Siri, remind me to dress appropriately for the end of the world
Artwork by Keith Haring
Of late, I’ve been preoccupied with our forefather’s fear of technology. More accurately, I have started to feel concerned that we do not seem to share this sentiment any longer. Though the emotion to which I refer is not, strictly speaking, fear, but rather awe, in its original sense, of fearing and admiring at the same time that which you do not comprehend. Is it that we’ve become fearless? Is it that we’re all so blazee that we’re incapable of admiration for the miracle of technology? Louis C.K. jokes about it, but can we say that the joke reflects the deeper reality? By the way, do watch the clip, it’s worth it.
My grandmother has had a mobile phone for three years now. To this day, she still prefers to call me up and ask me to go over there and help her figure out how she’s managed to delete all her contacts (again) than actually figure the phone out and make it work for her. So she to this day prefers to be dependent on me, a human being, for explanations, than on it, a thing, for making her life easier. But my grandmother still feels the awe. She hates the goddam phone, but she’s in awe of it.
The questions follows – isn’t my grandmother’s [fully fledged] look of AWE – fear and admiration – a more appropriate response? Perhaps time is the problem – it’s true, we can’t afford to waste time being amazed at how easy it is to perform our tasks nowadays if we are to actually perform them as well – But what is the amount of life-altering tech that we will take for granted before we start to become aware that we’re knee deep in wires and circuits? Which by the way, we have been for over a century – you just can’t see the wires nowadays.
Don’t get me wrong, please, there is no way I am ever going to say anything bad about any kind of technological advance. Fear of technology is stupid, duh. Also, I have a deep appreciation for all things Apple, so count me out of the skeptical crowd. Plus I’m a huge Ayn Rand fan (or was in my earlier youth), so I would never be caught dead saying we should stop sucking the planet dry or making up new sorts of mechanical wonders. Ecologists are the NEW LEFT! Except… that was the Cold War… And recently, what with Occupy Wall Streeters (who if not they are commies – and if they’re commies, where does that leave the rest of us?), among other things, I’m coming to think maybe Ayn Rand belongs to a different age… A better one if you ask me, but a reckless one, and sadly, one that is now either already over or slowly dying out. Philosophically, I’m all for Apple… I just think maybe my philosophy is beginning to be outdated.
It’s no news that every new gadget will in some way alter your life – it is not at all controversial to state that Ipad users lead very different lives to those of the old-fashioned laptop users. But is no news good news in this case? Of course no one can answer that question. Let me then raise another one. The excuse is that the gadget makes things easier, yes? Well, actually, it’s now documented that they does much more than that, that it actually encourages, and therefore creates new types of behavior Is it that you do things faster this way, or that you’re now doing things you never knew you needed done? Is it that the need was present and we were unaware? Or is it that the need and its quencher are inextricably linked?
Let me put it this way – for a century now, ever since the industrial revolution and perhaps even before that, whenever some new piece of technology was invented, we knew it was a point of no return – who would set fire to all the wheels in the kingdom knowing that the kingdom would then be slower that the competition in gathering food? No one. A mad man. Or was he? That same mad man that’s been making prophecies for ages. That same one that gave H.G. Wells his Time Machine, Aldous Huxley his Brave New World and James Cameron the script for Terminator. And in every single one of those scenarios, the message seems to be that the fucker who invented the wheel pretty much doomed us all to see it spin of its own free will and we’d all have been better off fucking walking.
And if he was right… Well, we didn’t listen, but are we all all to pretend we didn’t hear? So when in the end an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Steve Jobbs/Some-Form-Or-Other-Terminator comes knocking, do you throw your Iphone at him in defiance? Like you didn’t know he’d be coming for you? Like Siri didn’t make that appointment years ago? No, you fucking surrender. Which begs the question, what did your children do wrong? If you make a pact with the devil, when he comes to collect the only thing you can hope for is that you have a new pact lying around that he’ll find interesting, cus if not…
I’ve been watching a lot of period films and stumbled across Downton Abbey – a British soap (as I’ve heard it called though I would say soap is selling it a bit short, not too much, but still a bit short) about the final years of the British aristocracy. The begginning of the end. It’s the story of three generations of aristocrats and their servants. The old Dowager Countess (Dame Maggie Smith), is faced with electricity in one of her sumptuous home’s parlors. The light from an electric chandelier both blinds and disturbs her – physically and emotionally. She finds it a bother to the eye and downright distasteful – both things that I, obviously having taken electricity for granted (as if you didn’t) would never have thought anyone could think of such a commonplace invention. Later on in the series she is confronted with a telephone and has the same response. A bother and downright distasteful. The house is being turned into an administrator’s office, where anyone is free to call at any time they see fit. An outrage. And then Maggie Smith’s line goes like this:
“First electricity, then a telephone? What’s next? I constantly feel as if I am living in an H.G. Wells novel.”
A brilliant line, I thought, for obvious reasons. And one that makes me wonder: will our doom come from the fact that we no longer find it at all off-putting to be living in something like an H.G. Wells novel?
Or is it that there have always been minds that are on alert, sensitive to the changes, careful too spot the future before it comes to break down the door:
Keith Haring on Computer Art, 1978, said:
“Do computers have any sense of aesthetics? Can an aesthetic pattern be programmed and fed into a computer so that it reasons and makes decisions based on a given aesthetic? Why not?
The role of the arts in human existence is going to be tested and tried. It is possibly the most important time for art the world has ever seen. The artist of this time is creating under a constant realization that he is being pursued by the computers. We are threatened. Our existence, our individuality, our creativity, our lives are threatened by this coming machine aesthetic. It is going to be up to us to establish a lasting position of the arts in our daily lives, in human existence.
If humans are expendable, then emotions, enjoyment, indulgence, creative aesthetic, and personality of human beings are expendable.
Question: As an artist aware of this situation, what should my position be?
Am I a comrade to the computer or to the entire history of humanity?
This is the question that the artist of our times has to ask, because it is we who will have to lead the fight against a machine aesthetic or prepare people for it… The history of art rests on our shoulders.”
– October 14, 1978
And now the question I would really like to have answered: Can I still say I will keep alert to the changes happening in the world but buy that Ipad nonetheless? Cus I really need it to read those mags that let me know what the changes are.
