Jon Honeyball is in a melancholy mood as he attempts to tune in and drop out
One of the advantages of doing this job for over 30 years is that you have a somewhat different perspective to the whippersnappers. I’m acutely aware that people in their 20s have grown up with the internet as an integral part of their lives. That Google has always been there. And why wouldn’t you use online services to order everything from today’s lunch to your underwear?
To them, it’s natural that all of this can be done from their phone, which they carry with them at all times. There is no point trying to describe what it was like Before Internet, because they simply cannot comprehend it. It was an entirely different world, as alien to them as suggesting that Channel 4 was a big deal when it first appeared because it took the TV station list from three to four. “Hundred, you mean?” they ask, eyebrows raised.
However, amid all the utterly radical change, there is also a great deal of “plus ça change, plus c’est la
même chose”. Taking photos might no longer involve 35mm film, development and printing, but the reality of photography is very much the same, even if we are in an era of democratisation and cheapness that would fair boggle the 20th century mind. Much work in businesses is still done in a spreadsheet and word processor, and email isn’t exactly new. We have Microsoft Teams meetings and Zoom calls, but this isn’t all that different to a group phone chat when everyone has turned off their camera to avoid inflicting their bad hair day on everyone else.
Although it would be easy to say that the cloud, high-speed Wi-Fi and always-on connectivity has radically changed everything, it’s only noticeable because we have so much more stuff today compared to 20 years ago. We are generating data at a rate that is quite terrifying, and there is no sign that this will let up. Rumours suggest that Apple might be going to full cinema-quality digital video for the next iPhone. Which is fine, but my phone today has more storage than a decent corporate server of a few decades ago, and I’m already using most of it.
We can marvel at our access to information and the ease with which we can get to it. Asking Alexa or Siri to turn on the lights or to find a recipe for flambéed peaches is less information at your fingertips and more information at your moving lips, but we used to have perfectly functional light switches and recipe books.
Where will this go in the next 30 years? We will know everything about everything and understand nothing about any of it. To all intents and purposes, the major technical challenges have been solved.
Compute power, storage and connection speed are all more than adequate for just about any task. You can buy enough of anything for almost ridiculously low amounts of money. The amount of information we generate will continue to rise, and we will continue to be the raw ingredients that feed the global megacorps, which exist only to mine this data, repackage it and sell it on. What a twist to the story – we started using computers to get access to stuff and to get work done. The very act of doing that has now become the glue that keeps everything going, as it has shifted from “us using stuff out there” to “out there using us”.
I’m not sure what the future holds, and even if it is desirable at all. It’s clear that we need to get a better handle on our data, and what is happening to it, but I’m far from convinced this is possible even now. There seems to be only tacit understanding at government and transnational levels about what is required, and only token attempts to apply some sort of oversight.
It has all become too easy, and we’ve been so seduced by the charms of everything everywhere for everyone all the time that we’ve forgotten that some of these things were meant to be hard, and were better for it. I actively stop myself from reaching for my phone to
“just check that thing” nowadays, because I have finally realised that I don’t actually need to know the answer to the question. Whether the population density of Chile is bigger or smaller than that of Paraguay might be useful to slap down a pub argument, but it really hasn’t helped anyone.
Maybe this is the downside of getting older and having done this for a long time. Maybe being the product rather than the consumer is wearing thin. Maybe Timothy Leary had the right idea in his saying of 1966 when he said we should “turn on, tune in, drop out”. The answer for 2021 might be “turn off, tune out, and go dark”.
We’ve been so seduced by the charms of everything everywhere for everyone all the time that we’ve forgotten that some of these things were meant to be hard