Rube Goldberg Machines, Cell Phones, and Free Will

Not long ago, a trip to Chicago found me in the food area of the Science & Industry museum, staring transfixedly at a decorated and intricate Rube Goldberg machine, carrying a small, ordinary steel ball down a sprawling track. The machine was filled with small details and little passageways that were sure to delight any onlooker, and sure enough, I stood there entranced for an irrationally long amount of time, snapped out of it finally by some minute distraction that proved to be nothing of significance.

Rube Goldberg machines are named after, no prizes for guessing correctly, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg. His canon of work is most famous for an idea that he seemed to find quite amusing and therefore was the subject of most of his strips: using excessively complex mechanisms simply to automate one part of a simple, everyday task, such as this early drawing of a self-operating napkin, and another notably insensitive one depicting a way to get rid of olive pits.

Of course, as one can immediately see, this kind of machinery is wildly inefficient and even more so ineffective, but for Rube, they were simply manifestations of some abstract comic desire to unnecessarily overcomplicate the most menial tasks, for no reason other than some kind of weird enjoyment.

Over time, “Rube Goldberg Machine” entered the vernacular as a needlessly complicated but fun way of solving everyday problems. People began building their own Rube Goldberg machines, and eventually they became far more about the intricacy and the enjoyable display than the actual end product—usually moving a small ball from one place to another. The machines work by a simultaneous genius and tomfoolery. Watching one, you become like me in the museum—utterly transfixed, taken out of your world and into the brilliant mechanics of the contraption.

The whole idea of a Rube Goldberg Machine is not to perform the task, but to make the viewer so mesmerized they don’t want to look away. It should be asked, though—what happens when something is so addictive that you can’t look away? Surely this is something that no one would subject themself to, right? Wrong. The great check on the power of Rube Goldberg Machines is that, eventually, the process ends. When you are staring at a cell phone, the feed never stops. As everyone who has that annoying friend who doesn’t look up when the waiter comes could tell you, “cell phone addiction” has become an actual psychological phenomenon. As early as 2015, scientists were exploring the nature of phone addiction and its relationship to the characters of the addicts, finding that those who were impulsive, materialistic, in need of arousal, emotionally unstable, and conscientious were in particular danger of becoming hooked on their mobile devices. Of course, this obfuscates a fact central to the discussion of cell phone addiction, which is that cell phones and the culture that has been made around them has amplified those traits in all of us. Cell phones are designed to hook people who are impulsive and materialistic, but their algorithms are then designed to make us those very things. It’s a vicious cycle, and a damn well thought out one.

As I sat there staring at the machine in Chicago, all of these thoughts swirling through my brain, I thought to myself: cell phones are a perpetual Rube Goldberg Machine, yes, but who is the ball? Is it the feed, or is it us? The hidden conceit of these contraptions is that we are both the observer and the observed. We watch things on the platform, and the platform watches us. It reminds me of the classic Russian Reversal joke by Arte Johnson: “Here in America…everyone watches television. In the old country, television watches you.” Do the feeds exist to inform us, or do we exist to inform them? That’s not a rhetorical question—I don’t have an answer. Maybe it’s a false dichotomy, and it’s possible to inform feeds and be informed by them. One thing is for sure, though—the charm that comes from Rube Goldberg Machines is that they are silly, transitory, and inconsequential, but cell phones are none of those things. As we enter this new age, it is important to remember that while we may think we are watching a ball being rolled around endlessly powerlessly, we may be just as paralyzed as it is.

As I wrote on the back of a receipt later that day, “what if we’re the silver balls?”

Thank you for staying hopeful.

—P.R.