The tech reckoning
NOVEMBER 10TH, 2016 — POST 305
“Not checking any social media today.” Received at 6:05AM. The notification waited on my lockscreen for me to wake up. I’d gotten used to getting messages from my partner before I’m out of bed. 3 hours behind her in Vancouver, there’s nothing like a “hey” early in the morning to remind me that people are up and working on the East Coast already, that I probably shouldn’t wait for the lazy November sun to get out of bed before I’m compelled to. But there was no “hey” this morning. Just this declaration, really a statement directed at herself, looped to me to externalise it in the interest of keeping herself accountable for the day’s novel project. “Not checking any social media today”.
I’ve had to hear second-hand of the metropolis submerged in sorrow. From short iMessage exchanges the talk of protests in Union Square, of rallies outside Trump Tower, of spritely New Yorkers who last week babbled into their phones yet this week tread sluggishly, as if wading through the treacle-thick dread have reached my fingertips, relayed by my partner. The fear, loss, uncertainty bleeds into every overheard conversation, the phones melting back into pockets because the five inches of black glass don’t have any answers.
Facebook inundated users with the notification “You have new elected representatives. Find out who represents you”, a dollop of acid into still bleeding wounds on Wednesday morning. Twitter — the very space in which Donald Trump’s voice reverberated most ominously — has seen users blocking once-followers who support Trump. Jokes on the platform now feel hollowed out by the weight of reality. I don’t want to hear about the “darkest timeline” we now inhabit, nor the jaded quips masked as optimism in words to the effect of “nothing will change: the rich stay rich and the poor blame each other”. And the podcasts can only approximate any listeners personal feelings because they’re born from the hosts’ own. Tech doesn’t make space for how any one of us is feeling. It’s built only for the aggregate, dulling the specific quality of personal affect.
I’ve written recently about kind of tech impact that might soon be characterised with hindsight as an assault. Because if this moment was fuelled by something, that something was technology. Infowars, Breitbart, these things don’t exist without the internet, don’t transmit without YouTube and Facebook. Men’s Rights Activism groups, Red Pillers, Dark Enlightenment edgelords don’t breed without Reddit. And turds aren’t given direct means of spewing hate at people like Leslie Jones without Twitter. I understand you don’t win an election, and at least not the electoral college, on the anger of little boys on the internet. But their noise displayed the silent majority was done with being silent. We seem forced to legitimise bad ideas and behaviours through the peaceful transference of power. If 2008 was the election that technology won, 2016 is the election that technology lost.
But something had to shake us from our cybernetic love affair, at the very least enough to prompt pause. Unplugging, switching off, or simply turning away have on a dime turned from quaint acts done on a whim to mechanisms for survival. It’s no longer that “The Distraction Sickness”, as Andrew Sullivan terms it, is killing the user, it feels like it’s killing the world. The tide already felt poised to turn this year in the wake of Sullivan’s piece and myriad works from Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human to Tristan Harris’ Time Well Spent, initiatives that seek promotion of a sharp, mindful consideration of what we do when we’re online. Now an exodus feels palpably imminent.
This election has shown once-essential things to be fundamentally frivolous. Technology has won us over utterly with the constant cold glow of a screen and the navigation through a dopamine pathway gaping with overuse. But now we’re burned. It not only has no answers, no capacity to acknowledge the specific brand of hurt each of us holds, but is also the thing that delivered us to this moment. This isn’t to say we will run away. Instead, we will finally come to acknowledge that we weren’t users of technology but rather subjects of its influence. And my hope is that more are emboldened to once again wield technology as those who created it initially intended.
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