A Martian Sends a Postcard Home 2024

I detest the whole culture of it, and refuse to have a smart phone.  People call me a dinosaur.  No, I'm not. Neither am I a lemming.  I have a PC with internet connection, which I use when I choose to use it.  I have a VPN to protect my privacy, and never use anything 'Google'.  'Qwant' or 'Duck Duck Go' are my search engines.  They don't treat me as a product.  Then I get asked 'What are you hiding?'  Nothing!  I'm protecting something instead.  My privacy. No one seems to care about that any more.  I hear a lot of people say 'I've got nothing to hide, so I've got nothing to fear.'  False on both counts.  Everyone has something to hide.  Everyone has something to fear.

I agree.  I've heard from teachers, though, who say it's often the parents who are the worst - insisting that their children have the phones for 'safety'.  I recently heard an interview with a prominent education professional  defending the need for children to have phones "because without them, how would parents cope with the anxiety of being out of touch with their children throughout the day?"  She was deadly serious.  It made me think about how, as a child in the 1970s, I was away from my parents for 9 hours during every school day - and had to take two buses across south London to get to my school!  Strangely, nothing bad happened, and no one got anxious!  What happened to the principle of 'in loco parentis', anyway?  Another problem, as an ex-teacher friend pointed out (both of her children have phones at school) is that no child wants to be left out if all of their friends have phones.  This must create enormous pressure on parents - as if being a parent isn't hard enough.  And then, of course, even with phones, the children can endure bullying online, or get access to inappropriate content - as with the sad case of Molly Russell.  Then, on the other side of it - and as, again, we've recently witnessed - we have the speed with which misinformation can lead to racist rioting and mass social unrest... with Elon Musk happily stoking it all up.  I honestly think its a drastic and disastrous social culture it's created - and in a space of time so short that we haven't really had time to properly adjust to it.  People can't even leave the things alone when driving, in spite of knowing the dangers.  I catch people all the time holding a phone whilst at the wheel.  There's a cyclist in London - Cycling Mikey - who's made it his mission to catch these people and report them... and he's single-handedly raised over £130k in fines for his local authority by so doing: a small indication of the scale of the problem.  I honestly think that we're setting ourselves up for a huge fall, the more dependent we become on these things - and our dependency and addiction is, of course, the main feature of the business model behind these platforms and apps.  What happens if the networks get taken out in a massive cyber-attack?  It will happen - and we've had a recent taster of that, too.  The 'Leave The World Behind' scenario isn't necessarily science fiction.

Wise words!  As I said above, I've been called a dinosaur for not having a smart phone - by people who simply don't know what they're talking about.  My favourite answer when asked why I don't have one is simply to say "Because I don't need one."  Get out of that!

Interestingly, I've been reading that it's the Gen Zers now who are switching over to 'dumb phones' (calls, texts and emails only), having realised how much of their young lives are being swallowed up by the glass rectangle.  It seems it's the older generations who are most hooked - and, surprisingly, the over-40s and over-50s who grew up never needing any form of device to navigate their way through life (I guess a lot of it is - as with my older brother - pressure from children and grandchildren).  I'm intrigued, actually, about why they don't regard the phones as an impediment.  They've always got to be there - either in hand, or in a convenient pocket - ready to be referred to for everything and anything: paying, parking, price-checking, navigating, calculating, checking the home, etc.  Like the Ethan Hawke character in the brilliant 'Leave The World Behind' said: "Without my satnav or my cell phone, I'm lost.  I'm a useless man!"  That's quite a prescient film, I think.  Very knowing, too.  It name-checks Aldous Huxley, who prophesised that we'd embrace and love the tools of our repression, against the Orwellian vision of an oppressive surveillance dicatorship.

Thanks, Jenny.

I do have a Facebook account (though it's currently deactivated, which is a bit of a relief!), but I use a pseudonym on there and never post selfies.  I tend to use it for things like autism support groups.  And I would never 'befriend' anyone really close on it - and certainly not work colleagues (I've come unstuck with that in the past).  Most of my few friends are people with common interests, and fellow Aspies.  I try to maintain my privacy as much as possible.  It's strange how that's turned now, though, with people thinking it means having something to hide!  I have a 'dumb' phone, and 9 times out of 10 I forget to take it with me when I go out!  I also have a landline.  I was reading the other day that, for the first time, people without landlines have moved into the majority as fewer and fewer people use them.

  I think of it as a bit of freedom, mate!  It's funny, but I had a medical appointment yesterday.  I got to the Health Centre and there were about a dozen people waiting.  Most had phones on the go, of course.  But the most striking was a couple sitting near me.  I'd guess they were late 70s/ early 80s.  And both of them were actively and intensively engaged in some phone game or other.  Whatever it was, there was lots of 'bleeping' going on - plus, every now and then, an extended thing (possibly a 'Level' transition) that sounded like water rushing or money gushing out of a fruit machine.  I noticed another couple, probably in their 50s and sans phones, looking across at them.  I could almost read their expressions: 'Look at them - like a couple of teenagers!'  Eventually, one of the receptionists got up and came over to ask them to turn the volume down.  "Oh," said the woman, "Is it loud, then?"  They hadn't even noticed that everyone else could hear it, so bound up in their own little games were they.  I once went to a spiritualist evening, too - this was way back, before smart phones - where a middle-aged woman started typing a 'bleep-bleep-bleep' text whilst the medium was actually addressing one of the audience.  When I asked her if she could stop because it was rude, she gave me a look to kill... then got up and stomped out!  It's like Will Self has said: 'Mobile phones are the most blatant realisation of anomie in our culture.'  It's not just limited to phones, either.  But I think that culture has certainly made people ruder and less caring about the impact their behaviour has on others.  I hate traveling by public transport now because of it.

Thanks, Di.  I think the addiction is understandable.  It's an essential part of the business model for these platforms - the so-called 'attention economy'.  The saying in Silicon Valley is 'If you aren't  paying for the product, you are the product.'  And that's exactly how it works: the more they have your attention, the more money they get (through advertising revenue).  The algorithms are designed to track what people are looking at and are interested in, which is why people will always get stuff suggested on their news feeds (on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc) that is likely to appeal to them and  get them continuing to click and scroll.  That, plus the dopamine hits from notifications - like a mini jackpot on a fruit machine.  So everyone gets hooked in.  And the really sad and tragic thing is that people don't seem to realise how much they're being manipulated - because they're having so much fun.  It's all deeply insidious, the way it works.  The Big Tech guys who developed all this stuff knew this was going to happen... yet they did it, anyway.  Another scary thing with search engines like Google is that you will get different 'suggestions' coming up depending on who you are and where you live - and what the bots therefore know about what you are likely to be most interested in.  So, in a rock-ribbed Republican area of the US, say, if you type in 'climate change' on Google, the top suggestion that comes up on your search line might be 'climate change is a hoax', whereas if you're in an area that's likely to have more liberal and progressive social attitudes, it might be 'climate change is a serious threat'.  So it continues to create 'bubbles' in this way - using biases, based on what it knows about us, to confirm and consolidate social and political attitudes and manipulate sentiments. So much for their mantra of 'Don't be evil'!  And this is what was behind the nationwide riots sparked by the Southport murders: a lie posted on Twitter/X which then went viral: one person's intentional lie leading to wide-scale social unrest.  If you have Netflix, check out the the documentary film 'The Social Dilemma', which exposes all the behind-the-scenes machinations with these companies and their products.  It's written and presented by people who helped to bring us this stuff, too - techies, software engineers, product managers, etc: the people who could see the problems inherent in what they were creating and are now blowing the whistle on it.

Social media is in itself AI - the so-called 'curational AI'.  It's our first real encounter with AI. And it's not been good.  In the space of a few short years, it has polarised us more and more, made us angrier, misinformed us, had a disastrous impact on the democratic process... and made us into hopelessly-dependent addicts of the glass rectangle. The more we've allowed it to do things for us, and the more power we've ceded to it, the more dependent it's made us. Take it away and we're lost. Helpless. Hopeless. And that's just frivolous crap like TikTok, X and Snapchat.  Yet we can't get enough of it! And the more we have of it, the more we want.... and the more it takes from us: our data, our privacy, our skills, our attention, our sanity. So, what hope do we have against super AI?  Here's an excellent short introduction to the topic, delivered by Tristan Harris.  He's the ex-Google guy who's the main driving force behind 'The Social Dilemma', and is the co-founder of The Centre for Humane Technology.  Just if you're interested...   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6XR0byERZY

I try to remain hopeful.  But when you see how it's all being driven by the race to the top, and that the gap between the growth of capabilities and the development of safety mechanisms is so huge (1,000 to 1), then it's easy to see how it can just slip away from us.  As he mentioned in the quote, too, it's like 24th-century tech being dumped on 20th-century governance.  I wonder if there's any connection at all between this and the amount of money these tech billionaires are spending on 'prepping'.  Zuckerberg has spent $270 million on his 1,400 acre ranch in Kauai, Hawaii - including a 5,000 square foot underground 'post-apocalypse' bunker with a concrete-filled metal door.

Yes, you're right.  Any way you look at it, it's not good.  I don't know what the answers are.  Once an avalanche starts falling, you can't stop it.  It'll only stop when it's destroyed everything in its path, and hits the bottom, and runs out of energy.

Letter in The Times a couple of weeks ago:

Harriet Walter says that "there is nothing more depressing than a two-year-old in a buggy glued to a screen".  I think that an adult pushing a buggy using a mobile phone and ignoring a child is even more depressing.

Anne Turner, Gerrard's Cross, Buckinghamshire

Wow!  I'm astonished!  Truly!  Thank you!