A fork in the road
Live in an Elon Musk world or live in a Mary Oliver world? Which would you choose?
A few weeks ago, in the midst of my lowest low feelings around the rise of American fascism and the slow return to the Dark Ages, I was expressing to some friends how badly my days kept starting.
Every morning, instead of letting my little eyes open naturally and allowing my brain to adjust to the reality of daytime, I’d hear my smartphone’s alarm start tinkling and before my body had a nanosecond to adjust to waking up and real life, I’d be scrolling through Flip, streaming reams and reams of Musk and Trump and Vance and Netanyahu and Putin and countless other horrors I have no control over into my semi-conscious state.
And then, when I was done with that, I’d open Instagram, where the nightmare of Gaza and environmental destruction would punctuate reams and reams of funny dogs and manic, wide-mouthed content creators, and the bright achievements and well-travelled lives of countless writers and people, all just perfectly poised to remind me of what a failure I am.
It wasn’t great way to start the day, you know? I wasn’t feeling great.
But I had a problem, right? Because even though I wake up consistently between 6 and 7 am, I’d told myself I couldn’t ‘not use an alarm’ and that meant I had to use my phone and that meant I was totally bound to torture myself with social media and news before I’d even woken up properly.
Real self-harming behaviour.
Anyway. So, we were talking about this, and that’s when Sarah said something like ‘that’s enough I’m buying you an alarm clock the minute we’re done here’ and that’s what she did.
Which is how I now have this nifty little digital alarm clock attached to nothing but the plug point and FM radio next to my bed, and how on most days, I’m able to lie in bed and stretch and snuggle and think my thoughts and daydream in the quiet of morning before I get up to slip into some writing. No longer jagged and burned and recoiling from horror and overwhelm before my body has had the chance to breathe properly.
So the other day I was marvelling about how big a change such a small thing can make when it occurred to me that this little clock marked another fork in the road for me, a fork I’ve found myself at – I realise now – many times throughout my life.
It’s the fork in the road where I decide to get swept into digital unreality or live in the reality of the present moment.
The first fork was in 1998, when I finished playing Half-Life. The minute I’d played that final scene I knew it was the last time I’d ever play another game. Not because I hated it, but because it consumed me utterly. I lost days to that game. Nights. You know those horror stories of gamers whose babies starve to death because they can’t drag themselves away from the screen? I knew on a cellular level that that would be me. And so I made a decision. No games ever again. No thank you very much.
Or in the sage words of OJ Haywood, nope.
And that wasn’t the last time I said nope to tech.
When Oculus Rift came around I thanked baby Jebus that I couldn’t afford it; when Siri, Alexa, and the Internet of Things came around, I passed on those. Ditto body tech, internet forums, gaming and gaming paraphernalia, filming everything, becoming a content creator aka slave to the algos, and most recently choosing not to succumb to the allure of AI even though, when it first became a thing, I’ll admit I experienced in my gut a feeling of such raw opportunity that I almost dove face-first into it.
This is not a moral assessment I’m making here about people who do this.
This is about self-preservation.
Some people can manage the balance. I cannot.
Remember the dead babies? I’d be one of those people who start with a simple prompt and end up falling in love with their projections onto a machine response. I’d be one of those people whose brains turn to mush because they can’t do anything without asking AI first. For crying out loud, I once got attached to a pendulum (something I think my addictive personality mystic girlies will understand).
The minute I allowed myself to meld with the interface, I would be done for. There’s just something about the black screen and the story and the cocoon of it all that reminds me too much of casinos and strip clubs and theatre. A world of projection and make-believe in which to get lost. A world in which everything feels controllable until it’s not.
It’s not that I distrust all tech. But there’s a difference between tech that’s a platform, a tool, and an immersive experience, and suddenly the line between all of these is getting very vague. When a life – when experience, memories, relationships – is mediated through tech, how do you know what’s yours?
The implications are very problematic.
You know, when the internet, smartphones and social media came along, we just embraced it, no questions asked. Thirty years on, the data is in about how it’s affecting us: cognitive capacity and problem-solving is on its way out. Which are, you know, some key fundamentals to what make humans human.
Watching how the news cycle turns more and more to AI and body tech and mammal-like robots, how the tech companies make their intentions blatantly obvious and how Late Capitalism’s end-game becomes increasingly, horrifyingly clear, I feel like the fork in the road is one day going to be ‘live like a Matrix battery’ or ‘cling to the real world, the physical world, the world unmediated by tech, unplugged into the world’s eyeballs, disconnected from broligarch data’.
And I feel like the fork in the road is going to come for every urban dweller whether they want it or not and the choice will have to be made: live in a neuralinked Elon Musk world or live in a Mary Oliver world.
A Summer Day
By Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?Looking at my little digital clock, I know which one I’m choosing. Do you?
Good times,
t
To the light, to the light
It’s been a rough few weeks. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the gradual unwinding of America’s facade of self-determination and freedom for all, very unsettling.