Sorry, But Not Too Sorry
A Fond Farewell To Some Of Our Digital Platforms
There are whispers through the digital space, a huge game of telephone being played. It’s not happy news, but as a person who creates for the vast, ephemeral blob in which we’ve found ourselves embedded, I’m listening with great interest.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson postulates that AI is on track to make the internet obsolete, flooding it with such quantities of nonsense that even the least skeptical, most eagerly accepting among us will start holding their noses and turning away.
A number of successful platforms are set to turn into pumpkins, either through reject via government mandate (TikTok), by being deliberately turned into angry cesspools teeming with bots and trolls (Twitter/X/blahblahblah), or by having their emergency brakes removed in services of corporate greed (Meta). I confess, I am on or have been on pretty much all of them and am treading water. It’s not looking great for social media, in general.
As is always the case, there are theories about why something as promising as life online might turn stinky. Some argue that maybe it should never have been free, so that stakeholders could be satisfied without stealing our information. Others blame a lack of regulation (and then sometimes blame too much regulation). There’s buzz that it’s come to a head because AI has been given insufficient boundaries.
I don’t have the time or the spoons to figure out the causes of it, but I do want to explore why I, as a writer and a digital media creator, feel strangely intrigued and maybe even a little bit excited about all of this. Yeah, I’ll admit it. As scary as it is that I might have to relearn a whole bunch of things, and start over in some areas, I think I’m feeling a bit of relief. I’ve tried to be responsible with what’s there, helpful and collaborative, and it’s kind of sucked the life out of me.
Maybe I’m just sick to death of “the algorithm”. I’m sick of not understanding why photos of my shoes or my lunch get standing ovations, but my actual work, the stuff into which I pour my mind and my heart, the stuff that might actually help someone, gets crickets and tumbleweeds. I’m just done puzzling over the right day of the week or time of day to post, and whether I’ve used the right hashtags, not enough hashtags, too many hashtags (and yes, I’ve asked for help). I don’t want to have to resort to product placement or do something totally humiliating to attract the attention of this mystical being. I’m peeved that every time I think I’ve slid into some sort of comfortable, sustainable routine, the rules change.
Dare I hope that if the short form stuff, the stuff that has tight limits on words (and ideas, by extension) falls out of favour, and that people might start reading again? If long form videos sneak back in, will viewers regain some of their lost patience, and watch and listen with interest? Will we accept and relish someone else’s thoughts without having to watch them put on make-up or cook breakfast while they explain them?
Can I muse about what it would be like if we decided we were more interested in the stuff that an AI can’t do as well as humans, like art, poetry, philosophy, and music? You’ll have to fight me on this one, I’m not letting it go. Might we use what’s left of the internet, and of social media, to have important conversations, to support one another, to stay connected?
I’m not, by any means, a luddite, and despite being given every reason to lately, I don’t hate other people. I won’t be crawling into a barrel on a street corner any time soon (clever Diogenes reference). I can’t picture a digital-free life. I readily admit to really liking snippets of people dancing, rescued puppies, quick recipes, and people unclogging storm drains (please don’t judge me). I will still have a smart phone strapped to me for years to come.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (who did not live to see any of the white noise that is our reality) spoke of different phases of learning, phases that applied to humans of all ages, at all stages of our lives. We start out in a “romantic phase”, in which everything is new and cool, and we gobble up as much of it as we can. We can’t get enough, and we don’t really stop to think about the how or why of it. Eventually, if we are to keep learning, we have to pause and explore the technical aspects of what we’re learning, how to do it properly and effectively. This is nowhere near as much fun as the romantic stuff, but it has to happen sometime. If we’re lucky and we persist, we may eventually reach a stage of mastery, in which the love of what we’re learning finds balance with how we need to do it.
We’re not out of the romantic phase of our digital life yet, but it’s starting to turn on us, to smell bad. It’s probably time to be honest about which parts of it are and aren’t working, and how we might fix what’s broken. If we can keep chipping away at it, learning from our mistakes, we might get closer to mastery. It’s not like we’ll be going “back to basics”, and why should we? In amongst the ick, there’s still lots of useful technology. We’ll just have a better sense of how to use it, instead of letting it bulldoze us repeatedly. We’ll stop letting it define us, and insist that it must work for us.
Is it okay that I’m relieved, maybe even a little bit happy that we’ve come to this point, that I’m not sorry that some of the digital stuff might shrivel up and blow away? The stories won’t go away, no matter how we choose to tell them. I’m confident in that and I’m at peace with taking what I’ve learned (and have failed to learn) thus far, and using it to try a different approach, a different path. It’s okay that we don’t need things to be the way they have been, that some things we thought were necessary might soon topple. It won’t kill me (or anyone else) to read more and scroll less. I’m happy to go back to writing more words, choosing them more carefully, checking my ideas more diligently. It’ll be work, but at least I’ll get to spend my time falling in love again with words and ideas, as opposed to being hoarse from shouting my way through the noise.