Together alone

The true cost of technology? Isolated indifference.

For the past 15 years, my job has been to help (generally) really smart people who are (always) enthusiastically bad writers sound even smarter. Hey, it’s a living. But there’s always a point in the process that makes me shudder: syndication. Make no mistake: sharing content with colleagues often generates valuable feedback that improves the end product. Yet there’s always a tipping point. Whenever anyone asks how much syndication is too much, I simply say: “When it starts making the content worse.”

It’s hard not to think we’re reaching that point more generally.

Now, I’m well aware that with age comes nostalgic longing for simpler times, as well as general orneriness at the state of the world. But I also try to be self-aware and realistic: I know the days are gone when magazines were 400 pages deep, newspapers ruled the world, mobile phones didn’t exist, and I could actually concentrate. It’s where we’re now heading that’s so infuriating.

“I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the Wi-Fi network,” a user posted to X (nee Twitter) this week. “I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax Platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place.

“I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.”

I hear ya, but it increasingly feels like it’s too much to ask. I wasn’t trained to be—nor do I want to be—a supermarket cashier or an airline baggage handler. I don’t want to order my kids’ McHappy meals on a touchscreen because there’s literally no one manning the order counter any more. I want chit chat when I get my coffee; to know someone has a job rather than the burden of work falling on me—especially when it requires I learn something I have zero interest in learning.

But this obviously isn’t the world we’re in. For the past quarter century, we’ve been victims of what Bill Maher last week reminded people he several years ago called “RI,” or “reverse improvement, defined as when they make an upgrade nobody wants, needs, or likes, and isn’t actually upgrading anything—it’s just making it different and often worse.”

“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier—that’s the whole point,” Maher riffed. “But now Silicon Valley runs the world, and their motto is, ‘If it ain’t broke, fuck with it.’ I get it, you guys. It’s what you’re good at—tinkering with shit. Other people like girls; you like over-engineering stuff. But don’t tell yourselves you’re making anyone’s life better. No one ever looked at a car and said, ‘If only the doors didn’t have handles.’ What an improvement now that they pop out as you approach the car, like your car sees you and gets a boner!

“You may think reverse improvement isn’t really such a big deal but it is, and here’s why. It’s the same mentality behind AI taking over our lives now, whether we want it to or not. Because our tech overlords do stuff because they can—not because we need it or it’s good for us—and they don’t care about the consequences.”

I spent the past couple of weeks working on a big report on AI and Maher’s spot on: the premise underlying all activity in the space is that it’s inevitable; that we have no choice whether to be upended by it or not. The pro-AI argument is, of course, that it will make life easier—so much easier that it will free all of us to do more creative, fulfilling work. I wish that were true; we all know it’s not.¹

But even setting aside the dislocation AI will cause—the jobs it will render obsolete, along with the people today making a living from them—what does the technology and its application say about us as a society? On almost every front, we’re becoming more and more isolated—not only from each other, but from the impact of the decisions we make every day.

Consider Elon Musk’s pimple-faced geek brigade of Department of Government Efficiency lawbreakers. For this bunch of twenty-somethings, the work they’re doing must feel exhilarating: gaining access to the US Government’s most sensitive systems, shutting off this payment here and that payment there, firing workers left and right. I can only imagine how cool they feel, basking in the fact there’s no one there to tell them how deeply uncool they really are.

But they’re just so, so removed from the real-world consequences of their actions. A keystroke here and there and starving people won’t get food. The dying won’t get medicine. Farmers will lose their livelihoods. Thousands of workers won’t be able to support their families and communities. Others will be left stranded overseas. The words of an executive order declaring a federal government hiring freeze and that “each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart” are abstract and unemotional. The effect is not.

There’s no denying a lot of the technology we enjoy today makes life easier. But it feels like there’s a deeply worrisome cost from evolving into societies where we’re all increasingly socially and emotionally isolated. I’m not talking about the obvious destructive impact of social media. I’m talking about the fact that being able to order dinner, a coffee, a new wardrobe, and anything else you can think of without ever interacting with an actual person feels increasingly like the gateway drug to becoming numb to the real-world ramifications of our actions.

My only hope are the faint signs of reversal, although they’re fleeting. For example, Walgreens is abandoning its $200 million fiasco of replacing glass refrigerator doors—where you just looked in to see what was available—with whizzbang screens that displayed … what was inside. Many retailers are bringing cashiers back. A silver lining of growing return-to-office mandates—which are more about culling staff and justifying unavoidable rent payments—is people actually get to interact again, even if it’s to bitch about having to be in the office.

The next step? Someone actually checking my bags at the airport and saying, “Have a great trip.” I know, I know. But let a guy dream, would ya?

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.

1. Not-so-secret pro tip: it’s about cutting costs.