Fuzzy + Techie = Stupid

How dumb categorizations of academic subjects brought us not only teachers having to buy their own Kleenex, but global social networks rotten with hate, harassment, and awfulness

I was a Prop 13 kid.

I was a student in California, starting middle school, when Proposition 13 passed and the public schools lost crap tons of funding. In a few short years, we would be learning how to make a book cover out of a shopping bag because the books were falling apart. By the time I got to high school the swimming pool had been filled in and most of the music programs disappeared.

Prop 13 was sold as “grandma is gonna get taxed out of her house” but it primarily was a massive cash grab by the state’s largest owner of commercial property and Jabba the Hutt lookalike contest winner, Howard Jarvis.

Now that there was no money everybody went, “Oh geez, we’ve got to get in there and justify our budgets so somebody else doesn’t get all of what’s left of half a saltine cracker.” So a system that was supposed to be for educating the young ‘uns morphed into a budgeting and funding battle station.

Subjects that lent themselves to quantification, like math for example, were easier to talk about. Math was a “hard” subject. Just like the “hard” sciences, like physics and chemistry. Tangible. Graph-able. Real. The money went to the “hard” stuff. The subjects where you supposedly could learn “real” things, and later get a “real” job in engineering or medicine or law.

The humanities, on the other hand, didn’t look great projected on a wall in a conference room. They were “soft.” Intangible. Not graph-friendly. How do you explain to a bunch of suits that knowing what it is to be human is a “valuable” thing to do? It’s like speaking Klingon to a bunch of rabbits.

Not that anybody had enough money, mind you. But a hierarchy emerged. “Hard” subjects at the top, “soft” ones as nice-to-haves funded in wealthy white neighborhoods by education foundations throwing annual parties. Everybody else could just do without art or music or dance or theater.

The divide between “fuzzy” and “techie” grew. The Fuzzies were aimless globs of vapor who sat around all day smelling flowers. The Techies were the budding engineers, the builders of the future. Techies could do stuff. Fuzzies resorted to studying art because they couldn’t do stuff.

Majoring in art at a school famous for churning out Nobel laureates (and that would later spawn Google) got me a lot of quizzical responses. I couldn’t sit around the dorm hallways and bitch about how impossible the “problem set” was, or who was “setting the curve” in Calc. I smelled like linseed oil and had paint all over my clothes.

I was definitely not going to build the future. Not the way the techies inventing apps in their dorm rooms were going to. Leave that to the people who know real things.

Welp, here we are in the present, which used to be the future, and now actual humans have built global networks of computers and little screens that reach into people’s homes and brains and destroy their lives. Not just by way of wasted time, mind you, but with harassment, radicalization, and violent uprisings. These pixel machines can get a person to drive their car across multiple states to plow into a crowd of people they don’t know, killing one of them. They can be used to lie to insecure voters by way of made-up communities and groups that are really teenagers half a world away who want to make a buck. They can organize frustrated French citizens to take the “gilets jaunes” from their cars and become a violent political movement in mere days.

It didn’t have to happen that way.

The people who built these networks, they could have said early on, “Here are the rules for being on here. We want this to be a positive experience. So if we see stuff that isn’t constructive, we will remove it. We are a private entity, there is no First Amendment here. Get over it, and behave yourselves. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere. Like 4chan.”

But, you see, the chart and graph and cash monsters got hold. Instead of arguing for school funding, “founders” were grabbing for ever larger chunks of venture capital and investment. They had to perform the dance of “growth,” to please the investment machine. The rewards were godzillions of dollars and global reach and being Important.

The cost was everyone’s humanity.

We are not computers. Computers are stupid. They can literally only do what we tell them to do. They are not sentient, they are not “artificial intelligence.” They will only ever be what we are able to make them be. They do not have instincts. They have databases and speed and algorithms.

I grew up with both computers and art. My dad worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, programming Crays. A large proportion of the people in town worked out there. Chemists. Physicists. Actual rocket scientists. It’s the first place I saw and rode in a solar-powered car. It’s the first place I played an adventure game by typing into a terminal spitting out the story on tractor-feed paper.

So I understood computers, and programming, practically from birth. Instead of calculus I studied FORTRAN. On a Trash-80. So yeah, kind of a techie environment.

But guess what: Those people in my hometown were artists. Photographers, musicians. Inventors. There was a huge arts festival every year. I can’t even count how many concerts I went to. Many of them involved one or more of my family members, singing or playing. Sometimes I would sit and turn pages of music for my dad at the piano or the organ.

So this distinction between “hard” and “soft?” It’s total garbage. It’s meaningless. Chopping ourselves into silos like that has spawned some of our greatest problems. We’ve slid down a funnel of greed and numbers that fails to address our very personhood. No wonder we’re tumbling into ever greater inequality. No wonder society is “polarized.”

You know what we should be doing? Responding to art. Reacting to our own and other people’s creations. Communicating with authors across hundreds of years or from yesterday. Standing in front of a painting that we don’t get. Listening to music we’ve never heard. Looking people in the face.

And turning trash off. Don’t let some paid pundit tell you what things mean. You know what things mean. You know what cruelty is. You can figure this out yourself.

We are not data. We are not machines. We are not demographics. We are three-dimensional people. A lot of us are having to run from our own homes and throw ourselves on the mercy of foreign countries. A lot of us are running crowdfunding campaigns to pay for cancer treatments. And a lot of us are making decisions about people we have never met based on images and words curated by people who are not us, who sell advertising and data and “growth” for a living.

Do you think a lot of that crap would be happening if social networks, instead of delivering “growth” to the money gods, were about making us more visible to ourselves? This idea of being connected across the globe could be so powerful, man. It could make us real to each other. Instead, it’s making us into caricatures no deeper than the thickness of a screen. We’re hiding behind data and demographics and online “behavior.” Clicks. Likes. The rules.

I’ve got no magic wand. But I know we can do better. And I know that art, and expression, and weirdness, have to get back in the equation and quick.

And, I know that we are already connected, not just across the globe but across time and space, by art and music and writing and other things people have created through the ages. You can talk with an author who’s been dead hundreds of years. You can see the actual brush strokes of a painter you will never hang out with. You can find out, today, what the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks or Romans or any number of ancient cultures thought was important and worthy of putting in tangible form.

You’re not data. You’re a person. And so is everybody else. We grapple constructively with that, and with our differences, through the arts and creative expression of all kinds. Okay and also sports. Which is a separate topic. Don’t get me started.

Betsy Streeter is a cartoonist and artist and she writes a splendid email newsletter called Bad Art. This essay is way longer than her usual emails.