Technology and the heating of our world
I was recently staring out my window just daydreaming about a simpler time. That time being my childhood when flip phones were the “in thing” and Myspace was the best way to keep up with what was cool. So sometime during the mid 2000s. It was at that moment that I felt I understood how someone like my mom can’t really relate to the world we currently find ourselves in. While she isn’t a boomer by the strict definition she is from the generations before technology truly exploded into the titan that it is today. I think in that moment I understood the longing she and others like her feel for a simpler time, technologically speaking.
I have recently watched a lot of videos that are related to technology which planted the seed of these thoughts in my brain. Two that stand out are Jared Henderson's video on why some people are rejecting technology and Synthet's video on the history of the crazy frog ringtone. Two videos that are oceans apart in style and topic but somehow still belong in the same genre. At least in how I see it. Jared Henderson's video discusses the philosophical impacts of technology and how it impacts our lives as well as how people are rejecting it. Synthet's video struck my nostalgia chord and made me long for the days when the best thing a mobile phone could do was play a sick new ringtone or even had flashing lights when it vibrated. I miss the days when I had control over technology and I could use it when I felt like it, instead of me being controlled by it. This is how I think of technology now and why the idea of rejecting it also has an appeal to me. It is also moving faster and faster by the day. What I mean by this is that with the advent of AI things are speeding up. To paraphrase Corey Doctorow in a recent interview corporations implement AI into the workplace which then forces worker the work more and for longer to keep up with it. The computing power of AI is also increasing every day and is being implemented into every aspect of our world. This is just one part of what I’m talking about. We seem to be speed running technology from conception to enshitification. When the internet was slower the world felt slower or at least it did for me with my dial up connection. Facebook was the king of social media for ages but then as smartphones became ubiquitous things started speeding up and it fell to the wayside,for multiple reasons, and now we have Instagram and tik tok that feel quicker and more immediate. This immediacy in the dopamine hit has bled through into other ways of living. The infinite scroll model has been implemented into websites while some software has a social media like function. Gone are traditional forums that while not perfect where did provide some friction in use. Websites have been streamlines so that they fit the UI required for viewing on a phone. These sorts of changes while small all add up to things just moving faster.
The way I try to visualise this in my head is like this. When a substance like water heats up then the molecules begin moving quicker. So if we apply that to the world we live in we can see that the atmosphere is heating due to climate change. Our atmosphere is its own type of fluid, heating up with quicker moving molecules but we are part of the world also. Our society feels like its heating up and we are the molecules that are vibrating and moving quicker. We are developing our technological world quicker which in turn is heating our natural world quicker and to a degree our social world. To me there is a sense of chaos that stems from this. Do you feel it? The news cycle changes daily, trends only last a few days,computer technology develops quicker and our geopolitical situation changes at the drop of a hat. These are just some big examples but I think if you sat back and reflected on things you would see the trend all over. This quickening of life is also unravelling it in a sense. I don’t think we were meant to be living this quickly; we need processing time so that we can fully comprehend what’s going on around us. To a degree this is by design as our capitalist system operates at a constant pace that can never slow down. This has been applied to all things and as we build better technology we increase the speed at which our lives move then the process repeats ad infinitum.
The world is heating both naturally and socially and its scary. My daydreaming about the days when I wasn’t algorithmically manipulated are actually my desires for a simpler world technologically. The more I learn about the world the more I am confused by how it and how we can collectively deal with it. I often have this feeling where I feel like I’m in a speeding car and I need to step on the breaks but I guess I didn’t get brakes with my base version of the car. They are only included in the higher tier package so I just have to swerve out of the way of the oncoming traffic.