I
I am of the Last of the Analogs. I come from a time when we still memorized our friends’ landlines and video games were only something we kids did at night or on rainy days—sometimes. Card catalogs were on their way out at the local library, replaced by Pentiums and Emacs with simple search features and limited to no Internet connectivity. There was a contest held to name the database search software. The winner was “Laser Cat.” I did not submit a suggestion.
We always employed computers in our household. Simply put: they were fun. I was on our Commodore 64 Amiga almost before I could walk, swapping floppy disks and searching for the odd game demo—things like Motor Massacre and Spuds. I’d sit on my mother’s lap while she played Pac Man and Lemmings and whatnot. I’d start the (state of the art) CGI Star Wars “Walker” animation and dive beneath the desk away from its laser beams with my friend Jerry. He was many, many years my senior.
Not once, back then, did technology seem dangerous. There was no such thing as “addiction,” nor any concerns about its use getting out of hand. Then again, it took a different amount of effort and cognitive understanding to operate the devices, and games weren’t designed to be never-ending dopamine drips. Now technology is everywhere, surrounding us, creeping over every surface like a mold. If we’re not careful, it—through the employment of algorithms and AI—will sculpt our realities. For many it already does.
II
Even in the early 2000s we still did our primary research in the library. The Net was still fresh and unvetted. WWW sources were regarded skeptically. I remember searching up the Armenian Genocide for a 5th grade cultural project and later learning about the Native Alaskan cuisines of old Topiak—things like “Stinkheads” (or fish heads fermented in barrels of guts). People hungered back then. Still do. Will hunger again. Truth.
If I had to put my finger on when and why things changed, I’d have to say cellphones (or more accurately, “smartphones”). The “smartphone” is the devil to whom we have collectively sold our souls in return for IMMENSE power—knowledge and complex computations at the flick of a finger, powers of communication and record that in another land would be nothing short of magic. Are magic. The dark kind of magic. Later I will unpack at just what cost these powers come.
I held off on getting a “smartphone” until my 20s. My first one, which I dinked around with for a year, was rather dimwitted and could barely fit the crummy proprietary software it came laden with. I think it was called a Samsung “Vitality.” Heh. Then I got a Nexus 4 and that was cool, I thought. A quad core processor in my palm. I could run the Unreal performance benchmark at 60fps or something. Though I remained wary of my pocket computer. I never installed a game (still haven’t—games, I believe, are for personal computers and consoles and tabletops) and I was embarrassed to pull it out in public. My device has since changed but not the feeling: guilt, embarrassment. I don’t want to be seen surrendering my consciousness to a screen like those others around me. Call it a sort of pride. But I digress.
III
The “smartphone” is the most recent surrendering of our humanity. We are augmented now, machine-like. Our brains develop around this device attached to us like a barnacle. Muscles responsible for memory and recall atrophy. They say that “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” There’s a lot we don’t use anymore. We are losing it.
The more we lean on the crutch, the weaker our core becomes. It’s true that with the device we are greater than the sum of our parts. It seems like a good deal. And it is—the best of deals—until the device is taken away or broken or made obsolete or malicious. What are we left with, then? An atrophied husk with a hole where the barnacle used to nestle.
If we are not careful, we will create something our cores cannot control by themselves, something beyond the capacities of our human selves. (We have not been careful; perhaps we are already there.) But that is part of our human nature—our desire to grow and change and build and acquire and establish. Our unquenchable thirst. Our single best and worst quality. I’m rambling again. Stoppit!
There’s a balance that can be achieved. Achieving this balance requires keeping the barnacle in check and ensuring that it works for us and not the other way around. That it’s we who reach out for a specific nugget of information in a time of need instead of letting the information run us. Seeing as the pocket computer “djinn” is out of the bottle (and there’s no putting that away), we need to minimize the cost of maintaining our Godlike powers of knowledge.
It’s no secret that we are all being tracked—everywhere we go, everything we do, all that we search for—and the situation is only going to get worse. We cannot trust Government-issued “laws” or the “good hearted” nature of companies. I for one do not trust the operating systems on most devices to disable the “GPS” or truly be “offline” when told. What I propose is this:
We need open source (and publicly audited) software and then we need hard switches. We need the power to hard-cancel the GPSs and Internet connections in our pockets. We can keep the most pertinent information locally on our devices: dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps. If we need to contact someone or look up an answer we don’t have, then we can choose to connect at that point in time, take care of business, and then return to the physical world, isolated. Is it less convenient? Yes. Convenience is another cost—but one I can live with.
We need to maintain our individuality and continue to operate in the world as individuals, erring and succeeding by our own merits. We must at least try to solve problems on our own, lest we become but a singular node in a hive mind. For if we all surrender our powers of choice and autonomy to the Machine, that is what we will become.