Offline, It's Still 2005
It's nice to break away from the machines designed to make you sad.
A distinguished member of the Bad Faith Times discord community recently said something that jammed itself into my brain like the worm in Robert Kennedy Jr.'s brain.
This BFT supporter and friend of the publication and its fourth most popular blogger (me) said when you log off – when you close your phone or shut your laptop or eat your tablet – and go outside, it's essentially 2005. In the offline world, where people still do the things people have always done, not a whole lot has changed – beyond everyone's necks craning to get little jolts of dopamine from the magic machine in their hands that creates their reality.
I was highly skeptical of this claim. How could it possibly be true? The world has changed so dramatically over the intervening twenty years – as I wrote about in my Sad Dad essay – that it must be different, even if one is able to break away from one's mind control machine, now with a sleeker design and a better camera, as Zoe Saldana tells us on the TV.
Denny Carter
I tried for a few days to hold that thought in my mind as I interacted with the wider world and made a concerted effort to spend at least a little less time ingesting the poison of social media, that poison I seem to enjoy. I found it to be mostly true. If you're able to ignore the hellish sense of FOMO that comes with ignoring the dopamine-drenched show that is the Trump regime, real life – life outside the phone – can feel like it did way back then.
It reminded me of biting feedback I got from my BFT blog post on wildly disturbing AI videos urging people to return to the 1980s. These AI monstrosities, a BFT subscriber said, might be nothing more than the manifestation of people's desire to return to a more real time, a more authentic life experience than the one we have today. It might represent people's desire to be rid of all this tech-heavy shit.
It’s pretty galaxy brained to simultaneously (correctly!) rail against the mass poisoning of humanity by TechnoCapital while shouting down people’s instinctive desire to return to pre-brain poisoned times. It’s vital that people understand things don't gotta be this way, and that elements of the better world that’s possible are evidenced by the past in which those elements hadn’t yet been destroyed by Blackbox Algorithmic Profiteering, and people were happier for it. ... It's stupid to lament the all-consuming atomization of humanity then when people start tapping into awareness that might change it say, “No, not like that!"
These AI slop videos, he said, could even be leveraged for good if you added a more diverse cast of fake people. I'm not entirely sold on that idea, or that AI can ever been good for any reason, but I get the point on an intellectual and emotional level. No one likes how we live today. Being online can be a soul-killing process even if it doesn't feel like one. It can make you laugh and smile sometimes. It can make you feel like you're Doing Something, that you are someone. You know on a deeper level that none of this is a viable replacement for face-to-face interaction with other human beings.
I don't know when it was decided that traditional human interaction would go the way of my DVD player – and the DVDs on which I spent a small fortune as a broke freelance writer during the second George W. Bush administration – but it was never going to be a workable substitute for the Real Thing. Maybe it was a collective decision during the darkest parts of the COVID shutdowns. Maybe our collective consciousness in March 2020 said it's time to move life online, that it's easier this way. And it is easier, that's the thing. It's empty though. It's void of the Real Thing.
A couple weekends ago I went to a nearby beer farm – a place where libs go to drink fancy, pricey brews – with a group of family and friends. It was a wonderful atmosphere, the weather was just right, and the 2.5 light beers had made me just tipsy enough. Any good feelings I had evaporated as I stood in line to order pizzas for the group. A young guy standing in front of me had been talking with a couple buddies, and within three seconds of his buddies leaving the line to return to their table, this guy ripped his phone from his jeans and opened TikTok. He proceeded to watch a dozen videos in a matter of 30 seconds as he waited in line, just mindlessly whipping through #content. These videos were nothing: A monkey doing some kind of trick with a ping pong ball; a lady complaining about her car radio; an AI clip of some fantasy world from a comic with which I'm unfamiliar. It was all fucking slop. He kept scrolling until the moment he had to order. It made me sad. It made me even sadder when I realized I had done the same with my Bluesky app.
The other day at my daughter's bus stop I was reminded of the Real Thing that can never be replaced by the magic, evil little machine in our pockets. I stood there for a few minutes and spoke with a fellow dad, a guy from Haiti, who had recently moved to the area. We talked about the weather and the school and how late the bus had been lately. His son, an adorable kid no older than six, chimed in and laughed and smiled and joked. The bus pulled up and this little boy hugged his father around his waist before turning to me and doing the same. I was taken aback, only for a moment. It had been so long since I had experienced such an unplanned social interaction, especially one with a relative stranger. I patted the boy on the back and said see you later buddy, have a good day at school.
There are still a million human moments every second of every day. They're often small enough – fleeting enough – to escape your attention. They exist though, even as it feels like the entire world exists only on the screen holding the algorithm designed to hack your brain and keep you scrolling and make you anxious and depressed. These machines are designed to make you sad. Someone in Silicon Valley is paid handsomely to go to work every morning and figure out new ways to make you hate your life. Remember that.
Little human moments are the opposite of all this, the antidote, the cure. They can be, anyway, if you let them. So let them.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
Comments ()