Thursday, November 9, 2017

One day, when I am old, or dead and gone already, a young fresh wise Ken Burns-type will come along, and collect the facts and remembrances of our times, of the writers who led up to our times, who armed us with wisdom, background, sensitivity and knowledge--as always, the work of writers, since ancient times--to face the current battle to save the still-alive human mind while it is still alive and independent.

There will be the technologists on one side, armed with big data and numbers, treating us as some kind of collective organism, one easily led if one is clever enough, but always to their own technological preferences, their means, their tastes, their clever way of life.    Driven by style, success, a happy social life and material benefit, their blindness will only grow deeper, and the scandals, if they have not come already, will continue, betraying the colors of their moral character in their own 'creative' state.  They will claim to be the most creative of all, open to all, fantastic, saving the world as they speak, connected.

But they have forgotten something.

Then on the other side there will be us.  There will be those of us who remember the daisy, the experience of it, and the chickadee and the sparrow.

Instead of connecting us, as they claim, through their preferred mode of increasingly inhuman impersonal connection, of hits of dopamine, artificial, for which they will profit handsomely on by charging fees, dues for belonging to the master computerized computer-friendly master race, they will secretly be profiting by destroying the means and the ability for us to meet as strangers, to meet in common places in actual not virtual reality.

They will do all they can to destroy the old meeting places, the old quaint meeting houses and public rooms of rubbed shoulders and shared tales over a benign beverage and decent sustenance, to set up their own.  They will be set precisely against such people as me, old middle aged barman who've been at it for twenty five years in a neighborhood, against such who might still claim some right to write about real life encounters in all their strangeness and wonder.   (I will be dismissed as servile, not cool enough, not enough a self promoter.)

They will create a master race who goes where the machine, the big data tells us to go, the hot new place for something better, improved.  They will create the dopamine-seeking monster in all of us , that creature who must go, happily, to the new places, the new scenes, in so doing discarding the old ones, the old templates of decent things.  And that new humanity will not be able to provide any real dialog, despite professing themselves to be the great facilitator of such dialog.  They will create experiences of a virtual reality, as a fetish, experiences of the computer screen, ones which no longer allow, even wish or hope for real human dialog, as is only in their perfectly defined self-interest to do so.

To go to the new scenes will be a desire unquestioned by the masses, and unquestionable.  And anyone who does not follow along immediately, as millenials already seem to do, will be ostracized, trivialized, treated as an old fogey, irrelevant, uncool, uncouth, not following the latest in style.  The haircut will be their symbol of belonging.  Their style will be a uniform, and their actions will always include the new technology, worn on the sleeve, proud, proud of ignoring the fellow passer by, the human being sitting next to you, wearing no particular function but that of being human.

2 comments:

Pierre said...

Boy oh boy! You are bringing me back again.... And think that all it took was a simple phrase:
"One day, when I am old, or dead and gone already...."
The magic , that stopped five years ago, as I was pursuing (again) a dream that wasn't mine, that magic is back.
Thanks to you, again.
Well. let's see if I'm capable to finish what I started then.

DC Literary Outsider said...

Pierre, my brother. Of course! I thought I'd stepped over the line into a rant by the light of the next day, harboring a pessimism, so I very much appreciate your very kind words. And yes, I think that's what writing does, it encourages ourselves to write. I've been pulling out Hemingway books I've long put on the back burner, almost discarded, but he gets the juices flowing, and I think he had something to do with inspiring me.
Go for it, and thank you, as I get ready to go to work, Saturday night. Very sorry I missed you in person, but truly was feeling like crap.