The Sanity Game – on Devices and Being Human

October 16, 2022 5:45 PM

One who increasingly suspects that Thoreau had it about right when he observed that “men have become the tools of their tools.” "These are tools that we kid ourselves into thinking allow us to ingest life as quickly as possible, while practically guaranteeing that we don’t truly taste much of it. Our own lives are now often reduced to naked exhibitionism or vicarious voyeurism."
posted by spincycle (18 comments total)

I sort of agree, but I wish that the writer had expressed himself more originally because it's basically just a curmudgeonly rant.

Relevant thoughts: While I was out walking today, I was reflecting that because of a recent loss, I'm alone for the first time in 46 years. But "alone" means something else entirely. I have something in my pocket (and on my wrist) that allows me to call, text, or email anyone in my extended network and get an immediate reply. So I texted a friend that I occasionally hang out with and said I was out for a walk, and we had a short conversation. I stopped and took a photo of some trees strung with lights, using the same thing in my pocket, and then I checked the bus schedule and saw I could make the bus if I walked quickly. On the bus, I read the news, and when I got home I wrote an email to a lifelong friend that I met on CompuServe in the 1980s.

I'm only really alone when I want to be.

46 years ago I used to walk through October streets in the same city by myself, and though it is the same kind of experience, I was so much more alone then than I am now. That's not entirely bad, nor is it entirely good.

But then I will admit that I recently cancelled almost all my streaming services and I group my social media apps in a collection that I have entitled "Depressing," so the curmudgeonly rant is not completely wrong.
posted by Peach at 5:58 PM on October 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

my friendly English-as-a-second-language tech support helper in Mumbai or wherever, who kindly informed me through what sounded like a mouthful of samosa

There's a decent set of observations about the effects of technology on quality of life, but this isn't it.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:08 PM on October 16, 2022 [13 favorites]

I’m sympathetic to the argument that being an Internet-augmented cyborg has its downsides, especially on the corporate internet, but goodness do I dislike this essay. From random potshots at “lib readers” who apparently don’t know what a “progressive disease” might be to to a calling smartphone users a bleating herd, it all reads a bit “smart, sarcastic eighth grader.” And some of it is “my rotary phone doesn’t work anymore!”-level grousing.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 6:08 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

this whole thing reads like if Andy Rooney had been (slightly) more tech-literate
posted by Kybard at 6:08 PM on October 16, 2022 [7 favorites]

This guy must be about my age, maybe a couple of years older. And yet he thinks "ha ha customer service guy from India talks unclearly probably with a mouthful of samosa" is a funny. (And he's awfully confident that the rep speaks Hindi rather than Bengali or Urdu, etc). I would also be interested to know whether his phone customer service rep really said, "“Baby, they don’t want you to carry that no more. You obsolete!” which is of course not an impossible pair of sentences but seems awfully unlikely for a woman working a "this call may be recorded for training purposes" job.

I dunno, I am very very dubious about how phones work in our culture but I worry that there isn't really a viable critique that isn't rooted in white nostalgia.
posted by Frowner at 6:13 PM on October 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

A priori, I'd expect unregulated targeted advertising, engagement metrics, etc. would stamp out human progress and productivity eventually, with this being worse and faster the more they access personal data.

Interestingly, it takes 1 GWh to train a GPT-3 model, which suggests implementing such AIs with our current computers winds up extremely inefficient, making them slightly less dangerous, and amusingly wrecking the singularity fantasies. It's imho likely other simpler AI advertising suffices t wreck our progress and productivity anyways though.

As an aside, Quinn Howard covers the AI aspect of The Killing Star (1995) by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:16 PM on October 16, 2022

I really enjoy art on the internet, streaming movies and music, being able to drop little notes to everybody I know at a moment's notice, etc. I'm a bit of an introvert and a homebody, and being connected to things while in a private space is really delightful for me. If I took it seriously every time somebody informed me that devices are making my life worse, I'd be a lot more stressed out than I am.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:21 PM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

What tool was Thoreau being, becoming or embodying when he ran off to Walden Pond and and relied on the labor of women to cook hot meals or do laundry for him while he wrote his nice book?

Being obsoleted and making way for new things is a huge part of maturing and growing up.

Marvel in it. Being obsolete is similar to the privilege and honor of achieving old age. It is an utter joy and privilege to look around oneself at the wider world and remember how much harder it used to be just to exist or reach out to people.
posted by loquacious at 6:26 PM on October 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

I was thinking the other day about how much time humans used to have to spend fixing and sharpening their tools instead of going to the hardware store to get a replacement.

We have looked at tool making as what makes us special from the rest of the planet, and maybe it just makes us the planetary assholes.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 6:29 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Dude can bitch all he wants but the last fifty years have been fucking incredible for human empowerment.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:32 PM on October 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

look around oneself at the wider world
The Proenneke effect.
posted by clavdivs at 6:49 PM on October 16, 2022

And besides, I informed Samosa, while doing a quick on-the-spot Google search...

Instead of blaming capitalism and the critiquing the relentless drive to extract "value" from consumers and employees alike, and instead of identifying with the person on the other end of the phone as being at the mercy of the same system that has him calling as the end user, he reveals himself to be a reflexively racist jackoff with no particular insights of, well, value.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:01 PM on October 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

It doesn't much matter what technological means people have at their disposal to ingest information or to communicate with others. Most people, most of the time, will find ways to squander or misuse it. Fifty years ago most people, most of the time, were gawping at their televisions rather than reading their newspapers. Or they were reading their newspapers, but just the funny pages and gossip columns.

Yellow journalism was a thing, and then tabloid garbage, and now algorithmic echo chambers. Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 as the economically powerful nations were gearing up for genocide, and Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, not long after the end of that particular round of human inhumanity.

I'm firmly of the opinion that we're in something more like 1931 right now, but that doesn't really change the fact that we mostly just use the new tools to do the same awful shit that we've done before.

And yet also, as fragile as progress has been, it's been in no small part catalyzed by new technology of information and communication. As a total fraction of humanity, fewer people are starving now than likely ever have before, and in most liberal developed nations, people are free to live openly as LGBT.

People haven't become tools of their tools. It's just how people always are.
posted by tclark at 7:08 PM on October 16, 2022 [7 favorites]

Dear Mr. Labash,

Thanks for applying to the Dave Barry College of Satirical Writing.

Unfortunately, at this time we are unable to accept your application. While a know-it-all attitude and a skepticism of modern society are requirements for the program, our Academic Committee feels that you are a bit too much of an entitled racist to fit comfortably within our slightly diverse student body.

Also you're not a very good writer.

Sincerely and We are Not Making This Up,

College Staff
posted by mmoncur at 7:20 PM on October 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

I dunno, I am very very dubious about how phones work in our culture but I worry that there isn't really a viable critique that isn't rooted in white nostalgia.

There are dozens of critiques of technology that have nothing to do with “white nostalgia.” This guy just wrote a bad essay.
posted by atoxyl at 7:43 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you want to read some interesting commentary on what the internetification of everything is doing to us, The Shallows was a pretty good read. If you just want lazy xenophobic food jokes, there’s always Clarkson and the like.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:48 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

What tool was Thoreau being, becoming or embodying when he ran off to Walden Pond and and relied on the labor of women to cook hot meals or do laundry for him while he wrote his nice book?

Our guy spent his days in a cottage on his mom’s estate and his afternoons at the cafes in town, so let’s all maybe harbour some modest dose of suspicion about how much of the marrow he sucked out of the bones of a remarkably convenient life.
posted by mhoye at 8:28 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

This guy just wrote a bad essay

Ah but consider the alternative if it were good; increasing wisdom would be increasing vexation, because those who increase knowledge increase Thoreau
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:31 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]