New Hampshire Yankee farmer leaning on a fence rail and chewing a blade of hay. “Go on down to where old Maude Frick used to live and then turn right at the place where the barn burned down in 1958.” If Taxi Driver gets remade, it won’t star Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. It will star Elizabeth Warren in a driverless Uber. As for driverless cars, what’s next, eaterless meals? Computer connectivity has also given us the means to binge-watch TV, which is as delightful as having the means to binge-eat kale. All while wearing ear buds – a sort of reverse hearing aid that blocks out anything worth listening to. The millennial generation’s motto is “Huh?” Meanwhile, the iPhone blocks out any sort of real-life event worth looking at. Imagine a person from even 15 years ago being told that what the future holds is humanity looking at its phone all day. Amazon has transformed shopping from a pleasurable excursion and happy social interaction into something more like going into the outhouse with a Sears catalogue to browse and use as Charmin. Internet price comparisons also take the sharp, eye-for-a-bargain intelligence out of shopping. But that’s OK. We don’t need real intelligence. We have artificial intelligence – everywhere. My toaster has a brain. What a way to kick off a gloomy Monday morning – being outsmarted by a toaster.
Then I work from home rather than an office. Instead of hanging out at the watercooler gossiping, flirting with coworkers, and making sports bets, I’m overwhelmed by Big Data flooding my personal communication devices. And if I go somewhere else to work, I come home to a “smart house.” It was bad enough when the house contained nothing but the kids getting smart with me. Now they’ve got the thermostat, the burglar alarm, and the toaster on their side. To take an example of triviality from my own field... the computer network is a handy device for writers. But does it improve the quality of what gets written? • When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. • When we had to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to get a quill (and before the Infinite Monkey Theorem was developed), we got William Shakespeare. • When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. • When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. • And with the Internet we get – the President of the United States on Twitter. When it comes to cryptocurrency and computer connectivity, be sure that “progress” doesn’t do to your money what it has done to literature.
American Consequences | 65
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