Remind me later

I’m slightly regretting calling this blog ‘Remind Me Later’, as it implies that it is something that can be parked on the back burner of life, to be added to the great To Do List that never gets done. Whereas, of course, it is a must-read of considerable urgency. (I refuse to add a winking emoji as a signifier of irony at this point, but I trust that one is not needed.)

The intention behind the title was laudable enough. ‘Remind Me Later’ is one option available to you if you don’t want to install an update immediately. Too busy to be interrupted right now? Of course, no problem. Apple/Microsoft/Google (delete as applicable) understands that you might be busy at the moment, so when would you like to install the update? Try in an hour? Overnight? Or Remind Me Later?

The frustration arises when it becomes apparent that there is no chance to Just Say No (capitals). No thank you, I do not wish to install this update, because by doing so you will render my old-but-perfectly-legal (and fully paid for) copy of Photoshop unusable and to replace it you will require me to take out new (and expensive) monthly subscription instead. So every day we go through the same charade: Remind Me Later. Hence the title of this blog, wittily (insert appropriate emoji icon here) suggesting that it is something from which you cannot escape.

There is a much more fundamental issue to do with the lack of a ‘no thanks’ option, however. To paraphrase Foucault, all relations are power relations, and this omission lays bare the true power dynamic that now exists between ourselves as users of tech and the tech corporations as suppliers. For we are not being given true choice and so presumably we are being thought of as children rather than adults: we are not considered capable of making our own decisions.

‘Just Say No’ was the slogan for an advertising campaign against drug use. It is interesting how the removal of the ability to say no is situated in the landscape of powerlessness and addiction. We are being forced to follow the tech playbook, and the expectation is that sooner or later we will be brow-beaten into submission by repeated asks. The tail is wagging the dog.

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.”

I chose to stay at the Flamingo Motel because (a) it was cheap, (b) I liked the name, and (c) it had a huge pink neon flamingo sign outside. What’s not to like? But in one of those moments of pure serendipity (or to which some might ascribe the intervention of a Higher Being or two), the Flamingo Motel happens to be located immediately next to not one but two artist studio complexes, and, as if thrown in for good measure, a vast secondhand bookshop.

What could such a Higher Being be trying to tell me?

Of the three serendipities, The School of Visual Philosophy (which I initially thought might be a hairdressing salon) turned out to be the most relevant and thought-provoking in the context of my search for Silicon Valley. I visited to find metalworking, signwriting, printing, painting and many other hands-on activities being served up, all with a side of warmth and community.

Here my rising angst about the intangibility of tech (to which I shall return, and see also blog post 001 – I knew the numbering would come in useful) was at least temporarily assuaged by the sheer physicality and immediacy of the work being done.

Blacksmithing at the School of Visual Philosophy

I watched as co-founder Yori Seeger demonstrated his blacksmithing skills, his arm making a great arc as he wielded a heavy hammer on red hot metal, a fine, primal clanking noise rising above the roar of the flame.

Where is the digital equivalent? Sure you can beat the living daylights out of your digital opponent in any number of games, but instead of describing a great arc to eliminate your great orc, virtual extinction is a mere thumb-twiddle away as you sit in your comfy leather gaming chair. Why would you swap the one for the other?

This visit left me with a lasting impression of the fundamental divide between ourselves and tech, between material and immaterial. In adopting tech, sure we can put on the exoskeleton of VR, but what exactly are we trying to achieve? Are we rejecting, augmenting or replacing the physical reality of our human frame by building the metaverse?

In some ways this all reminds me of the famous Mike Tyson quote (though sadly it was not, as far as I am aware, in the context of such questions): everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.

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Next time: Define your terms. What even do we mean by tech?

I will be honest, my trip to Silicon Valley did not go entirely as expected.

I had thought (perhaps rather naively) that I would be thrown into a cauldron of red hot tech enterprise, with the heat of innovation and creativity scorching my very eyebrows. Metaphorically, of course.

I had assumed that, living in the shadow of the Mountain – Mountain View, home of Google – everyone would be in some sort of technological nirvana, with new and hitherto unheard of gadgets seamlessly integrated into the very fabric of their lives; or at least, into the fabric of their garments. I would be gaining a privileged glimpse into the future.

Instead, everything and everyone was surprisingly – dare I say, disappointingly? – normal. By and large, people were not obsessing over the imminent rise of AI or the deployment of killer dogbots any more than they were back home. And my own area of particular interest – the migration of knowledge from books to the internet – scarcely got a mention. Or maybe I wasn’t looking under the right rocks.

Only the ubiquity of corporate tech giants gave the game away. The football game was played at PayPal Park. The Lick Observatory was indebted to support from Google. Firefox proclaimed its goodness on a monument in downtown San Francisco.

Firefox monument in downtown San Francisco

This relative normality only served to create a heightened sense of disconnect between the frankly scarcely believable scale, complexity and otherness of new tech and the fact that it has all been created, here, by the cumulative efforts of countless human beings using nothing more than digital 1s and 0s.

This is a dissonance that our brains strongly dislike. We are being invited to believe something that appears unbelievable. It is a feeling, a physical, visceral reaction, intuited rather than rationalised.

Or, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Which is surely the technological equivalent to Clement Greenberg’s famous dictum: that all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

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I have decided to number these blog posts, as it seemed appropriately tech-y. I doubt I’ll get to 100, but the leading zeroes look nice.