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I just keep letting my technology fail.
Our ancient TV is so blurred, I cannot read the plot summaries from the sofa, and I have to get up anyway, because the remote is not fully functional. My car has gone wonky, so that airbag warnings appear now and then (random, unwarranted) and block the time and temperature and anything else I might need to know. The aux cord that connects my iPhone so I can hear podcasts goes out intermittently, and I have to yank it out and forgo the podcast so I can hear the GPS. My computer freezes periodically, like a shy teen when the relatives arrive. Can it save? Will it pull up the webpage? Will it show me the letters I have keyed? The pull cord for the light in my bedroom closet has to be held with one hand while I sift through clothes with the other. Even the knob on my office desk light has to be turned on just so, slid forward then back, then forward and held, about ten times before it flickers on.
For a long while, I just figured I was either lazy or cheap, neither of which would surprise me. But I am starting to see a pattern here. I prefer the low-tech workarounds. Even when the tech is no more complicated than a light bulb’s connection, tugging on that cord feels friendly and quirky, like knowing where to bang on a vending machine to get it to spit out a candy bar. And with the phone and computer and car, the enforced making do offers a reprieve from anything slick and fast, new and reliable. The world feels quieter, somehow.
I am musing on this, wondering how long I will muddle along with these various incapacities, when I read Karl Ove Knausgard’s meditation on tech—its deliberate opacity, its omnipresence, its way of deluding us that we know the reality of something when it has given us only a scribbled two-dimensional outline. The images are lively, the simulations seductive, yet the world they render is thin, abstract, stripped of experience. He writes of the deadness of the computer’s generated voice, and how, courtesy of AI, “now that voice is everywhere…it is dead matter speaking with our voice. And if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us.”
Pumping gas, I hear, over my shoulder, someone exhorting me to go inside and buy something. Alexa wants to know if I want the Brandenburg concerto to be my default. Duolingo thinks I need a widget. Everybody wants me to rate them. There are wearables and nearables (mats and hubs and such), all of them taking our metrics, checking our sleep, urging meditation or finding a better price or reporting the minutiae of the weather or the second-by-second fluctuations of the stock market.
None of these are human beings, yet they crowd me. I almost miss the sweaty funk of a real crowd, the cacophony and shoving. Knausgard’s piece, which graces the cover of the most recent Harper’s, is deliciously long, standing proud in a world that insists on cutting and shortening and boiling down. A friend sent me a pdf. At the top, Adobe Acrobat had issued a warning—this looks like a long document—and an invitation: would I like Acrobat to summarize it?
I would like to read it in private. Unwarned, unwatched, unrated. And were it a treatise on physics, I would like a way to request a summary, on my own initiative. Instead I am always saying yes or no, having options thrown at me by an omniscient “assistant” that thinks it knows how to please me but in fact only reminds me that I am living in someone else’s world. Too many decisions are pre-framed for me; the options seem objective and innocuous, yet beneath them is a substructure of values I do not share.
I no longer care to be efficient. Tech makes everything too easy. For much of each day, I am profoundly grateful for that ease, yet at the same time, it feels insidious, addictive, a modification of my self without my permission.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff writes about the ways our experiences are mined for raw data, then used for someone else’s profits. But the problem is not the unshared profit, she stresses. “The essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us.”
Deliberate techniques are used to distract us from what matters and steal our attention outright. All the digital interruptions, the beeps and rewards and thumbs-up and hyperlinks and reductions of prose, are rewiring our brains, sucking out our ability to concentrate. Social media has altered the very definition of a friend, replacing a handful we saw often with hundreds we may have never met. Linguist Sherry Turkle describes us as “tethered selves,” always connected yet more isolated than ever. James Williams, who worked at Google, explains how tech has raced ahead, eluding any attempt to make it conform to our values. “The attention economy,” he writes, “is not just a battle for your attention, it’s a battle for the very shape of your soul.”
Williams’ epiphany came with a feeling, generated by his everyday use of technological devices, that was far more intense than distraction: “It felt like something disintegrating, decohering: as though the floor was crumbling under my feet, and my body was just beginning to realize it was falling.”
Groping to describe the feeling, he winds up exactly where Knausgard does: “The matter of my world seemed to be sublimating into thin air.” A loss of substance, a thin floaty unanchored existence in an attenuated world.
And so I tug on that pull cord, squint at the ancient TV, cheerfully unplug the AUX cable and switch to the radio. Tiny, incapacitating acts of rebellion that, instead of annoying me with their inconvenience, make me feel that I am back on solid ground.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
