He stumbled into the app after an hour and a half of what the kids kept referring to as doom scrolling. In his time the only thing close to scrolling was the dirty habit of flipping through channels; pressing his thumb down on the remote again and again until he was back where he started, maybe 300 or more channels ago. There weren’t that many channels on the TV anymore. Well, maybe there were. He no longer owned one. His only connection to the outside reality was the oblong titanium and hardened glass block he held between his hands, flicking his thumb up over and again until the movement felt like a twitch and made his hand ache.
That was around the time he found it.
The app–if that is what it truly was–appeared in the form of a commercial. It occurred to Lawrence that they still had those in this new landscape where the channels never ended but each offered slews of much much shorter programming. The app was wedged between a still photo of a boy holding a chicken in one hand and a baseball in the other and a short video of a woman who was probably hispanic wearing a short skirt and walking out of a building. He didn’t know who she was anymore than he knew who the boy was, but as he watched her for the third time he thought about that brief instant between where a purple banner had implored him to swipe left for more.
Growing tired of the woman, he flicked his thumb in the opposite direction and found the add to still be present. The top of the bright purple screen read: Turn Your Days into Magic! There was an image of a black top hat below it, and below that were the instructions to swipe to the left. He did as instructed. From his experience this leftward swipe usually meant an extension of the front page moment–more pictures, a short video, a quote, often someone relating their moment to God or Jesus or Jordan. In this case it was none of those. In fact, it was a black screen.
He swiped again: Black screen.
There is a familiarity between the various forms of social media; a set of rules a cues that are not dissimilar to the old days of universal remotes. You always know where you are and how to use things based on the buttons. Without buttons, persay, social media relied on visual cues. In the case of side swiping it was always about the number of dots. The more dots, the more times you needed to swipe to the left. Except with this particular page, there were only 3 dots. He swiped 11 times, each one coming up black. He swiped back twice and found himself on the original top hat. This was very curious. He tried it again, swiping fifteen times. At first he thought that he was witnessing a glitch, as he was certain that something happened every time his thumb shifted from center to left. Yet he couldn’t be certain, so he went back to the first page and he decided to switch thumbs.
He did this several times, eventually swiping as many as seventeen times before a quick return to the first page. Never did he reach the end. Sighing Lawrence started to move his thumb up, but something stopped him. He sat there, both thumbs hovering over the purple page with the black top hat. Then, as fast as he could, he swiped left.
There was something there–between the screens. He did it again. He swiped as fast as he could again and again, thumbs working in a dance of movement faster and faster to reveal that hint of white between the black screens. With each successive swipe more of the white was revealed. His hands were moving in a blur. His thumbs felt like they were on fire. Still he kept going, peeling away the black to reveal was was underneath. He did this for a very long time, until finally he stopped.
There it was. The black was gone now and in its place was a white rabbit. The bunny stared at the screen with sullen red eyes and a nose rounded like a button. Lawrence knew what he needed to do next.