becoming obsolete
some thoughts on how technology changes things, and the tradeoffs of standing still.
Dear friend—
I am a luddite in many ways, but I am a luddite highly sympathetic to those who are not. I am just as enthralled with the immediacy, flexibility, and possibilities of digital life as I am with the joys of analog ways of doing things—if not more.
But at the same time, I'm becoming increasingly aware of how my reticence to using certain kinds of technology leaves me behind in many ways.
I remember realizing something one day, as I helped my very smart, white-collar mother navigate a website. She has worked with computers and the internet since there were computers and an internet to work with. She serves as tech support for the majority of my family.
But as I took the reins at last and finished the task in a few clicks, I realize that I had some innate instinct my mother did not. Some understanding, indescribable and unquantifiable, of the logic of the web page as a medium.
In the years since, I have had tablets. They are dead useful for may things, but I still find myself gravitating toward devices with keyboards and trackpads. Trackpad gestures and clicks are more comfortable for me than that of the swipes used to get around an iPad.
But now, as the number of iPad-wielding ten-year-olds grows, I wonder if I am leaving myself behind. There are still parts of a tablet's interface that I struggle with or that feels constraining. Maybe I am becoming my mother, comfortable enough in this technology but never native to it in the way that, say, my sister is, who went through high school with her own school-issued iPad.
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I am thinking about this now because I've been reading a lot about the Metaverse recently. For all my distant appreciation for new forms of technology, you know what is just plain old whack? Virtual reality. Nothing can be said to change my mind.
There are few technologies that freak me out as much as virtual reality. Mostly because I care a lot about how others perceive me, and there are few things that will make me feel goofier than a VR headset strapped to my face. It just feels kind of cringe? A proliferation of viral videos have shown us just how stupid people using VR can look.
A newsletter entry from technology writer reminded me of this. He points out that in adverts, "rarely will there be another person in the image who is not wearing VR goggles, because if there were, it would be heard to imagine them not smirking at the person with the brick-sneaker strapped to their face."
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I always hedge my criticisms of technology because old men have yelled at clouds for millennia. While I can make lots of assessments about the advantages and disadvantages, society-wide, of various technologies, I try to remind myself that all criticisms are borne from a cultural moment, and the values of that moment.
As I've mentioned before by way of Nicholas Carr's What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, Socrates decried the invention of writing because he saw how it would diminish our ability to remember things. He was right, but writing allowed humankind to do so many new things intellectually, like revise and analyze our ideas over time.
Who's to say that the scatter-brained, rapid-fire retrieval of information encouraged by the internet doesn't open up new, exciting, transformative ways of thinking and being? And just because I long for the days when I could memorize a poem for class, because I love touching pen to paper, doesn't mean that those are unmitigatedly good things, or that the alternatives are inherently worse.
There are just certain ways that my brain works now that I am afraid of losing, for good or for ill.
So I am thinking about why I have trouble thinking as charitably about virtual reality.
Perhaps it's because of the way this technology is framed compared to others. Most technologies have been talked about, historically, in the public discourse, as things that improve our lives. Machines have historically saved us time and energy. We can do things faster and more easily, and more people can do them than ever before.
For example, when the internet started to become ubiquitous, it was discussed through language of freedom of information, democratizing culture, accessibility and equality, education and connection.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric of VR says “progress” in terms that I, and the cultural-political commentators whose work I follow, really interpret as dystopian. (Also, maybe, we live in an era where it's cool to be dystopian and cynical.)
The world that Meta, specifically, is selling us is funny-looking. It is only partially realized, and almost universally agreed upon as ugly. No matter how convincing the mechanics of VR are, they are irrelevant when the reality you're accessing looks like a seven-year-old touching Blender for the first time.
Additionally, Horning points out, Meta by way of Microsoft (and Microsoft itself) are trying to incorporate VR into the workplace.
The other morning, while walking Hazel, I almost lost it listening to an episode of tech podcast The Vergecast. Host Nilay Patel said, of his colleague's reluctance to hop on a call during the workday:
All I'm asking them to do is to push a button in the app in which they are already pushing buttons and talk with their voice instead of their fingers ... Now imagine being like, 'Okay, coworker in Microsoft Teams, what I'd like to do is for you to put on your headset, so you can look at me as a cartoon, so we can more intimately connect on an emotional level.'
Imagine!
I am similarly skeptical.
Barring the fucking ridiculousness of it all, Horning points out that such work systems give your employers (and, I would add, Meta itself) so much more access to your work life by way of surveillance, in ways that weren't available pre-pandemic work-from-home.
"VR depends on more straightforward and invasive forms of monitoring, like eyeball tracking," Horning writes. "How many blinks should you be allowed on company time?"
Increasingly, Meta is marketing its ‘verse as something for companies to inflict on their workers, or for entertainers to push on their fans. It is less marketed toward consumers themselves.
The Metaverse, Horning argues, is a "means of trapping and maintaining labor." In a media and social environment increasingly recognizing, supporting, fighting for workers' rights, this is setting off alarm bells. Equally so for those concerned with how our lives are becoming subsumed by a handful of tech corporations who increasingly control our means of interacting with each other and the world.
Perhaps that's the problem—it is less the technology, half-baked and goofy as it is. It is more the economic model that this technology doubles down on, entrenches, exacerbates, and empowers.
That was the complaint of the original Luddites, who smashed the machines they knew would endanger their jobs. It was less the technology itself and whatever its cultural or psychological effects, real or imagined, and more about how that technology stood to change their lived conditions as workers, as people.
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I am thinking about all this especially now because I recently read 's "Sympathy for the Wordcel." An absolutely wild word coined by Twitter user @tszzl, defined as someone who ardently sticks by the power of written language, despite evidence of the contrary.
Wordcels, Munger writes, base their whole raison d'etre on the idea that if "people write/say the right words, and if enough people read those words, and if democracy works unimpeded, the world will become better."
My fried, I have never been called out so searingly in my life.
Munger assesses that in the past few years, the written word has lost the battle. People speak and write publicly more than ever, but the political landscape (in the U.S.) has become more fraught, less equal.
"Writing values like clarity and facticity are transparently useless on Twitter,” he writes. “Deliberation has been overwhelmed by the social information."
Maybe I am showing my hand as one such wordcel, but I don't think all is lost for literary forms. Teenagers still read. Beautiful books and essays still shape the culture.
Though, I am becoming increasingly aware that my idea of “the culture” is incredibly rarified. Maybe what I take to be the culture at large is actually just a tiniest sliver in the wider world.
A few semesters ago, I interviewed a local substitute teacher with some classmates for a policy class. The teacher told us point-blank that her kids—middle schoolers—don't read. I used to think statements like these were reductive and uncharitable to Gen Z.
But if I am to believe it from anyone, it would have to be a public school teacher. And that’s a bad thing, a dangerous thing, in a world that moves and grows in the realm of the written word, in newspapers and blogs and books. But maybe we won’t be in that world for much longer?
Blasphemous, I know. But I’m thinking about it.
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I am going to toot my own horn here for a moment and say that I am a very good writer. Maybe not the kind that can move mountains with my pen, but I have a craft that I have been building on and learning about and honing for more than a decade. I plan to continue honing it for decades to come. But you know what I could not do for the life of me? Make a TikTok. Speak on camera without embarrassing myself.
I do not have the innate ability to control my voice or my body for maximum intended impact. I do not, as my partner will happily attest to, have a knack for comedic timing or clever turn of phrase. My humor consists mostly of parroting memes others have come up with.
And so, Munger's piece made me wonder for the first time—is my craft becoming obsolete? And, more concerning for my entire worldview, will my craft soon be unable to change the world for the better?
I don't doubt that the written word will allow people to learn and experience and grow for a long time. That it will move us and sometimes even change our lives. Rather, that the main medium of everything, from politics to culture, humor to justice, will be no longer be the written word.
I don't think this is an inherently bad thing. For one, writing can be very elitist. Writers and literary culture even more so. Growing mediums like video are accessible in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to things like class, and all its attendant corollaries—race, education level, age, etc.
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In his newsletter Galaxy Brain, tech writer Charlie Warzel recently interviewed Munger on research he had done with colleagues about TikTok.
Munger pointed out that TikTok memes are more embodied than the text- and - visual-based memes of, say, Twitter—or, throwback, Tumblr. TikTok memes are so embedded in the creator's physical form and face. It’s difficult to forget that a real person, with real feelings and a real body, is behind the meme.
Perhaps this is a good thing for discourse, Munger says. The un-embodied memes of Twitter and Tumblr make anonymity very easy. It is perhaps too easy to say nasty things or have flammable takes when your face is not attached to it.
Not only that, embodied memes require an entirely different kind of literacy. A kind of vibes-based literacy. How to read a body, a sound, a mood, a face. (Warzel subtitles his newsletter, “Welcome to the vibes-based political culture.")
Munger tells Warzel that in the paper, he and his coauthors have a disclaimer that essentially warns, "You can read these words, but you won't really understand what's going on at TikTok unless you experience it yourself."
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There is something special about the written word, but there is something special and transformative about every media of communication and self-expression. To imply that the rise of video and multimedia communication is the death of some kind of intelligence is only accurate in the way that writing itself killed our ability to memorize and recite. I can mourn that “intelligence” as we mourn loss in general, but I don’t think I can say that loss is inherently good or bad.
Of course, the platforms and institutions around these different media introduce different elements to the story. The literary project is filled with fact-checkers, research teams, and editors. Even newsrooms had such teams for the television.
Youtube and TikTok and Instagram have no such teams behind each and every creator, and certainly not behind every viral or well-loved creator. These are, after all, first and foremost entertainment platforms and social networks.
The rise of video may not be the problem—but rather, the kinds of video (short, punchy, with no time for exploration and nuance) and the kinds of platforms (rapidfire, vulnerable to misinformation and perhaps even encouraging it) problematize the medium.
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Though I think Munger (and others writing on this topic) are exploring something vital to understanding how ideas and communication work, and will work, that won't stop me from continuing to write.
I am, however, thankful for the humbling their work has introduced. Words are important, of course. They can hurt and empower and hide and love. We use speech as our main mode of interpersonal communication, of course—but perhaps I won't save the world just by writing more and better. Perhaps the time for that—the era of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of The Jungle, of Les Miserables, when a single work of reporting or fiction could completely shift the public discourse on an issue—has passed.
And yet here I am, continuing to write these silly little missives, continuing to read things and write things with an eye toward making some change in the world. Perhaps I would have greater impact making YouTube videos or, God forbid, TikToks. But like my pen and paper, I'm sticking with writing, for better or for worse.
Why? For the simple reason that I love it. And I am bad at everything else, lol.
Thanks for reading, I'll catch you soon,
— mia xx