Category: Technology

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To be everything and more

I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen’s tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe’s island).

Buried in there is one of Frantzen’s typical hidden gems: “To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.”

As AI looms, I concur with his concern that the virtual world is rapaciously eating away at us all. Perhaps we all need to go outside more, though maybe not as far as an inhospitable island off the coast of Chile.

Many bytes have been spilt over this ongoing encroachment. Is it a bad thing? Is it an inevitable thing? Is it dystopian? Is it dystopian but will eventually become utopian?

The general public seem to harbour suspicions. Courting reduced to swiping instantly on a phone app cannot but feel like some kind of awful diminution and commodification. And yet according to research, a tenth of straight people and a quarter of gay people have met their partner online.

This is the kind of efficiency and scalability and global connectivity the internet rightly boasts about. But it doesn’t seem to make most people as happy as it makes the tech oligarchs who profit from such seismic societal change.

We could look at Wikipedia too, the extraordinarily ambitious project to get the world to collaborate in collating the sum of all knowledge. Obviously they haven’t achieved that, but such an overweening ambition drove the project to where it is today, having displaced encyclopedias like Britannica early on, and spoiled many a pub argument by providing instant answers to disputes of an esoteric nature.

Does it matter that Wiki pages about Marvel’s cinematic universe are much more detailed than pages about ancient philosophy? Yes and no. The open source model panders to the interests of the editors not some abstraction of relative importance. But perhaps their interests also reflect (broadly) those of the general public.

And with the ‘internet of things’, one by one the appliances in our own homes and environment are becoming dully sentient, speaking to one another, integrating with systems we rarely if ever see or comprehend.

This is convenient, apparently. It is convenient for our fridge to order our shopping, for the heating in our homes to decide when and how much heat to provide, for our cars to drive themselves, leaving us all feeling that strange combination of privilege as passenger, and cargo without control.

As with all societal change of this scale, or at least all that we’ve been experiencing since the industrial revolution two centuries and more ago, the technology changes the world so quickly that it unnerves many. We never asked for this. We are unsure how it will change our lives. The promises of the techbros often come with dystopian undercurrents, as we see with the online dating revolution.

No wonder then that people like Frantzen might want occasionally to step out of that and into a former world, one of no surveillance, one where dangers can be fatal, one which somehow feels more adventurous and alive. I think many of us harbour similar desires, however hazily constructed.

But as he writes, the internet wants to be everything and more. And its rapidly growing offspring AI wants that even more and may at some point even be able to achieve it.

The irony of Frantzen’s argument is that in seeking to escape the world, he found he missed it deeply. The parallel he draws between the physical island of Selkirk/Crusoe and the mental island on which his friend Wallace was trapped is not unreasonable.

As usual, binary thinking won’t help us. Let’s leave that to the technology which thrives on ones and zeroes. We will need to find a new, tech-enabled way to engage with the world and each other. I wish the tech oligarchs would ponder that possibility a bit more.

I don’t wish to be stranded on either a desert island nor a digital one. I would like to be able to connect with people. The internet both does and doesn’t permit this, because it wants to be everything and more. It interpolates itself between us. And that, I fear, will likely cause many more people to end up on that third type of island, the one which David Foster Wallace was tragically unable in the end to escape.

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The Gamification of Living

Well, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been neglecting this blog because the internet isn’t real life and I’ve had rather a lot of life to be living in the past while. All will become clear anon. Or, at least some of it might. In a world busy throwing privacy away, I’d like to preserve a little for nostalgia’s sake.

John Lennon famously quipped that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Or, as the old Jewish saying has it, man plans and God laughs. These days we might say life is what happens when you’re not online, but of course so many of us are online, some almost perpetually.

Life does now happen online, or at least a simulacrum of it. An entire generation has met partners online at this point. People do business with one another entirely via electronic comms and screens. I’ve even seen funeral notices where it was stated that the deceased would be greatly missed by his Twitter followers. Seriously. Even death occurs online now.

Anyhow, that brings me to the brief point I wanted to make somewhat circuitously. The metaphors of the online world have long since infiltrated what we might, in a binary mode, call the real world, or at least tangible and palpable world. Even as a kid, I recall hearing the GIGO phrase – garbage in, garbage out – which originated with the computer programmers of the Seventies, complete with their punched cards.

Fifty year on, and the metastasis of such metaphors is ubiquitous. So much so that the UK even now has an official government department for ‘Leveling Up’, which is not, disappointingly, helping gamers to beat their high scores, but in fact relates to the latest attempt to resolve or in minor ways at least mitigate the outrageous inequity in that nation.

But it does all rather leave a strange taste in my mouth, like that of slowly smouldering silicon chips. Marriage or kids are not ‘achievement unlocked’. Getting a new job is not ‘leveling up’. I entirely understand that the gamification of so many aspects of modern existence would lend its baleful influence to the very language we speak of course. But the concepts simply do not map across.

Why? Because we are human. And when we game, those of us who do, we are not human. In fact I’d go as far as to say we’re not fully human when we attempt to filter our human functions through this electronic portal at all. We’re cyborgised, both enabled and constricted by the facilities and limitations of the internet and its penumbra of pervasive techno-enhancements.

Do you look at your phone or out the window to check the weather? Do you tell someone happy birthday in person or simply click a like on social media instead (which kindly reminds us)? How many people have driven down the wrong road or even into a canal because they listened to Google Maps rather than watch their environment? (And how many more once Elon’s self-driving cars become the norm?)

At the risk of sounding like the Luddite I am, human life encompasses more than the electronic bottlenecks our techno-cages impose upon us. If Divorce (or marriage for that matter) is ‘Game Over’, then what are we actually saying about our view of relationships?

Am I being too literal or serious? Perhaps. But unlike in a game, where one can respawn, try again with a new strategy, life is both linear (no spawn points) and picaresque (no reassuring story arc).

Sometimes we level down. Or sideways. Or into an entirely new mode of being. We shouldn’t allow the metaphors of gamification to erode and dissolve and mask the glorious unpredictable muddiness of our human existence.

We are animals, sometimes even thinking ones. We should remember that more. We are not automata grinding out levels in a game called life. Or, at least those of us who don’t work as loot farmers in China for American World of Warcraft players are not.