I wonder what it’s like to live in a world where you’re unoccupied; where you don’t open a phone to pacify and conceal yourself from interacting with anything around you.
I’ve somewhat lived in this world, but I’m so far from it now. It has left me and without brave rejection, I’ll soon forget about it.
What do I mean?
The world that existed before the Airpod, the apps that tell me the weather, and the world of the ever-effective-and-knowledgeable AIs seems to me, at my most internal point (soul), a more desirable one that what we have now.
Would I – who knows – turn off the computer and the AI and the Spotify and all of this metastasizing ‘progress’ if I could? In my dreams it’s a strong Yes! But, once again my preferences reveal that I either do not wish to or am not brave enough to try.
The kids make me all the more nostalgic for this world where you might find yourself watching a group of hippies from the Haight-Ashbury, one day to become the Grateful Dead, at Columbia University with no screen in sight.
I’m afraid that the digital walls close in and the algorithms one day take away my agency and that very human thing which is to be going nowhere and doing no thing really, but nonetheless fully alive and responsive to all the good things right here.
Perhaps all young people come to feel this way, and maybe kids become a catalyst for it, but they say that the jobs will be obsolete and the robots will do the physical labor in just a few years time. And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if one could assume that the Screen Time would go down and the algorithms would loosen their grip on us because they don’t need us on the phones as much to keep us watching the ads to sell us the things we don’t need. But, I think Huxley and Orwell are most likely both right and we’ll arrest ourselves in please and the Flock cameras will arrest our liberty should we come out of the haze and try and act on it.
In other words: I sat down on a bench under the old train depot in Black Mountain the other day with my son to sit and talk, and there in the corner of my eye I see a security camera… This is what I mean: how could I quit that world of the screen and the security camera and the algorithm when I’m both unwilling to do the hard thing and unflinchingly quit the phone and can go nowhere the security camera isn’t?
Where is the spontaneous world that isn’t planned, isn’t watched, and isn’t guiding me to where it wants me to go?
I could resist, but I’m afraid I like the memes too much and the knowing about What’s Going On In The Straight of Hormuz today and the Simulation and Simulacra of it all.
But, something in me is still knowing and watching my own participation and guiding me towards not forgetting that I can resist and I can still go where the wind goes and participate in the natural world my kids and my wife and just experience it all. Call that God, call that Spirit.