Left to Our Own Devices by Margaret E. Morris

Author:Margaret E. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social media; technology; Twitter; Facebook; Tinder; Grindr; Internet; cell phones; dating apps; social networking; texting
Publisher: The MIT Press

One Space, Two Places

Like Mary, Ellen didn’t have trouble remembering exactly. She had trouble changing her behavior to align with a goal that haunted her: she had repeatedly resolved to stop eating at the end of meals and cease snacking between them. Ellen had never been overweight, but she had an obsessive preoccupation with eating and had worked for years to manage it. Setting intentions hadn’t helped her. What did help was changing her environment. She kept her kitchen empty, except for some tea in a cupboard. She knew that if she kept food at home, she would snack incessantly. She had been through cycles of extreme dietary restrictions and excessive violations. Many years earlier, a friend with similar struggles suggested an approach that had worked for her: eat all three meals out, ideally with others. That worked for Ellen, too.

But then her relationship with David got serious, and they moved in together. David wanted to be supportive but was frustrated. She knew what he must have been thinking: How could someone lack the control to stop eating, especially something as bland as crackers? He had previously lost over fifty pounds without emptying out his kitchen or inconveniencing others. He wanted the option of eating breakfast at home, having snacks he could grab from the cupboard, or preparing a meal without going to the store. Ellen didn’t want to withhold these basic pleasures from him and was ashamed of her lack of restraint. The stocked kitchen was wreaking havoc on her eating, though, unraveling years of progress.

At the same time that Ellen and David moved in together, she started working from home. Now there were many more hours of the day that she had to contend with the kitchen. And there was always some kind of stress—ambiguous assignments or contentious emails that she would ordinarily bounce off the colleagues sitting beside her. Almost everything that showed up on her computer added to her stress. In the cupboards, she sought some kind of buffer zone where she could process things before responding. But the grazing was becoming as much a cause of anxiety as a response to it. She felt terrible about her lack of control.

She asked David to keep certain snacks in his bag or car instead of the kitchen—a mobile mini-mart to which she would not have access. When he rejected that idea, she wondered aloud about a lock for one of the cabinets. David shuddered to think about the effect that this would have on their own interactions, let alone the awkwardness that would arise with guests.

David had been experimenting with magnetic locks in other projects and began thinking about how they could work with the do-it-yourself “maker” programming tools that he often used. After researching electromechanical locks online, he found one that had been used for cattle fences. Both components of this lock would easily fit inside the cabinet. He then programmed a Raspberry Pi (a tiny computer commonly used in the maker community) to control a relay that switches the magnetic lock on and off.

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