The cops are on the case of your missing phone (Apple.com)

Good news for everyone who has had their iPhone stolen (or probably just lost it somewhere last night when they blacked out, but "stolen" sounds so much less humiliating): The NYPD has officially put out a memo telling its officers about the amazing Find My Phone app, which could allow them to retrieve your missing Apple product from the back of your taxi, where you left it.

From The New York Post:

"If a complainant is reporting the theft of an Apple Corp. product, ascertain if they have access to Apple's 'cloud' environment AND have previously activated 'location services' on said device."

But there's a catch. Well, two catches. The first being that you would have needed to activate your iCloud account before you lost--er--had your phone stolen, since otherwise the GPS-based tracking system will not be turned on.

Secondly, the NYPD does not provide its officers with iPhones, which you need in order to access the Find My Phone app. So hopefully someone at the precinct decided not to go with the Droid with the modified Taser function, and will be able to spend their time and taxpayers' dollars and hunting down missing 4gs.

Or you could save everyone the trouble and just ask your friend to borrow their iPhone,  in the off-chance that you are able to locate the phone by yourself with coordinates that line up to that bar your were partying at last night. Since there are obviously much better uses for Find My Phone, as demonstrated by this testimony on the app's website:

To start I am a Sheriffs Deputy, i have this device on my ipad and both my wifes and my own iphone 4. She recently wrecked our 2009 Dodge Charger in the country with our 6 month old daughter in the carseat. She was knocked unconsious. I could not reach her so i used the app and tracked her phone. I was an on duty officer who thanks to this very app was 1st on scene at my wifes accident and got her and our daughter the help they needed. Once i had the location I dispatched a medic and assistance while enroute. Thank you thank you Apple. Fyi they are both without serious injuries.

Still, having cops locate cellphone-stealing perps with Find My Phone beats their previous method of just pretending to be drunk.

All it's cracked up to be.

On a charming August night, The Observer was sitting on our fire escape with two friends, having cigarettes, having beer. We had brought out an iPhone dock, a diminutive speaker machine that plays music right from a mobile device, at a decent, but not offensive-to-the-neighbors, volume.

Then, with a jerk of an arm, there came a crash. The iPhone dock, nudged at, spun down four stories and smashed unceremoniously on the Houston Street sidewalk. Still affixed to the dock’s protruding metal slab was our iPhone. A retrieval trip downstairs found a young woman holding the mess of technology. She handed it sympathetically back to us.

We examined the damage. Not good. It had been crushed to a pulp. The frame had cracked considerably, the SIM card sputtered out like a rancid animal tongue and the once-sleek corners were marred beyond help.

But I was hardly the first victim of a battered iPhone.

Let’s play a game. Do you have a cracked one? Have you been careless enough to go caseless, a state of the phone where a single mishandling can lead to a nasty slit across your screen? Look at your phone, turn off the backlight, and rotate it slightly to catch a good reflection—maybe you haven’t even noticed, but there’s quite possibly a spindly wisp of a line running horizontally from left to right.

For the last few months, more friends and acquaintances have revealed the imperfections on their phones. They might even reveal with with pride—there’s a sort of community emerging.

We have been privy to the following conversation, with little variation, rather frequently of late.

“Oh, yours is cracked, too,” said a friend to a young lady, over dinner at a small French restaurant on Orchard Street in July.

“Yeah, it is!” she replied in solidarity.

He was getting her number when the recognition hit. They both had gashes in their glass. They took the phones out to compare and the faults nearly matched up, like two touched-together palms with lifelines of the same size.

“What happened?” said the first friend

“I dropped it,” she replied.

“Look at that,” he said.

Never fear, this is not cause for mourning, not a moment to lament these blemishes to the vaunted work of the industrial-design gods in Cupertino. The thing is: cracked iPhones are cool now! The splinters displayed as a badge of honor here in New York. You have your demolished jeans, you have your beat-up apartment in deep Bed-Stuy. Now you can have your tough-looking mobile personal communication device.

(Can iPhones come pre-cracked, to save time? Sure. Why not.)

Adjusting to the new reality, we found ourself newly in possession of a blighted device, the dark face that once sprang to life with a single click blanketed in a spider web of broken glass, chunks of the sharp stuff falling out as we turned it over in our fingers.

But you know what? It looked pretty awesome.

“I’ve noticed that some iPhone users see cracks as street cred,” a writer told me. “Like, I was balling out with my phone so hard that I dropped the thing, cracked it, and I’m STILL using it.’ A cracked iPhone is clearly superior to any other type of phone that doesn’t have a crack in it.”

We had put out a notice on Twitter—how iPhone-appropriate!—asking those who’ve carried around a shattered phone in their pocket to come clean. Some replaced them out of shame, others sucked it up.

“[I’m] on my 4th iPhone,” one said. “Parents said the cracked one(s) made me look poor.”

“Psh I’m still on smartphone I think lucky #13,” tweeted another. “Maybe this one will last more than 5 months???”

“Oh man, mine was shattered and the butt of jokes for MONTHS but then it got stolen,” said one more. “Does that count?”

Yes, that counts.

Oftentimes it’s just laziness keeping New Yorkers from fixing their phones. Brian Phothimat, a tech fixer-upper who claims to be able to replace your screen in “5-35 minutes,” said with discernable dismay that he knows people who wait inexcusable amounts of time to get new screens.

“I have clients who sometimes wait 2 to 3 months because it’s not that important to them,” he said

(He then noted he was on the phone from Hawaii, on vacation. In the event of a dropped phone in the next week, well, his clients would be flat out of luck.)

“It gets really bad—when they try to slide it in they cut their hands,” he went on. “Your cell phone is your livelihood! It’s not good to look at. I cracked my iPhone three times and I had to get it fixed right away!”

Well, evidently many others feel differently. After talking about this for a while, we started getting tips, unprompted, from friends. There would be cracked iPhones at parties, cracked iPhones at the office, cracked iPhones on buses in and out of the city.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, our iPhone buzzed with a text from a close college friend who had just finished brunch in Brooklyn with four male acquaintances.

“Playing Taboo at a beer garden,” the text read. “One of them has a cracked iPhone.”

“Noted,” we typed back.

Another ping.

“Apparently there’s a background that is a picture of a crack.”

That is true, but cracked backgrounds are only the beginning. At this moment, just a few single clicks and you will be in possession of cracked iPhone wallpapers, cracked iPhone screen savers, cracked iPhone apps and cracked iPhone games.

Not all cracked iPhone apps are made equal, mind you. Being thrifty, we first picked up “Crack Me Up Lite”—it was free—which does little more than let you browse through none-to-convincing pictures of impact-heavy glass, and then blow them up full screen. Boring. So we ponied up a dollar for “Shattered Screen Joke,” which added one key element of a cracked iPhone app: the high-pitched exaggerated ka-pleesh! sound that attempts to intimate what it sounds like when an actual accident occurs. A nice touch, but nothing close to the real thing.

The full version of “Crack Me Up,” however, is pretty stellar. When you load one of the backgrounds, you can shake your phone to add more and more cracks, each shatter accompanied by a satisfying crunch. If you don’t have the courage to scuff your iPhone up on the ground, this would no doubt suffice.

But how could The Observer even test these apps out, when our phone lay dormant and unblinking after the four-story fall? The day after, we ventured to the Soho Apple store, where the air was thick with discontent. Every five minutes, another citizen approached the genius bar with a crack, or an iPhone that wouldn't turn on, or a model gashed badly on its bottom USB dock.

The estimate for fixing our phone was $150, and we declined.

Luckily, a friend had an old phone he was set to donate. We met in Williamsburg to complete the exchange. He handed it over at a busy intersection, and as we headed off toward brunch, the sun bounced off the screen and through the blinding rays we saw, across the top, a big visible crack. We thanked him and slipped the phone into our pocket.

nfreeman@observer.com

Until 10 in the morning, a dozen attractive men and women—day laborers in film, public relations, media, fashion—drank Peroni, smoked cigarettes and indulged in cocaine as someone with an iPhone 4 blasted songs through the speakers. A girl sitting next to a Harvard M.B.A. student looked through a coffee table book of Todd Selby’s photography. There was a conversation going on about Twitter—most of those present kept a vigorously updated account.

Then came the sun—the traditional cue that one should choose a member of the opposite sex and set off for his or her apartment, to sleep together. Instead attendees departed alone. They peeled off instead of pairing up. No one at the party got laid that night and, even worse, no one gave a fuck.

YOUNG NEW YORKERS no longer care about having sex. It’s not the endgame, nor even the animating force of social interaction. Men and women still get dressed up, but not for the purpose of taking off their clothes in another’s company. What used to signify desire or the desire to be desired now boils down to narcissism. How will I look on Patrick McMullan tomorrow? Or just on Facebook? The Observer spent a few weeks at parties and gatherings fraught with abstinence but slack of any sexual tension, and we heard a repeated sentiment, often delivered with uncharacteristic fervor: “We are a self-obsessed generation.”

What devalued sex for 20-somethings in New York City? Social media networks, rather than bringing people together, encourage nothing so much as an orgy of self-congratulation. Anyone worried about accumulating Twitter followers could be racking up bedmates. The networks are omnipresent. Dueling iPhones rest on the nightstand. And if you sleep with someone, they’ll be all over five Firefox tabs for the next week.

“He was in my Twitter feed, on my Tumblr dash, in my Gchat group, writing the articles I read,” a young woman who works at an Internet start-up told The Observer, over Gmail chat. “It’s like you don’t want to become attached with someone else’s online identity—or known because of someone else’s online identity, who you’re dating. You want your own, damn it.”

There are aggravating factors. Cocaine is again going around, and everyone would rather stay up doing it than going to bed. Cab rides from downtown back to Bushwick with a potential paramour ruin the mood and are best avoided. But the most prominent cause for the shift is the way the codes of online interaction has been transferred to the mores of New York socializing.

The platonic cliques spend all day tweeting at each other, forming exclusive @-reply feeds that appear only to them, and at night flock to the same bars, clubs and after-parties. It’s harder to go home with someone knowing that you’ll be seeing their avatar the next morning and every morning after that.

“New York is too dense; you’re running into people all the time, everyone knows everyone,” said a male consultant in his mid-20s. “Sex just doesn’t make sense—it’s dirty.”

It was around 2 a.m., and The Observer was sitting with the consultant at a booth, presumably taken from a diner, that has abetted the consumption of thousands of cigarettes. It now rests by the panoramic windows in his Delancey Street apartment, which doubles as his office. Noise is insulated from neighbors, and there is ample crowd space. On the wall hangs a glass marlin named Marlin Brando. It’s a swell place to stay up all night drinking, doing drugs and not finding other people to sleep with.

For a while, the apartment has welcomed last-call castoffs who arrive around 4 or 5 a.m.—a mix of nightlife promoters, musicians, aspiring actresses, friends connected through college, television personalities, Google employees, gossip reporters, skate kids and writers for The New York Times. And, in the past, certain attendees would see former sexual partners.

“It’s gross to be, like, at a party and there’s five people you’ve had sex with, but you don’t really even have a relationship with them to the point that you’d even say hi,” the consultant said. “I’ve noticed that happen at parties here. It’s just … awkward.”

But such encounters have become less likely, he added.

“It’s come to a point where people don’t necessarily want to do that anymore.”

No, they don’t. Sex is antithetical to the way they socialize, disruptive to the larger plan, a gateway to chaos in a digitally ordered world.

AT A WRAP PARTY for a film shot in downtown Manhattan, underpaid and raccoon-eyed film assistants sucked dry the open bar, and after shmoozing with the producers—the key grips and set managers needed new gigs—they poured out clumsily onto the Bowery, to head home. They were tired.

“My hours are so fucking absurd,” an office production assistant on the film told The Observer. “I work a minimum 12 hours a day and up to 14 or 16, and you don’t have time to bring anyone into the equation. If having sex with someone won’t fit in your schedule, it’s just not gonna happen.”

The same cadre from that previous Saturday morning party reconvened a few days later for comped gin cocktails at a Lower East Side speakeasy. The good-looking men and women sat with plenty of space between them. 

“Twenty-somethings are wary of sex,” said one, a young man who works at a hedge fund. “It’s not 1998.”

It was the same at Kenmare, where we sat in the back nook between a photographer-DJ—his art collective has a prominent Tumblr—and a striking fashion model.

“Capitalism has replaced sex,” the model said into our ear, a black, flat-rimmed hat crowning her blond hair and waifish features. We were sharing a hidden cigarette. She then took the half-empty Stella on the table and disappeared into the crowd, and The Observer left alone to get a cab home.

THERE IS, HOWEVER, hope for these poor souls, sexless in the city; younger kids are poised to take their places.

The Observer ran into Sofia Black D’Elia and James Newman, the teenaged stars of Skins, at a party at Jimmy, the sleek lounge on top of the James. Ms. D’Elia is television’s coquette of the moment, Mr. Newman her well-cheekboned onscreen counterpart. They were sneaking Champagne, gussied up and beguiling, their hungry eyes recalling the racy ads for their show. You know the posters: They plaster subway trains and imbue the minds of commuters with their first naughty thoughts of the day.

The Observer asked them why young people in New York don’t want to have sex.

They both laughed.

“That’s a funny idea!” Ms. D’Elia said.

“I haven’t actually, um, heard that?” Mr. Newman said.

“I’m 19, so I don’t t
hink I can weigh in,” Ms. D’Elia said.

Mr. Newman gave her a mischievous smirk.

“Both of us are kind of right out of high school,” he said. “We’re in that period where you supposedly ‘lose it.’”

“Everything makes you assume that this is Your Time,” Ms. D’Elia said. “For example, the media …”

“Or, for example, television shows …” The Observer said.

“Yes,” Ms. D’Elia laughed. “For example.”

They may be onto something. The adolescent heat of Skins is an MTV put-on, but on the show, their cell phones—not iPhones—are a means to an end. The texts are always sexts. They don’t seek to expand their persona within a scene, online or otherwise. The carnality is evident and, to some in New York, enviable.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it with someone who’s a good writer,” a young woman, who is a journalist in New York, said over Gmail chat. “Because all it comes down to, really, is whether he/she smells good and can wiggle around well.”

“I agree!” The Observer typed back.

The words stopped coming, and then Gmail indicated she had entered text.

“Being naked, warm and squirming with someone in a bed has nothing to do with the Internet,” her Gmail chat message read. “Never has, never will!”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

In light of the multiple deaths and the resulting press coverage, including a sprawling Bloomberg Businessweek cover last September, an Ad Age story reports that Foxconn founder Terry Gou has hired the Burson-Marsteller public relations firm to help brighten its reputation. The agency, which is run by the longtime political pusher Mark Penn, will also help oversee Gou's attempt to expand Foxconn operations into the U.S. 

Companies such as Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Dell all rely on Foxconn to manufacture their products, but the recent string of suicides hasn't exactly been great for Gou's reputation. The Bloomberg Businessweek piece said the deaths have prevented Gou from being "Henry Ford reincarnated," and noted that the founder did not take action until the fifth worker took his or her life.

Penn, who's kept a relatively low profile since his failed stint as the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, caught flack last week when he said that because President Clinton's response to the Oklahoma City bombings reconnected him to the American people, President Obama needs a disaster of his own to occur in order to help his approval ratings.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

What he hasn't done, however, is send a tweet.

"I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by and you wonder, what did I do today?" Packer said in the parts of "5 Tips for Reporting on Anything" that somehow made it to the cutting room floor. "And those are bad days, as far as I'm concerned. That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it, it's because I would be a slave to it and I don't want that to happen. I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse."

It's too bad Packer won't be getting on the Twitter train — many of his pieces would be perfect to tweet with a #longreads tag.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234