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.

What if the drugs don’t work?

A young man has stabbed his grandmother to death in England and now faces trial. The trial is to decide whether he committed murder or manslaughter. That he killed her is not in doubt.

According to the Daily Mail, the man’s ‘addiction’ to cannabis – a usage quoted at a mere two joints daily – may be to blame. This is the grounds of his defence case, incidentally.

Buried in the article are further details that the man was also taking prescription medications – specifically Elvanse for Attention Deficit Disorder and Xanax for depression. It is reported that his mood had changed significantly in the months prior to the killing, and that his family had grown concerned about his taking both cannabis and these prescribed medicines.

Clonazepam vs. Xanax: Differences, dosage, and side effects

I don’t wish to prejudice this particular case so instead I will speak generically. Elvanse is an amphetamine stimulant. Xanax is a Benzodiazepine sedative. Anyone taking both is having their moods artificially heightened and lowered simultaneously.

Both medications have a range of significant side-effects, including hallucinations, mood swings and aggressive behaviour (Elvanse) and depression, agoraphobia, social phobia and loss of libido (Xanax).

Yes, you read that correctly. One of the side effects of a medication commonly prescribed for depression actually causes further depression. Furthermore, both drugs can cause dependence. That is, it is possible to become addicted to them. By contrast, there is no evidence that it is possible to become physiologically addicted to cannabis, though psychological dependence is widely reported.

In the 1970s, heavy sedatives like Mogadon were commonly prescribed to housewives who experienced depression or anxiety. For many of these women, this was a sentence to decades of zombification, their moods and personalities entirely suppressed under a cosh of sedation.

We now recognise that in many instances, what they were actually suffering from was social isolation, attempting to raise small children alone in dormitory suburbs without sufficient social connections and supports.

I wonder whether there might be similar societally caused reasons underpinning the vast upswing in depression, anxiety disorders and issues like ADHD among the younger generations today?

It may well be that such medications are helpful in some instances. But in many cases, people are prescribed via a ‘throwing darts at the wall’ method, where they are placed on one regimen for six months, and then if it doesn’t work, the dosage is varied or a slightly different medication offered in replacement.

As a result, they can go years without seeing their symptoms alleviate, especially as the periods of tailoring up and down on these drugs can be especially disconcerting and debilitating. Furthermore, as in the instance of the two medications mentioned, dependency issues can develop.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some young people attempt to self-medicate, especially with widely available recreational substances like cannabis. And obviously cannabis is not a good idea for a still-developing young mind, especially since it appears to catalyse the likelihood of schizophrenia and like conditions among those with genetic predispositions.

Furthermore, the THC content of cannabis has been rising for decades. The ditchweed smoked at Woodstock bears almost no resemblance to the high-octane skunk now sold in California, Amsterdam and elsewhere. When the UK newspaper the Independent reported on the dangers of skunk in 2008, reported THC content was up to 14% Nowadays, it can be as high as 25%

I have no easy answers here, but I am beginning to wonder whether future decades will look back on this era and the widespread prescription of amphetamines and barbiturates to young people, including children, with similar horror as we now look back on the decades of mothers lost in a haze of ‘mommy’s little helpers’.