A phone is a mere inert object apart from the attention directed into it.

Evidence

I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 131

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the key idea that attention is the faculty that constitutes a world; the phone’s power is entirely attentional in origin. — connects to: The smartphone created a new social norm of perpetual device attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1039