Remind me later

If you listen to tech evangelists (is it just me or are they getting fewer in number?), you will hear that the sunlit uplands of the metaverse are just around the corner. By contrast, doommongers warn of surveillance capitalism and robot overlords. Who is right? Can I just enjoy the ride – or should I be joining the resistance?

To some extent all inventions bring with them a similar anxiety. By their very nature, they involve a change to the status quo and new and unknowable futures. We cannot know how things will play out and even the most rigorous preparations cannot fully protect us from unintended consequences. And without wishing to be too defeatist, genies almost never go back into their bottles. Today’s new becomes tomorrow’s normal, whether we like it or not.

Robert Good – Phone Me (Red)

What is different this time seems to centre around addiction. On every high street, in every train carriage, at every music festival you will see people speaking into, looking at or watching through their phones. We seem to be unable to disconnect in a way that was surely not the case with books, telephones, cars and other previous life-changing new technologies. You may say that we have become addicted to our cars: well we certainly live in a car culture and many would find it difficult to function without one, but most of us don’t nip downstairs to the garage to sit in our car one last time before bed and we don’t decide to spend a spare five minutes driving to the end of the road and back. We are hooked to our tech in a way which we have not been hooked before.

Tech addiction seems particularly difficult to shake. First of all, tech is now virtually essential to our being functioning citizens. It is no longer possible to just ditch our phones and our tablets. Many people do not own a car; a lot of people do not read books. But try to book tickets, renew your passport or pay a utility bill and it soon becomes apparent that we are being funnelled online towards a digital identity. Once online, our tech interfaces are actively designed to maximise screentime (see for example ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ by Nir Eyal). So we have no choice but to use tech; and tech then manipulates and exploits our behaviours in unhealthy and addictive ways.

There are similarities to the food industry. We cannot do without food, but proecessed meals frequently contain way too much salt, sugar and fat. We are being offered a tasty, desirable (and addictive?) product, but one which is ultimately not good for our health. But at least there are still alternatives, healthy eating options, fresh food, home baking. With tech it feels as though we are only being offered the processed food.

But to end on a positive note. My visit to the San Francisco Mint to see an exhibition of augmented reality artworks was a pure joy. I put on the headset and before my eyes sprang mythical creatures in bright psychedelic colours that I could walk through and around. Unfortunately I could not take any pictures: ironically, the tech wouldn’t work on my phone.

New tech is undoubtedly a modern miracle and beneficial in so many ways. I could just do without the manipulation.

My visit to the Computer History Museum was great, and you didn’t need to know your bits from your bytes to appreciate it. There was so much uber-cool retro gear from the 60s and 70s: stylishly designed knobs, sliders, lights sat alongside buttons galore. These were design classics as well as being cutting edge technology.

Design classics from the past

I don’t think I am just donning my rose-tinted specs here. A lot of the kit from the 80s and beyond was brown or beige, and boring (to look at, at least). Perhaps there is a creative arc that sees innovation combine with a first blush of aesthetic elegance before degrading into dull (but improved) functional utility? I’m thinking of steam trains to diesel, original minis to mini metros, LPs to CDs.

Maybe the early part of the creative lifecycle is, almost by definition, hands-on, focussed on detail, experimental, idealistic. All these things lend themselves to human scale, care and thoughtfulness which then translates into good design, whereas perhaps later iterations sacrifice personal connection for mass-production and return-on-investment.

What was particularly striking was how the museum situated the computer revolution within and alongside the innovations that went before it and made it possible. Log tables, slide rules, weaving machines, telegraph cables, morse code and many others provided foundational elements: it felt as though IT was pretty much bound to happen given the myriad antecedents: an almost Darwinian process of incremental small changes leading to the sudden speciation of the microchip.

Perhaps new technology is just another invention that provides us with some utility. The printing press, the telescope, the television all created seismic and well-documented cultural shifts of their own.

This may be true, but things seem qualitatively different this time. IT is now both larger and smaller than human scale, and as such no longer seems to fit. It is like putting on a suit that is too large, or being all thumbs when trying to thread a needle. On the one hand we really don’t know if there is a nanobot in that vaccine or some spyware on our phone. And on the other hand, we cannot parse petabytes of data as machines now can. This creates an anxiety of powerlessness and a state of mistrust.

And most technology is passive, obedient, static. When you park your car, put down your book or finish your newspaper you expect to find them all just as you left them. Put down your smartphone and you have no such guarantee. This creates an anxiety of disconnectedness and a state of addiction.

As I left the museum I passed a noticeboard where visitors were invited to provide feedback. “Literally everything I do uses a computer” wrote one, “I’m glad I was born in this era.”