Praxis doesn't make perfect
Google before you tweet is the new think before you speak.” That epithet is not original to me: I got it from the interwebs. And not from them smart websites like Boing Boing or TED.com but from the recent social networking obsession, Tumblr. (Check us out: unomagazine.tumblr.com) It’s a dangerous observation, and not an untrue one. The more we’ve ceded our basic functions as human beings, as we have continually done so to things like pacemakers, prosthetic limbs and now even our own thoughts, can we honestly (ask philosophers or those who’ve read bits and parts of Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman) call ourselves individuals? Of course we can! Just dumber ones.
“Perhaps unwisely, the brain is subcontracting many of its core functions, creating a series of branch economies that may one day amalgamate and mount a management buy-out,” wrote the late JG Ballard about personal computers. He was being cheeky but deadly serious. (The author of titles such as High Rise and Empire of the Sun wrote all of his stories and novels longhand first before using a typewriter.) If a company like Google does our thinking for us, then his quip has come to pass. (Ballard was always — to give him due credit — until his last novel eerily prescient with his ideas if not always elegant with his prose.) The buy-out is done — and all that neo-hipster wisdom is an example of it. That heady brew of ’60s baby-boomer idealism plus ’70s scenester excess plus ’80s Gordon Gekko-greed aphorisms conspire to rob us of our horror, consign us to the boredom of Ikea-imagined work-spaces and the comfort of consumer thrift-shop dumpsters we live in and call home.
This isn’t utopia and can never be, after all. But neither is it a dystopia. Big Brother may have won — but he is none other than ourselves. We’re watching.
Obscure as it is, technology is a vital component in our lives. We are what we say we are on our social networking site profiles — even less, in most cases. I can hear the collective groan across cities whenever Facebook goes down for one reason or another as proof. And why shouldn’t we? Personally, I find people more agreeable as digital avatars than flesh-and-bone. For those who already have enough friends in the real world we don’t need any more; for those who haven’t anyone then it’s certainly allowed them a social life more robust than they can ever hope for anywhere else.
But we can’t blame Google for the rise of stupidity in our culture. It’s a trait that’s pre-dated Al Gore by millennia (most of you won’t even remember recent history: figures like Dan Quayle, the former vice-president that preceded Gore and his curious way of spelling potatoes) and evidence of its growth has been steady ever since; it’s just now there’s even a slimmer chance of people getting smarter. I really believe though that the ones who aren’t will be even more brilliant with the help of it.
In his story, “Help,” Gregorio C. Brillantes has one of characters, a party guest named Max Agsorwa, say: “There is no history without living men. A Marxian fallacy would be to maintain that technological progress alone determines all change. The structure of human societies depends as well on feelings, thought, and… a kind of poetry.” Though intended as caricature in the fiction, he isn’t wrong (only officious and insufferable in his delivery, which might even be worse). All in all, we may be virtually cyborgs living in an increasingly prosthetic world but make no mistake about it — it’s our own.
At least, for now it is.
