Being a young man in the mid 1990s was pretty great. If you had logged on to the ”net” via a 14.4 whatever modem that made loud sounds like avant garde music, and if you knew how, you could get an e-mail address from CompuServe that was just a bunch of numbers. And you could have a cellphone with an antenna and a chunky battery that made your ear feel warm and fuzzy. What a strange feeling of hyper-modernity that brought…
This feeling only lasted for about a year, because by then the floodgates were already opened, and all the internet-based digi-demons passed through and into our unsuspecting bio-logical minds. Everything was too late in so many ways, and yet you gladly accepted it because so much of the technological progress served you so well in whatever you were up to (in my case, a lot!). It was almost as if someone had conceptualized it all in detail, and now catered to the whims and fancies of the up and coming generation of creatives, as well as of consumers. Everyone was hooked for life.
I am very happy to sound as old and nostalgic as I’m about to now: Wow! To have lived without cellphones (whether ”dumb” or ”smart” doesn’t really matter); to have lived without computers, and, most importantly, to have lived without the internet… What a blessing that is! I can get back to that mind-frame without any problem at all, and suddenly everything around me becomes visceral, physical, metaphysical, pleasantly causal, real, and surreal even. Dare I also say more ”human?”
Is this nostalgic mind-frame/memory a longing for an actual heightened sense of human existence, or perhaps just a temporary compensation of a fragmented contemporary brain involved in a thousand and one technological causalities?
I think I’ll go for both affirmative answers; quite simply because I can.
If we want to cock an eye on something Evil in this conundrum, it would have to be the concept of ”making things easier.” An elevation of laziness, cutting corners, and complacency, often hiding behind advertising catch phrases like ”smarter,” ”easier,” and ”time- and money-saving.” None of this has been true of course – it’s been exactly the opposite, actually.
The gadgets haven’t made us smarter in any way. Sure, it might be easier to press a button than to perform a task. But it also quickly sensitizes you so that you actually fear any real, visceral challenge; you would rather press that button or, even better, have someone else do it for you. This inherently makes life harder and us dumber. And we are certainly not saving time nor money; on the contrary, we’re wasting a lot of both thanks to all our machines and their interconnections.
A challenge for the daring: sum up your screen time each day, and consider how much – sorry, how little – of whatever you look at/consume is genuinely essential to your life.
Like any addiction, it’s hard to break away. When interest dwindles because of inevitable techno-ennui, a new gadget, platform or app zooms on by, and we’re hooked again to something even more addictive. We have also allowed it to develop to the point where real necessities can only be handled via web tech (pity the older generations!); paying the bills, getting in touch with authorities and companies, acquiring societal information. So much has been handed over to faith in that these things will work out. But do they, really? And will they in the future that is getting closer by the day?
The ever so important customer service that you might reach after being on hold for aeons will likely be AI-generated and surprisingly dumb. I recently tried to explain my question to responding voices that are literally dead; conveying messages back to me that make no sense – because these advanced answering machines are not human, nor intelligent. (But they sure paint snazzy & trippy digital pictures based on what you tell them to, or write up some quasi thesis or paper that allows you pass your exam because the crust of perception is thin, and, after all, aren’t we all swimming in a cess pool of simulacra anyway?)
I know how this will end. Not by nuclear wars or pandemics. No, the critical mass point will arise when the servers hosting social media platforms and all its gazillion selfies specifically can no longer host the exponentially increasing input. One tiny overheated server breakdown will lead to a domino effect of everything computerized crashing, including power supplies, and the logistics of ”supply chains” (sounds like something from the days of slavery, doesn’t it?) in general. The emperor bitterly realizes that he’s been naked all along, and now can’t find the old clothes that used to keep him warm.
Rest assured: there will be many selfies taken at the time of the apocalypse, but… ”why am I not online? Why isn’t the server uploading my selfie? OMG, I can’t seem to update my feed…”
And then we all die!
