Automatic for the sheeple

In early May, Google introduced a new Gmail feature it called “Smart Compose,” which uses some kind of sophisticated predictive technology to anticipate what you are about to write mere seconds before you actually write it. It’s meant to helpfully mitigate the chore of drafting mundane emails by making it possible to “touch base” or “follow up” in a spasm of instantaneous divination. Eerie enough, but it reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague many years ago, when I told him I intended to become a professional writer. “One day,” he foresaw ominously, “you won’t need to write an article, because a computer will be able to study what you’ve written and come up with something original in your own voice automatically.”

That friend passed away last year, before Smart Compose arrived. I take some comfort that he saw it coming.

Of course, Smart Compose seems less smart, and therefore less menacing, when you consider the content of the messages it is designed to predict. Most of the emails we send one another are pitiful, in terms of rhetorical panache or linguistic originality. I would wager 90% of my outbound mail consists of variations of the phrase “sounds good,” and, aspire to innovate as I might, there are only so many ways to announce to a recipient that you are “just circling back.” The terrible truth about Smart Compose is that it works because most of what we’re composing is stupid, and we would have decidedly less to fear about language and automation if we did not rely so heavily on mechanical expressions and prefabricated constructions to communicate. It’s not surprising that an algorithm can write our emails for us, because our emails are largely cobbled together out of clichés.

We seem to be delegating more and more of our communicative work to automation. I don’t mean to computer software — even if “autocomplete” seems the watchword for Apple and Google in the near future. I mean to a different sort of automation: joke templates and internet memes, trendy references and juvenile posting, a whole asinine complex of perfunctory junk-language clogging social media and eroding our brains. It’s a phenomenon that’s replaced a sense of humour with the same five or six image macros on a rotating loop, and amusing observations about current events with any one of a dozen unvarying captions tweeted beneath a picture from the day’s news.

At times the year in communication seemed little more than a procession of briefly ubiquitous memes: from whether this is a butterfly to what you should have by the age of 35, from recipes for success to car salesmen slapping roofs, there was little you could say to someone that couldn’t be said better with an incredibly played-out meme.

The urge to participate in a meme cycle is hard to resist. It doesn’t demand much, attracts attention and makes you feel like you belong to something widespread and very contemporary. But I think there’s a deeper impulse, which is as simple as the need to say something, to put something out there, to create. That need is never satisfied with less effort for more reward than when you log on and fire off “weird flex but okay” or “let’s get this bread” or “one taught me love, one taught me patience, one taught me pain” alongside whatever happens to cross your line of sight: a picture of the new Philadelphia Flyers mascot or that kid who danced with Katy Perry on Saturday Night Live or the strange-looking duck in Central Park. Whether your contribution is interesting or clever or funny doesn’t matter. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. None of these jokes are interesting or clever or funny. They are merely automatic to create — and automatically recognized.