”
Officers will be instructed to only ticket people who spend more than 30 seconds continuously staring at a mobile device screen and/or texting, within a public space.
Even though the proposal was only announced quietly yesterday, some groups have already raised objections. There’s the obvious concern of retailers that this law could reduce the sale of smartphones. This is simply silly. That will no more happen than will cracking down on public imbibing reduce sales of malt liquor. People will just partake in alleys, out of sight from the police. And no one will care, as long as it stays out of sight.
A more serious concern has been raised by some business leaders. They point out, we think rightly, that the law could have a disparate impact on people of higher means, as poor people are more likely to have “dumb phones” with no internet, and so would be far less likely to get spotted by police looking for offenders.
Murray’s office has an answer for that. “We’ve already been getting poor people in our nets, look at the ordinance we just came up with that bans smoking in city parks. This law only evens it out a little.”