I am a big fan of modern medicine. I like my car, I need electricity, I even (mostly) enjoy the internet. I could do without my television … but watching a good movie (on the DVD player) makes the glass teat worth owning.
I mourn the fields and sighing pines that are now condos, and the state of my attention before the omnipresent pocket screen. I miss the world pre-9/11, life in the middle before extreme political division. I miss local bookstores and reading culture, when everyone seemed to be holding a mass-market paperback.
I am not a purveyor of nostalgia, though nostalgia is genuine human emotion and has evolved with us for a reason. I do realize that we’ve come a long way baby, and even the decades of my youth—the 70s and 80s—had pockets of shittiness we’re better off without.
But I’m also not a blinkered techno-utopian.
I miss Google search before it became “enshittified” and definitely life before generative AI. Slop and outsourced thinking is a problem; not having a reliable way to know if something is true is worse.
Progress is just change, and change is sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Great things are gained with breakthroughs, something is inevitably lost along the way. There is no unseen digital hand, no Prometheus of circuitry and silicon, steering us ever forward to “better.” This belief is a myth.
The myth of progress does not only apply to technology. It applies to social progress, and the progress of a life.
As we grow older we gain wealth, wisdom, strength, autonomy, influence.
We lose innocence, wonder, malleability, potential. And if I’m getting dark, we lose everything at the end. Maybe we progress to some paradise of the afterlife, but there is no assurance there.
Unfortunately there is no magical formula for getting this balance right.
What can we do?
Slow the fuck down. Encourage and celebrate measured, incremental progress. Be thoughtful, as humans can be, and strive to make more of these changes the positive sort.
Be kinder, stop killing each other for a few minutes.
Celebrate our past, preserve and honor what is great about it.
Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development.
Talk like adults about all this, rather than behave like children striving to win a game that never was one to begin with.
I realize I sound a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, without hope.
But I am hopeful we can figure this out, and discover the peace that comes with balance.
...
Or at least bring back Pizza Hut of the 1980s.
7 comments:
One thing I've come to believe is nothing is every one sided. There is good to technology and bad. Even genuine progress comes with a cost. And most of today's progress is not genuine.
Shout at the clouds brother, shout at the clouds.
"Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development."
I do remember the words of my science teacher telling us 13 year olds that "While a new invention will solve one problem, it will also likely cause one or more new problems as well".
That's how I think of technological progress. There will be a tradeoff with each new invention. It reminds me of that quote by H. G. Wells in "The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind" about how
"Science casts a shadow wherever she distributes her benefits."
There's a poignant quote from Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) in the film Tombstone. It goes something like, "There's no normal life, Wyatt, there's just life. Now get on with it. Live every second, live right on to the end."
Great comments all, appreciate it.
Greed is a huge factor. Which is childish, of course. Almost no technology is put out for the benefit of society as its first goal. The first goal is always profit.
But stuff like enshitification? No one used to go out of their way to make something worse to appease investors/advertisers before their own customers.
Humanity is crazy. And it always been crazy. But we are approaching a point where the tech will outpace us, and that is a place I don't think we've been before.
Grim but truthful stuff Paul... when your customer is your investor and your true north the quarterly statement, not the user (who is using these products for "free" or at artificially low/subsidized pricing), you will get anti-human products. Which is what we currently have. The incentives are all warped.
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