Based on what I’ve been reading, when you started working at Nokia a mobile phone cost four thousand dollars, and only a millionaire or a madman could buy one. I’m sure you remember. I couldn’t even imagine such a thing existed — only in science fiction films. Some of the worst people in the world bought them: wealthy men from Wall Street, Hollywood producers, real estate magnates. Even this extravagance had an enormous waiting list, thousands long.
Nearly ten years later, when you were already president of the Cellular Systems division at Nokia, you signed an agreement with Motorola to share the intellectual property underlying phone calls. This made it possible to establish an open standard, one in which all companies could participate, so that all of us could call all of us without trouble. In the press release you said that “open architecture will be the key factor in the acceptance and success of GSM on a worldwide basis.” And it was true. You knew it even then — that those connections were what mattered most.
What I want to ask you, Sari, is whether you ever closed your eyes and saw all of this that surrounds us now. Not only the good, the wonderful, the intensely human. How could you have known about the Internet, for instance, which would carry the phone into becoming something else entirely. It must have surprised you too.
The girl working in this café where I am writing you this letter is working, but she is also talking on her mobile phone every second she is not actively attending to a customer. I watch her talk while she operates the espresso machine and makes those small shapes with the frothed milk on the surface of the coffee. I think she’s talking to her mother, for several hours at a stretch. They talk about their lives, about their sisters. She narrates the life of the café to her — tells her what’s happening with the customers, who they are, when they leave. I wonder what she’ll say about me, once I’m gone.
It’s difficult to speculate about these one-sided conversations we now hear everywhere. Lawyers arguing with their clients, boyfriends talking to their girlfriends, parents with children, lovers with lovers. What seems clearest to me is that people always want to be somewhere else, with someone else. Perhaps you imagined that too, looking out the window of your office in Helsinki — that city I always picture in winter, in a very short day with darkness at its edges.
I must confess I resisted at first. By 2003 there were already one billion mobile subscribers in the world. I was not one of them, because frankly the idea of being available and findable at all times seemed terrible to me. I was a young woman and a nonconformist. But it was around that year that I gave in. My first phone was a Nokia, as it happens. A little brick. Sending a text message cost a small amount of money. The device only worked within the strict coverage limits of the city.
And then, not long after, the iPhone arrived and the phone stopped being a phone and became a computer. Half the world’s population was connected by mobile. I didn’t know that at the time, but I’m certain that number was right at your fingertips. What strikes me most is that the first twenty years of all this were slow, technical, silent. And the next twenty were explosive, uncontrolled, incendiary.
I don’t know if you’ve taken an Uber lately. I don’t know if there’s Uber in Finland, where labor rights still exist. In my city there are now self-driving taxis, but I haven’t wanted to make that leap — I’ve had that other resistance. Not long ago I called one and the man driving it had his mobile camera pointed at himself, in a continuous live stream to his house, where a woman lay resting, watching television, saying nothing. At least not while I was in the car. In this constant video call, there were the two of them — him and this woman — in an extraordinary exercise in telepresence, spending time together. Who wouldn’t rather be at home than driving a strange woman to hers? Who wouldn’t prefer a less precarious economy, where a single job was enough to let us sit together all night and say nothing, in front of one screen?
Sari, those silent calls are the ones I find hardest to understand. Who are you leaving behind; where is it you want to be? What distance separates your body from your own life? If it weren’t for survival, for work, for capitalism, where would any of us be in the world? We are all displaced now, in one way or another — walking alone, talking to ourselves through invisible earphones, like madmen.
I know you spent several years in Asia and the Pacific, not only working but also traveling and learning. I’ve read that you were more interested in understanding other cultures, in understanding yourself, than in the demands of shareholders. But so little is known that I’m left to speculate: you are a Finnish woman with no personal history to speak of, save your devotion to the Savonlinna Opera Festival, which takes place in a medieval castle.
Every morning I sit on the balcony, at a position and an hour that lets me watch one of the women who maintains the building arrive. I have never seen this woman take her eyes off her phone. They are fixed on the screen when she’s walking over, when she pushes the mop and broom, when she tries to reach the highest corners, and when she finally leaves at the end of the day. I don’t dare get close enough to know what she’s doing, who she’s talking to, what she sees in that oracle of glass. I don’t want to interrupt her — it would be like breaking a spell.
This same trance is what nearly every inhabitant of the earth is carrying. I see it on public transit, in the park, in the museum, at the cinema. In waiting places and workplaces, in dull places and in places where we’re supposed to want to be, with the people we love most. There is no difference anymore. We are all in several worlds at once.
In 2004 you left Nokia citing personal reasons and therefore mysterious ones. By everyone’s measure you were at the peak — one of the women who owned the world. There was no drama, no memoir, no circuit of interviews and conferences. You simply disappeared. I don’t want to know what you thought, or how you chose. I don’t want to know where you are; I don’t want anyone else to know either. I want to know what it feels like to be in a castle surrounded by a thousand lakes, contemplating a vast and eternal solitude, an inscrutable language, an intentional disconnection.