Well so here we are again. Everywhere you go people are constantly screaming, “What we need more of in 2022 is blogs!”. Okay, so maybe blogging is about as hip as My Chemical Romance, but 280 characters just doesn’t cut it for this guy. And Vlogging? That’s a hard no.
I was telling myself to get back into writing so this is my way of getting back into shape. This won’t be so much a blog as a guy who’s been eating Fritos on his couch for a year wheezing his way through a 5K.
I was thinking about….the Internet. The biggest event of our lifetime is probably not the pandemic, or Donald Trump, or 9/11, or Monica Lewinsky, or even a late middle aged Tommy Lee posting drunken dick pics to promote a reunion tour, but the Internet and all the ways it has changed life. It’s the automobile of the 21st Century. Cars created suburbia, highways, and Sammy Hagar’s I Can’t Drive 55. The Internet has created….well everything.
It's become commonplace for people to say the Internet ruined life as we know it. You see it all the time: people posting comments on social media over the Internet saying the social media and the Internet destroyed society. Guess they are trying to bring the enemy down from the inside? Yes, it's kind of ironic, maybe a little hypocritical—or maybe it’s not. Maybe it just shows that it’s become such a ubiquitous force, it’s pointless to even try to live an offline life anyway. Remember when hipsters all were going back to flip phones? Have we heard much about that lately? I entertained the thought several years ago myself. Then I thought, “What if I get lost?”. And “Why do flip phone screens suck so bad?”. End of my retro hipster phase.
And yet none of us felt so ambivalent if not hostile toward it in the 90’s when it started. I was totally into it. Guitar tabs posted for free online! No more $20 tablature books to buy. Emailing people. So cool! Er……are there any naked online pictures you can find of celebrities or other girls gone wild? (The bandwidth for actual videos was still at least a DSL connection away). I never found out the answer because this would be wrong and just sad! So did we think AOL was a harbinger of societal collapse? Helllll no.
And yet now it seems common for people to say life changed for the worse and everyone seems to have buyer’s remorse and feel like we were lied to somehow. Or maybe not even lied to. Maybe everyone telling us The Information Superhighway was going to make us all smarter, better people believed it themselves. Maybe both the sellers and the buyers drank the Kool Aid. Did they know it would just become The Opinion Superhighway? The Tik Tok Transit Station?
Now this is really tricky because how can you know it’s not just middle-aged nostalgia? Are people really yearning for the offline world or just their youth? Or a bit of both?
I will say there’s one example I think about. My job. I’ve been working in the same office for 19 years this September. There have been two major technical shifts in my time there: one happened in the first couple of years, the other happened in the last couple of years. The first was switching from paper cases to an all electronic system. I mean we weren’t COMPLETELY in the Stone Ages when I got there. There were computers. And you would use them to track cases and do certain things, but the cases were paper, the medical evidence and forms were all paper. But we underwent a (very painful) transition to all electronic case processing. (It’s the government---they can screw up a two car funeral. Usually by summoning a committee of 23 to design 39 different routes the two cars are to follow. And are we sure the deceased is dead? We’re going to need a death certificate before we can move forward).
Also, when I got there, the place was pretty lively. Lots of socialization, lots of shall we say eccentric, sometimes alcoholic, occasionally insane people. But a lot of people seemed to know each other. There were semi-regular happy hours and a lot of people actually showed up. At our summer picnics and The Christmas I mean Holiday I mean Winter Party was always well attended. The place was kind of fun. But slowly things seemed to change. The place got more cliquey. Fewer people seemed to know each other. Happy Hours stopped since people just wouldn’t show up. And our summer and winter events became a little more sparsely attended even though attendance meant a free Thursday afternoon off from work.
Did all the fun people just retire or leave? Was it management changing? Possibly that was part of it, but our switch to an electronic, Internet driven case filing and medical records system may have changed the place more than anything. In the paper case world, you had to move the cases between medical consultants, supervisors, quality assurance, the clerical staff. Back and forth. Cases—and people---were constantly on the move though the office. So you might bring a file to someone but find yourself asking about the kids or telling them about your weekend attending a Maxim model search at The Brickyard, whatever the case may be. But once we went fully digital, there was rarely any work related reason to get out of your cubicle and social activity seemed to gradually decline accordingly. It’s not like everyone stared straight ahead and never spoke a word, but I think a lot less. And the cold convenience of technology might have driven all of it.
But if our office community had become more splintered than before, it’s become almost non-existent now. It’s now a mostly remote job. People are only required to be in the office one day per week—and many seem to often use their time on days they are supposed to be in the office. We say this was driven by the pandemic, but Covid really just accelerated it. It’s really driven by the Internet. Covid or not, without being able to get online, remote work would be impossible. Most people seem to love working from home. I (mostly) like it. It’s the 21st Century’s answer and apology to the 20th Century’s biggest downer: commuting. There hadn’t been too much commuting before cars since everyone just lived where they worked. But if there is one thing that seems to unite us a country and a world, it’s our universal hate of commuting. A century of car commuting has raised blood pressures, bored people to tears, polluted the environment, caused endless amounts of car accidents, and subjected people to endless phony phone call skits from wacky morning drive DJ's. Telework is the antidote to that poison. Whenever I hear people say they hate the office, if they talk further they usually bring up the commute. I don’t know if we actually do hate the office per se all that much, it’s just that the commute required to get us there and home spoils any redeeming qualities it might otherwise have. I myself have wasted COUNTLESS hours and days of my life sitting on some cruddy two seater bus with my leg rubbed against a big boned stranger’s leg because they actually require two seats or waiting for a bus in sub-zero temps or pouring rain. Which is why I can’t be anything but pro-telework and thank the creators of the Internet for bringing this bounteous gift to humanity. It’s this century’s white-out to last century’s grammatical mistake.
And yet……can I be honest with you? Do not tell my bosses this. I actually have kind of mixed feelings about working from home. I love the zero commute, but it’s kind of lonely some days. I listen to music, I listen to podcasts. That keeps me company. I call my claimants and they are always an absolute delight! But after the Internet chained everyone to their desk in the office, now it’s chaining us to our desk at home, miles away from each other. Only a Skype away! But that’s still not real life. So it just seems the more technology advances, the further it drives away a lot fo face to face interactions with each other. Am I the only one a tiny bit sad about this? Maybe people with more of a life than me don’t care. Especially the ones with kids. Or the ones who kept all their friends growing up. Those folks probably have very little need for the office as some sort of social town square. This is why office management’s talks about preserving “culture” rings hollow. I assume many offices are similar to mine where much of the culture and community had already pretty much gone the way of paper case filing systems anyway. Work form home is only the final phase of a computer and Internet driven separation of office staff from each other that’s been going on for a few decades.
And is the office just a microcosm of society? I saw a Facebook post the other day asking about going to the mall back in the 80’s. This of course triggered a flood of nostalgia about how great the mall used to be. I kind of agree. I used to love the mall. Record stores, bookstores, Orange Julius, how could you not love it? Or video stores. I watched the Netflix doc about the last Blockbuster where they ran through the history of video stores. So I went online and found a blue and yellow Blockbuster T-shirt. Strangers compliment me on this shirt almost every time I wear it. I’ve never had a shirt that drew such praise. Is this because everyone kind of misses the social setting of a video store? I guess we should be happy that any smart TV or Roku or Apple TV is the biggest video store you could ever imagine right at your fingertips. You never have to leave your home! And no worries about snotty judgmental clerks questioning your rental choices! (Clerks? What are you a degenerate? The Mask? What are you mentally challenged?). It’s more convenient and convenience seems to win every time. But it’s lonelier. You don’t have to leave your house to work or watch any movie you want. Is that good news or bad news?
But maybe all this is stupid. Okay so you can’t find a record store in the mall anymore, but you can still see live music. You can’t find video stores, but you can still go to the movies (if streaming doesn’t kill movie theaters). Work and shopping may be far more confined to home, but people still go out. They go to sporting events, they play sports, they join yoga classes. They get sunburns and alcohol poisoning in Cancun. They go to bars and restaurants. Lots and lots of things are still basically like they were in the offline world of the 80’s and mostly offline world of the 90’s. Could both the statements that computers and the Internet are going to save the world and that they are destroying the world be hyperbolic and basically wrong?
Young Steve Jobs constantly used a metaphor about computers. He said humans aren’t very fast and can be easily outraced by any number of animals. But put a person on a bicycle and they can beat most animals in a race. So computers are the bicycle that will make us faster and better.
I’d say that hasn’t hasn’t aged well. Is a crutch a better analogy? Do smart machines make us dumber? You could learn how to spell or you could let spellcheck do it for you. You can learn how to sing or let auto-tune do it for you. And did people before the computer age have no ability to enrich themselves? They did have things called books. And newspapers. And magazines. And encyclopedias. And evening TV news—which was actually probably a little better when it was more information driven instead of opinion driven ratings bait. That magical bicycle was kind of always available to anyone who wanted to ride it. And of course, it's still available today for people who still want it. So maybe the biggest insult you could actually give computers and the Internet isn’t that they have destroyed society, it’s that they haven’t maybe mattered? There were smart people and dumb people then. And there are smart and dumb people now. And the smart people are still smart because they read books—not Yahoo News. (Full disclosure: I read both so maybe flip a coin here).
But maybe here’s the difference: you once needed to at least be semi-smart to get your voice heard. Most people in print and TV journalism are at least reasonably smart, as are people who create movies and TV shows. But social media, as opposed to the old media, has opened the floodgates to everyone. You can be a complete idiot and be on more or less equal footing in the comments section of Facebook or Twitter with any MIT professor or Yale graduate. On the Internet a PhD from Stanford is of equal value to The School Of Hard Knocks.
So has the Internet made smart people smarter? Doubt it. Has it made dumb people dumber? Doubt it. But maybe it’s legitimized and popularized dumbness and meanness in a way like we’ve never seen before. Ignorant and dumb people have never had more company than they have now. So they can get together and egg each other on. Al Quaeda was organized online. So many mass shooters belong to forums where they can have their feelings reinforced by other angry, alienated young men. The January 6th insurrections were from many different states, but they organized it all online. (They probably got help turning their computers on). 30 years ago, that would have almost never happened because the Internet wasn’t around. Also white supremacy went into remission for a long time probably because the gatekeeper media didn’t talk about it and there just wasn’t a community many racists could find to share views and receive encouragement from others. Now Sleepless in Shreveport can pour out his hate filled heart about how much he hates black people to all his semi-literate soulmates the world over.
In other words, the Internet has democratized everything. And this is the real conflict because don’t we say we want things democratized? It’s just that the Internet has created a megaphone that has allowed the lunatic fringe to not be on the fringes anymore. Again, The Information Superhighway just seems to incredibly naïve now. In hindsight, we actually should have seen this coming. In the 20th Century, television and newspapers became the glue that helped bind society in a way it had never been before. We were really always the Divided States Of America but for a while we were actually pretty unified. Economic prosperity and a non-divisive, more bipartisan media helped create that. (In our divided times we don’t believe that: liberals say it was lies from the corporate media, conservatives say they were always stealth liberals imposing their agenda in sneaky ways through the mask of impariality but let’s move on). If the old media was like the world with its clothes on—often designer clothes at that---the new online media is life stripped naked. In many ways it’s more honest, less polite, less vetted. But as they said on Seinfeld, there’s good naked and bad naked and what we see is definitely naked while opening a pickle jar. Or it’s like what they say about nudists: it’s always the ones you least want to see naked who are first to take their clothes off.
Maybe Steve Jobs was right. Maybe the digital age has given people a bicycle—it’s just that it’s not to the fast and thoughtful ones. They already had one. Instead it’s given the lowest common denominator one. Not one they can use to become smarter and faster, but one they can use to broadcast and celebrate and encourage ignorance. The bicycle is not knowledge or invention or creativity, it’s attention. A voice. So it’s not like humans racing a cheetah as he predicted, it’s smart and decent humans being chased by Proud Boys on their brand new 10 speeds. (Okay, souped up Harleys but trying to stick with the bicycle metaphor here).
And this is why I say the biggest story of our time, almost the only real story of our time is the invention of the Internet. If the world hasn’t been destroyed in 100 years or 200 years, I’m sure that’s what the history books will talk about first. And those of us who are old enough to remember the offline world and yet have lived through the online world have been alive though a unique time in human history. The vast majority of people never saw the online world and the vast majority of future people will have no direct experience or memory of the offline world. So many other big recent historical events seem more of a symptom of this tidal wave. Again, 9/11 may not ever happen if those radical Muslims from different countries weren’t able to come together online. Trumpism likely never happens either. Again, it’s all from a voice a segment of the population now has thanks to the Internet that has fueled a movement that he was smart enough to exploit all the way to the White House. But in many ways Trump and his buddies have been along for this ride as much as the rest of us.
So I don’t know. Maybe the Internet will destroy society after all. It certainly seems to have split us into factions much more. It’s become such a depository and dumping ground of opinions that it almost seems like facts have become less important. Is it going to kill any idea of an objective reality itself? John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things” but what if they aren’t as stubborn as we might hope? What if facts are like a religious faith: they draw all their power from people’s belief in them. If everyone stops believing in God, then God is dead. (In the sense of having relevance down here on earth, not necessarily in the sense of whether God exists). Zeus and Aphrodite, and Athena weren’t just names in books, they were gods with shrines people visited to worship. Now they are dead because no one believes in them anymore. They don’t believe Zeus can do anything to help them in their life. If people don’t believe facts help them, will they just stop believing them and does the Internet provide an unprecedented forum for new distorted realities to form? If someone’s Alternative Facts are all I choose to believe, does an actual fact matter?
So the Internet just seems like this monster whose taken on a life of its own. Dr. Frankenstein had the noblest of intentions when he created him but the monster grew a mind of its own and the doctor lost control of his own creation. But whats’s amazing about technology is there are no rules, no laws that seem to govern it. Was legislation ever passed approving the Internet? Was there a Supreme Court ruling? Nope. We tightly monitor abortion rights, gay marriage, gambling, how fast you can drive on the highway, what drugs you can put in your body, but something like the Internet which has arguably impacted life at least as much as those things was never subject to any real review, sign-off, or permission slip. Same thing with the 20th Century’s big invention: cars. Don’t think the Supreme Court gave the green light there either. It just happened. People heard how fast they could get from Point A to Point B and no one thought there was any reason why we wouldn’t rush into it. We now know that cars have caused thousands or millions of deaths from driver and pedestrian accidents, that they have caused skyrocketing carbon emissions which could end up creating a climate all but inhospitable to humans…..so yeah. Someone probably should have reviewed this. They were spending more time worrying about prohibiting alcohol and never even considered any downside to cars. Not saying cars shouldn’t have existed, just pointing out that new tech exists on its own privileged, basically above the law plane that almost nothing else in society does.
Holy crap this is long. I could probably go on but…………….I won’t. Here At Blog You Like A Hurricane we have a staff of one. Budgetary constraints just don’t allow more staff members I’m afraid. So Tom Cruise does his own stunts and your humble blogger does his own editing.
What have we learned? Probably nothing. Bye!
PS--And I didn't even talk about distracted driving. Thanks Apple! Another reason Steve Jobs' metaphorical bike rider won't be outracing any cheetahs any time soon. The cheetah isn't texting that smokeshow he met at Cross Fit training in the middle of the race before crashing into a tree!
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