One of my solutions for getting myself out of the prison of the same thoughts and thinking habits is to imagine to unnecessary detail what historians of 200 years later will make of us today. I imagine the concept of parking lots will seem exotic, in a future where automobiles are transformed, too luxurious, or illegal/outmoded due to their intense environmental needs. Likewise skyscrapers might seem luxurious in a world with more intense weather, stronger winds, or perhaps violent class conflict over fewer resources.
Mostly I try not to grow apocalyptic and/or dystopian, though. This is a method of escaping and not embracing the same old thought patterns.
Now and then, I'll see a very fashionable person walking with headphones in, phone in hand, staring straight ahead like they have a vision, moving altogether a touch too fast for a stroll but its not quite a run and where might they be going and gosh don't they seem busy and in touch with something I'll never approach?
A yuppie, a metropolitan, a suburban pretender, a genuine dealmaker - I don't know which they are and that's part of the fun of course. The more mystery I can have in my life, the better. Particularly as I get older and movies, music, and shows are more transparent in their influences, derivations, and also appear more plastic and lifeless in their effects, I treasure the resilient small myths one can tell oneself about life: this person is important, this day is meaningful, these words have weight.
Yet watching these hustling bodies stroll along with their nano-transistor machines, looking important, I get not just an entertaining sense of 'main character' syndrome fluttering off their scent as they half-rush by, but also a long-lasting amusement at the fact that they likely don't know how wi-fi works.
Not that I do. And not that you do, probably. Putting our heads together, we might all come up with a very plausible-sounding explanation for a router box emanating a signal in a localized area - something like this, yes? And the router is plugged into something physical, drawing internet out of the wall?
Before you are tempted to click away and look up an explanation for wi-fi on the internet, consider for how long you'll keep that knowledge after having read it. Do we fact check others to learn, or to satisfy a desire to say something in the moment? Having 'the world's knowledge' at our fingertips, do we do more than finger it?
Let's just stay with our thoughts, here and now. Or better yet, imagine what the hustling yuppie might be thinking as they breeze by. They are not just using wi-fi, after all, but likely bluetooth and GPS technology as well, tracking some combination of steps, direction, time, duration.
And they do all this - most of us do all this - without understanding how the technology offering us these functionalities really works. It's been said elsewhere, but this is sort of funny on the face of it. We're walking around with magic talking/listening boxes that service our desires in exchange for, well, everything else (if data is everything, and we give it away, what are we giving away?).
No Revolution
I dislike the word 'revolution' as used in the US American context very much.. I've written about that before. Let me introduce an alternative history in which the word might have had meaning in the 2000s. I don't believe, in this case, in totally semantic clothes-changing of words. When it comes to binary terms - either there is or is not a revolution - I am conservative. Words have to mean something.
There was no smartphone revolution. The smartphone gave people faster ways to do what they were doing already. Speed is not a revolution, it is a progression, i.e., an increase in already-existing processes.
A true revolution would have been for-profit corporations like Apple eschewing pure profit margins for the project of spreading tech literacy far and wide. Open source, open code phones; no jailbreaking because there was no jail. Apps that taught people, through treacly gamified methods or not, what coding was and how to do it. Apps that revealed what data is tracked and sold, how much advertisers pay for parts of their lives, and who is buying.
If this sounds stupid, anti-capitalist, or even 'anti-freedom' (another term drained of meaning), then congratulations, you have been exposed to a genuinely revolutionary idea. Revolution is either a type A cynical revolving door of the same systems or type B groundbreaking expansion of human liberty. Open source smartphones with programs for teaching coding pushing a cultural norm of greater and not less literacy regarding their manufacture and function would have been revolutionary.
It would have been messy, too. Gone would be the infantilizing closed-box mentality of apps, the cold white walls of minimalism, the animalistic dopamine triggers in clicks, taps, and bubbles. We would be sold a product intentionally unfinished so that we might tinker and break it. That is how revolutions arrive: unfinished, because you are meant to add to it.
Fast Yuppies
I like the term yuppie, it's a rare English word that sounds like what it is while also containing the bitter sarcasm that undergirds the English language (thanks England). It is a happy term for unhappy people; what could be better?
I'm part of a very big generation growing up with magic boxes we were told were revolutions that almost immediately revealed themselves to be extensions of labor demands that we would put in our pockets and under our pillows. Smartphones introduced a new market of labor - attentional labor - as well as expanded our potential shopping and consumption hours well past daylight (you ever watch movies in bed? shop late at night under covers?). Sardonic marketing executives might call this a revolution, though it is still strictly a progression of their groping reach into people's wallets.
Key to the masquerading of enhanced labor and progressive advertising is the sensation of speed that accompanies the transformation. Technology is intentionally developed and introduced breathlessly, and each new small step forward treated as a simultaneously surprising, inevitable, and comprehensive 'revolution' in which life will cease to be what it was before.
We now face this advertising strategy with the powerful tox boxes of LLMs. Everything has changed, did you know, since they arrived. Money, labor, love, relationships - everything! And it has to change, and fast, so that we don't spend too long asking what problem this technology has solved. We must not interrupt the 'revolution' as it is on its way to cause new problems that it will then pretend to solve.
LLMs appear more open-source than smartphones - but they are not. Their biases, limits, prejudices, and programming are baked in. We are beta testers, not coders. We are squatters in digital skyscrapers that will, eventually, ask for rent or kick us out. We are proving the pillars are load bearing, the servers are still up, and something resembling economic demand could exist.
Smartphones continue to exist not because they solve any problem, but because they seem a fashionable and fast way to do more work in the guise of cultural practice. We think sending emails is social. We think content creators are culture. Everything done with a smartphone is economic, but at least it's pleasurable.
Likewise with LLMs, people are adopting at a mass rate a technology they do not understand and, more importantly, will only learn about to the extent that it satisfies their immediate wants and desires. Give me the answer I am looking for, Google/Apple/ChatGPT, and then we are done.
Latin for the 21st century
In 200 years, historians will probably note with intense consternation the high rate of technological adoption by certain countries with no attendant interest in literacy regarding the tech. This is a recipe for magical thinking, since we hold black boxes in our hands and in our pockets right next to our genitals, and barely care how they work, when they do their work, and what role we serve in the work that they do.
Let's go back the other way: if I could travel back to the Kingdom of Germany around 1300, or maybe Spain in 1400, I could observe a world run by churches that were run by monks speaking the near-dead language of Latin to one another. Ordinary people would hardly be speaking it - maybe key terms and concepts related to religious practice, law, or medicine.
There'd be no great effort to spread Latin literacy to the masses (until much later when the language really died), because it's a huge advantage to the powerful to speak a language others don't (particularly if you can convince society that the language is the language of your God).
How different is coding? Very different, of course: there are many thousands or millions of coders in the world today, certification and degree programs offering courses on it, and a variety of programming languages people can study, practice, and execute in any number of high-paying positions.
And amongst ordinary people, that is consumers like this hustling yuppie with a magic box in their pocket, we have some terms borrowed from basic computer science: download, upload, process, save, copy and paste...we have some basic grasp of if/then statement logic and its implications for how computers work. There are hundreds of accessible books written on computer history, science, logic, and programming.
People in the medieval era were mostly too busy to learn Latin, and the majority of their Latin-related problems were solved by experts, i.e. priests, only too happy to apply their learned skills. Economics trumps education in every imaginable instance. It is only those with money and resources who have space for extensive study. Most of the famous US American 'founders' were wealthy men with more time than modern people can imagine. Most accomplished polyglots and top scientists are likewise children of privilege given the greatest resource of time and space. To become a priest in the Middle Ages required a whole lot of time and space. To become a coder today requires nothing less.
In 200 years, historians may configure our period as such: it was a time of digital Latin, in which the vast majority of people turned not to holy texts but to personal black boxes that worked in ways that seemed magical or metaphysical. The devices worked so well, that people were compelled to do as much work with them as possible, as quickly as possible, and as often as possible. After all, everyone else was downloading, uploading, streaming, emailing, and messaging nearly all day. It was socially important to at least appear productive.
Having little idea how the black boxes worked, ordinary people were increasingly taken advantage of by those who did, resulting in a repetition of the Christian Latin Church's greatest crimes against humanity in the late European middle ages: exploitation of believers and mass extraction of wealth from society into privately held funds.
Without tech literacy, the tech-laden societies of the 20th-21st century focused on work as a source of meaning, which bound them ever closer to the exploitative economies of tech corporations. Small numbers of users who did know and understand code were able to demystify the big narratives of the day, and separate themselves psychically from its trappings, as well as participate as active members in the exploitative class.
I ended up on a far less positive note that I had hoped. I swear, this really all did start with my watching people walk or job by with their phones, looking like Very Serious People, and I thought it funny that they (and I of course) could go through the day looking smart but of course being very stupid about the devices we hold so dear. We are like children with stuffed animals that we believe to be alive and have personalities. Adults chuckle and humor us, knowing we'll grow out of it. Will people grow out of ChatGPT and the other LLMs? Have we yet grown out of social media? It seems we still imagine it is alive, and has a personality.