Outsourcing connections ...

Its not what it seems ...

Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.

This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes. Many things have become harder to do in person. Of course, there are well-recognised upsides, but the downsides are no less real: public spaces and public life have withered, including some of the places in which we once acquired our goods. All those errands – buying milk or socks (in the past, I would have said the newspaper) – meant moments of human contact, moving among strangers and making acquaintances, maybe observing the weather and the natural world. These activities meant becoming more familiar with your surroundings, feeling at home beyond the confines of what you rent or own.

Space of a useful kind

Yours truly calls it Outsourcing Connections as this is what's happening as we speak. I am as guilty as you as getting swag from Amazon or emailing friends or doing a Zoom call is easier, faster and requires no physical effort while the tech bros hoover our online data to generate endless ads keyed to our particular interests 24/7 while trolling the web. What's becoming worse is the fact Idiocracy rules, where the crass and the stupid hold sway and web pages, particularly on the smart phone, are polluted with endless ads increasingly designed to not being able to be erased, thus making us rubes absolutely infuriated with the diminishing returns of tech but remember, it's "free" so the ability for us to bitch is kinda lame, right?

What is happening is the dumbification of society in real time. My wife and I were celebrating our anniversary by having brunch at one of our favorite places. Three generation z types were across the aisle, trying to look hip while having their noses in smart phones, not pausing to talk nor to take their eyes of the tech while eating. As one somewhat versed in tech, this is rather disconcerting as it relates to They Live but this time, aliens are not involved, the tech bros are ... 24/7.

They Live