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The voice comes from over my shoulder, cheery but somehow grating, exhorting me to buy some sort of frozen slurpy drink. It rattles on, touting slurpy wonders, as I try to fill my Mini in peace. Ads that were once trapped inside TVs or stuck to paper now fly through the air, aimed with velocity at every one of us. To think, I used to object to Muzak’s canned sound waves. I would take that crappy music back like a lost lover.
With herculean effort, it is possible to take control of your own devices, silence the beeps and auto-plays, stop the pop-ups and refrain from tilting your phone awake every three minutes. But how do I avoid the gas station voice? Wear a noise-canceling headset every time I need to fill the tank? I used to think people who walked around with earbuds were hooked on their own sounds; now I wonder if they are mainly trying to cancel all the rest. Honks and revved engines, but also buzzers and clicks and the unstoppable information flooding in, pinging you, demanding your attention.
I wrote about this in a different way a few weeks ago, after I read Karl Ove Knausgard’s description of tech as a barrage of “dead matter speaking with our voice.” It turns the whole world into information coming at us, and “now that voice is everywhere…. It fills in every gap and crack.” This is the most distinctive feature of our time, he says: that “everything addresses us.”
When I check a quick fact with AI, it offers to rewrite its answer for me, presumably so I can paste it as my own. When I put the piece up on our site, AI asks if I would like the social-media summary rewritten. When I post it (with my own summary) on LinkedIn, I am asked if I would like my post rewritten.
Ironies chase us: tech is supposed to give us more control, yet high-tech societies are falling apart because people feel out of control. Tech is supposed to make life easier, and it does, yet it is also condescending, maddening, frazzling, and obsequious, and we expend vast amounts of energy guarding our minds and our money from its reach.
I vent my frustration in an email to two dear friends, one twenty years younger and a tech whiz, the other an editor my age. It was he who sent the Knausgaard piece to both of us. “When I hired a firm to build our website, I explicitly made sure that nothing moves, speaks, or pops up unless the visitor wants it to do so,” he replies now. “I see visitors as guests to our house. We treat them with respect, rather than bombard them with stuff we want them to see or do. People ought to choose to engage with tech, not be forced into it.” We talk about how coercive various technologies can be, with their rapid obsolescence and all that preloaded software that comes back every time you try to disable it. Profit hunger dictates every innovation, drives every annoyance.
By now I am wondering what our younger, tech-expert friend will make of our grumbling. “This is just the latest iteration of stuff being foist upon us,” I continue. “Remember all the blaring jingles and piles of junk mail? But this form feels the most invasive and insidious, because they’ve gotten so good at the psychology, the gamification, the intrusion. Unless you hike off the grid, which is increasingly harder to do, it follows you everywhere.”
Enter our friend. “I keep thinking that what we’re calling tech alienation is mostly just familiar annoyances showing up in unfamiliar ways,” he writes. “Not worse, not darker, just less integrated into the world we already understand. We’ve been putting up with physical junk mail for decades. Nobody loves it, but nobody blames the mailbox. Same with background music on hold lines and cumbersome forms and processes. Bureaucracy has always been opaque, condescending, unintuitive—and essential to everyday life. But when those same dynamics show up through a screen, they feel somehow more offensive. I don’t think it’s because they are. I think it’s because we haven’t built the same mental furniture for them yet. They’re not part of the landscape we (you more so!) grew up navigating. So they land harder. They feel rude, alien, over-designed, out of sync with the body or the room.
“That discomfort doesn’t come from the object,” he continues. “It comes from distance. From being outside something that’s moving faster than an unadapted intuition can follow. And because we don’t know how to relate to it, we assume the thing itself is cold, even hostile. But tech doesn’t invent the noise. It just turns the dial up. It’s an amplifier, and what it’s amplifying is the same cultural garbage that annoyed us before: the push to monetize attention, the pressure to optimize every moment, the little humiliations of not being seen or listened to. The deeper pattern here is about what we’re willing to tolerate. We’re used to some frictions, so we don’t question them. Others feel new, and that makes them feel wrong. Familiarity softens the offense. Novelty sharpens it.”
I am nodding, reluctantly, as I read. What he says makes sense. But the amplification is exponential, supercharged, and harder for the rest of us to control. Also, there is that uncanny new piece: the ability to pretend to be human. Old forms of advertising and money-getting figured out which bright colors to use, what desire to fan. But new tech uses neuroscience, crawling deep inside our brain, and artificial intelligence, mimicking it.
There are plenty of times, and there will be more and more of those times, when it does not matter whether we are “interfacing” with a machine or a human being. But machines do not have experiences or emotions or souls or fears or hopes or regrets or loves or losses, and you cannot count on them for genuine commiseration or empathy. Nor can you appeal to their moral sense. They simply roll on, developed for profit, speed, ego, and efficiency, with scant regard for nature or spirit. And they are choreographing our daily lives, setting the pace, flattening idiosyncrasy, always nudging us toward something faster or briefer or more typical.
The editor and I wax nostalgic about older tech, typewriters we were fonder of than I could never be of a computer. Our friend says that is because the old tech was “tactile, mechanical, honest in its limitations. The new stuff doesn’t offer the same feedback. Its failures are abstract, inaccessible, sometimes silent, and that unreadability makes it feel like betrayal. The shift isn’t just technical, it’s almost ontological. It unseats people not because of what it is, but because of how it demands to be understood on terms they didn’t choose. But that’s the point: the part that irritates is usually the part that’s not on your terms. Tech is taking all the things you already disliked—triviality, noise, rudeness, interruption—and delivering them in a format you don’t have any control over. You don’t even have the ability to get a ‘Fuck you!’ registered or acknowledged by the machine. That’s why pumping gas while being yelled at by an ad feels worse than leafing through a dozen coupons in your mail pile. One you walked into voluntarily. The other springs out of nowhere and claims your attention. But both are expressions of the same economic logic. Capitalism isn’t sneakier because it’s digital. It’s just louder.”
Maybe the two of us feel besieged, he adds, because we cannot feel at rest with the technology. “You haven’t molded it to fit you, because the material isn’t one you know how to work with.”
I see that the opacity, and my inability to penetrate it, makes the new landscape more shadowy. I agree that tech is an amplifier—of the annoyances, the manipulative power, and the price we must pay to keep up. But it is an amplifier that can change the sound at the source. Before it raises the volume, it steals our voice, and deadens it.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
