In Defense of Technology

In Defense of Technology

 

 

 

By Andrew O'Hagan 

 

New York Times Magazine

 

November 5, 2014 9:00 am

 

 

 

 

Credit "You Autocomplete Me ... or Are You Taking Over?" by Kowalskivision

 

 

The children don’t believe me when I tell them life used to be hard. They think it’s a routine out of Charles Dickens, a tale of filthy lodgings, stale bread and no Internet, where even the most resourceful among us struggled to survive in a world without teeth-bleaching or Kindle. My daughter rolls her eyes whenever I begin my stories of woe. “Here he goes,” she says. “Tell the one about how you used to walk to school alone. And the other one, about how you had to remember people’s phone numbers! And: Watch this. Dad, tell the one about how you used to swim outside, like in a pond or something. With frogs in it!”

 

“You know, darling. It wasn’t so long ago. And it wasn’t such a hardship either. There was actually something quite pleasant about, say, getting lost as you walked in a city, without immediately resorting to Google Maps.”

 

“As if!”

 

And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was life as good as it is now? one is almost programmed, if over the age of 35, to say no to this question. one is supposed to stare into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker.

 

To believe in progress is not only to believe in the future: It is also to usher in the possibility that the past wasn’t all that. I now feel — and this is a revelation — that my past was an interesting and quite fallow period spent waiting for the Internet. At home, I’ll continue to cause a festival of eye-rolling with my notion that some values were preserved by the low-tech environment, but, more generally speaking, life has just gotten better and better. The question is: How far would you go with that? My daughter’s mother goes all the way. “I can sit in my holiday house in the country,” she says, “and order furniture, clothes, anything really, to come from London and Paris. It’s killed provincialism. It’s also killed human loneliness.”

 

“That’s shocking,” I say. “Luxury can’t kill loneliness.”

 

“You want to bet?”

Credit Sylvie Fleury, "Yes to All," 2008, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

 

So, I’ve been on the back foot. I didn’t know it when I was young, but maybe we were just waiting for more stuff and ways to save time. Is that right? Were we just waiting for Twitter to come along and show us there were sexy and clever people out there and funny stuff happening all the time in places we’d barely even heard of? I mean, how could I ever pretend life was even half tolerable in the 1970s, when a slow game of Pong or a fast episode of “Mork & Mindy” felt like a glittering revelation of things to come? My God: It took punk, which was basically just a bunch of art students jumping around wearing safety pins, to wake us out of the doldrums. I grew up in a world where people did mental arithmetic just to fill the time.

 

Then I got over it — and some. I’ve come fully round to time-saving apps. I’ve become addicted to the luxury of clicking through for just about everything I need. Yesterday morning, for example, I realized I needed to know something about a distant relative for a book I’m writing. I’m old enough to remember when one had to pack a bag and take a train; when one had to stand in queues at libraries, complete an application form, then scroll for hours through hard-to-read microfiche and take notes and repeat. I’m not 104, but I wrote a whole book that way, my first, and it took forever and it didn’t add much to most of the paragraphs. Yesterday, I had the information from an archive website in about 20 minutes. Then I made a list of winter clothes to purchase from Mr. Porter. Then I ordered a car from Uber to take me to King’s College London to teach a class, and I emailed my notes to my office computer from the car and I dealt with a dozen emails and I read a review of a restaurant I was going to that evening and watched part of a video of a ballet I was due to see before dinner.

 

What has been lost? Nothing. Has something gone out of my experience of life by ordering all the shopping on Ocado rather than by pushing a cart around the aisles of a supermarket for an hour and a half? Yes: A pain in my backside has been relieved. It is all now done by a series of small, familiar flutterings over the keyboard, which I can do at my leisure, any time of day or night, without looking for the car keys or straining my sense of sociability by running into hundreds of people who are being similarly tortured by their own basic needs. I’ve always liked music, the sheer luxury of having a particular recording there when you want to hear it, but nothing in my long years of hunting for and buying records can beat Spotify. I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights and measures of their own experience: We value our own story and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country. There’s a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell you the opposite.

 

Getting better is getting better. Improvement is improving. There will, of course, always be people who feel alienated by a new thing and there might be a compelling argument to suggest all this availability is merely a high-speed way of filling a spiritual gap in our lives. Yet I can assure you there was no lack of spiritual gap in the lives of people living in small towns in 1982. It was just a lot harder to bridge that gap. We used to wait for years for a particular film to come on television, thinking we might never see it. one had practically to join a cult in order to share a passionate interest. I can still remember Tupperware parties, when — Oh, the good old days! — women would meet at each other’s houses on rain-soaked evenings to try out and buy pastel-colored breakfast bowls. And that was a good night! Communication was usually a stab in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board. And now you can find the love of your life by posting a picture and proving you’ve got a GSOH (great sense of humor). Every day now there’s something new to replace the old way of doing a crucial thing that was hard to do. Is it the middle of the night and you live in Idaho and you want to talk to someone about your roses? Is it Christmas Eve in Rome and you want to know where to hear some music and light a candle?

 

Physical loneliness can still exist, of course, but you’re never friendless online. Don’t tell me the spiritual life is over. In many ways it’s only just begun. Technology is not doing what the sci-fi writers warned it might — it is not turning us into digits or blank consumers, into people who hate community. Instead, there is evidence that the improvements are making us more democratic, more aware of the planet, more interested in the experience of people who aren’t us, more connected to the mysteries of privacy and surveillance. It’s also pressing us to question what it means to have life so easy, when billions do not. I lived through the age of complacency, before information arrived and the outside world liquified its borders. And now it seems as if the real split in the world will not only be between the fed and the unfed, the healthy and the unhealthy, but between those with smartphones and those without.

 

Technology changed my character. It didn’t change my parents’. My mother says she wasn’t touched by the moon landing or the Internet, though she admits that having a fridge has made a wonderful difference. She’s not nostalgic for the days when they would place the milk bottles out on the window ledge overnight — that does the trick, in Scotland — though she has a general feeling that life was cozier and friendlier years ago. I must have taken some of that from her, but the more I think of it the more I see it as an affectation. For me, life did not become more complex with technology, it’s became more amenable, and what a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore.

 

My daughter was right to laugh. Because what she was hearing was a hint of vanity and a note of pride in my stories of the unimproved life. In point of fact, we sat in the past and burned with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn’t to plant a flag on the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but hoping we might like it when we got there. My favorite record when I was a teenager, trapped in a box bedroom in a suburban corner of old Europe, was “How Soon Is Now?” by the Smiths. I had taken a bus and a train and walked for miles to buy the record, and it told a story about giving yourself up to experience. I don’t know where the physical record has gone. It’s probably still in my mother’s attic. But the song is right here at the end of my fingertips as I’m typing, and in the new, constantly improving world around us, it took me just under 15 seconds to locate it. Would anyone care to dance?