It’s a cliché of course, but we are living in strange times. In one sense, we are awash with The New. In just a short period, significant aspects of our daily lives have been completely transformed: going to stores and buying things has been replaced with online shopping through mega-vendors like Amazon; professional broadcast and print journalism has been displaced by podcasts and blogs; the record and compact disc collections people used to own — not to mention their VHS and DVD libraries — have been swapped for “streaming services” charging a monthly subscription; and people walk around carrying hand-sized computers in their pockets, capable of connecting to a global network that makes it possible to broadcast to everyone on the planet almost instantaneously.
But in another sense, things have barely changed at all. The running line about “the future” since the Second World War has been that it would be an era of flying cars, space colonization, and atomic power; the “Tomorrowland” depicted by Disney World in 1972 and much more. Robert Heinlein’s “future history” stories, written between 1939 and 1950, imagined limitless energy, moving walkways that can reach speeds of 100mph, and commercial passenger ships traveling between the earth and colonies on the moon, all in the the 20th century. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke conceived of manned space flights reaching as far as Jupiter and artificial intelligence capable of piloting and managing the systems of enormous spacecraft, in the year 2001. Yet more than a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, if you drive down any average road in any average American city or suburban area, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the same road decades earlier, unless you pay very close attention. Street signs, traffic lights, business frontages, and even most of the cars look largely the same. 60% of American power still comes from coal and gas. What is supposed to pass for “artificial intelligence” is little more than aggregating software. Our space program, once advancing by leaps and bounds, is stagnant, and the fighter jets making up the bulk of our combat squadrons are of thirty to fifty-plus year old designs. If you walked through an American city in 1920 and were suddenly transported forward in time to the same spot in 1950, it would be barely recognizable. Do the same thing in 1996 and 2026, and it would take you a while to realize you’d traveled through time at all, let alone thirty years.
The whys of this are fascinating and complex and well beyond my expertise, so I won’t speculate as to them. What I’m interested in here are those cases where the relevant transformations seem not to represent an improvement but the opposite. Certainly, there are those who suffer from a kind of nostalgism, according to which everything new is bad and everything old is great, but far more people are prone to a variety of novelty bias, where the new is always better, and the old is always worse. It’s common in sports discourse, in which current players are deemed superior to their predecessors (usually in “greatest of all time” conversations), but it is most prevalent when discussing novel technologies and — for lack of a better word — “systems.” And though the whys of this also are undoubtedly intriguing, having to do (at a minimum) with certain elements of human nature and colossal marketing efforts on the part of companies and institutions with financial and other interests in promoting The Latest Thing, I will only speak to the “what” of it.
The impetus behind all of this is a feeling I’ve had for some time that we’ve long since passed the sweet spot for new technologies and systems in our ordinary lives. What I mean is that there was a time at which there was just enough by way of modern devices and arrangements to make pursuing the things we value easier and more efficient, without undermining them in the process. Automatic washing machines fit this characterization, as they made cleaning a family’s clothes less laborious and time consuming, and nothing of value has been lost because we no longer scrub our shirts and underwear on rocks by the river or with a washboard and bucket in the backyard. It’s also true of indoor plumbing, which made using the toilet far more convenient and sanitary, and we’ve been deprived of nothing valuable in no longer having to freeze in an outhouse during the winter or shovel quicklime or lye into feces- and urine-filled holes in the ground.
What I will be talking about here are novel technologies and systems where this is not the case; newer devices and/or ways of doing things that purport to save us pointless labor but either fail to improve on earlier ones, undermine our capacity to pursue any number of other things that we value, or even outright harm us, whether physically, mentally, or socially. To follow is a list of some of them, accompanied by more or less commentary depending on the specifics. In some cases, the failure to improve on what we already had or the worsening of it is obvious; in others, it may be more controversial or a matter of personal preference or taste. In each and every case, however, I am far from being the only one who has found The New Thing seriously lacking at best and at worst, flat-out awful.
[1] Automated “Phone Trees” vs. Human Customer Service
This is so clear as to require little explanation. Anyone who has navigated these infuriating systems — which often lead a person in circles and never seem to include the specific option one needs — can testify that they are among the most loathsome elements of contemporary life. The fact that there is no defensible rationale for them, aside from squeezing out every drop of potential earnings for a company by employing as few people as possible, makes it all the more enraging. (There isn’t a firm on the earth whose fundamental profitability depends on eschewing human customer service.) Of course, there’s an even worse version of this, where one’s only choice involves suffering through online automated customer service systems that are even more useless and aggravating than the phone-based ones.
[2] Automated Self-Checkout vs. Human Checkout
Automated checkouts are sold to customers on the premise that they save time, but even the most minimal experience with these machines exposes this for the nonsense that it is. In supermarkets and grocery stores, where automated checkouts are the most common, human cashiers have so much experience that they’ve often memorized the price-lookups for produce, while you have to navigate multiple menus to enter the price for each and every lemon, head of lettuce, and onion that you want to buy. Add to this a clunky interface, routine outages, sensors that seem perpetually confused as to whether you’ve “put your item in the bagging area,” and the fact that stores still have to employ people to stand watch over these devices (in order to assist customers who can’t get them to work), and you might as well have just left things as they were. Rather than standing around and waiting for the automated checkout to fail, these people could be behind a register, ringing people out.
Also, are we really looking for more ways to avoid in-person social interaction? Or to disemploy people? (These will be recurring themes.)
[3] Online Shopping vs. Brick-and-Mortar Retail
This one is undoubtedly more controversial, but it really shouldn’t be. Like automated checkouts, online shopping is presented to the public as being a matter of convenience and time-saving: Who needs to walk or drive to the store, when you can go online and get whatever you want in just a few clicks? But the reality is far more adulterated than this. A few observations.
If it’s clothing you’re looking for, then the obvious problem with online shopping is that you can’t try on the clothes. “But I know my size!” presumes that all SM, M, L, XL, etc. clothes are the same, which is manifestly untrue, and if it turns out that the item you purchased doesn’t fit, you have to send the damned thing back, which involves packing it up and driving to the post office or FedEx or some other shipping outlet and standing in line. Or going to a website, making your way through the sorts of systems described in [1] and arranging a pickup, if that is an option. This presumes one has the materials to re-pack the item in the first place, and if you don’t, you still have to drive somewhere to purchase them. So you might as well have just gone to the store, tried on the shirt or pants or sneakers or whatever, and bought them on the spot. (Or not, if they didn’t fit.)
Shopping online for food items is of limited utility and really only works for canned goods and non-perishable items. Ordering fresh produce, meat, or fish online is just begging to receive stuff that is unripe, overripe, gristly, of dubious freshness, etc.
Is it more convenient to shop online for a new USB cable or adhesive tape than to go to a store? Perhaps. But once again, as per [2], I’m not sure why we want to further reduce our in-person interactions, when we are already spending so much time on the internet. Is the aim to become a self-imposed version of the pod people in The Matrix? And why do we want local retailers to go out of business? Is there some strange penchant for ghost towns that I’m unaware of?
[4] “Smart” TVs vs. the Normal Kind
A television shouldn’t require an advanced engineering degree to use. It shouldn’t involve thirty different subscriptions. It shouldn’t be operated by a remote that looks like it was designed to coordinate the flight paths of thousands of commercial aircraft. The entire world’s supply of these execrable devices should be stuffed into a capsule and shot into space or buried in a crater on the moon.
[5] “Independent” Journalism vs. Professional News Outlets
This is one of those cases where the old version of an absolutely essential thing becomes so disfigured that creating a new one is necessary. Once media conglomerates and tech billionaires bought up newspapers and broadcast television stations — and their news operations with them — the slide towards commercial fluff and politically compromised journalism was inevitable, culminating in the state-supporting propaganda we are confronted with today. Independent outlets have rushed into the breach, in the form of podcasts and blogs, sometimes helmed by veteran newsmen and women who’ve fled their proverbial sinking ships, but more often than not by so-called “citizen journalists.”
Of course, the fact that a development is warranted doesn’t make it good (except in the purely relative sense in which having a broken leg is good if the alternative is congestive heart failure), and the displacement of professional journalism by “independent media” is neither good nor sustainable: The “citizen journalists” doing this sort of thing have neither training in journalism nor any relevant expertise, so what they produce is little more than uninformed — or at best, barely informed — opinion; the exiled professionals no longer have access to the research, reporting, and editorial staff required to produce journalism of the sort that informed the public about the Pentagon Papers or Watergate; and the idea that the average person is going to subscribe to scores of individual blogs, “Substacks,” YouTube channels and the like and thereby replicate what he or she once got from the New York Times, Washington Post, or CBS News is just fantastical.
[6] Automated Trucks and Taxis vs. Human Driven Ones
This is in the category of “novel systems that are not yet here but are right around the corner,” so I’ll just say this. If you think our current politics is fueled by resentment and malevolence, just wait until you abruptly send every truck and taxi driver to the unemployment line. They’ll be sprinting to the ballot box to vote for Son-of-Hitler.
[7] CGI vs. Practical Effects in Movies and Television
This one is easy. There is a reason why 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), the original Star Wars (1977), and John Carpenter’s, The Thing (1982) look better than the computer-generated slop made today, whether it be Avatar, The Mist, or whichever generic Marvel movie you might choose. Practical effects involve things with real texture, lighting, and weight, which cannot be realistically simulated in a computer. ‘Nuff said.
[8] Digital vs. Analog Music
Another one that is controversial but shouldn’t be. Often presented in terms of a “tradeoff,” the advantages of digital music almost all boil down to variations on convenience: portability, accessibility, affordability, and the like. But when the issue is what the music actually sounds like, it’s mostly a one-way street. Analog music is warmer, has more color and texture, and is better with dynamics. Just compare any contemporary digitally recorded album with Boston’s debut (1976), Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors (1977), or any number of records that came out of Sound City Studios, and you’ll immediately hear the difference. It’s great that anyone can make an album today with a laptop and Pro Tools, but that doesn’t mean that the music sounds good.
[9] The Internet (and AI) vs. Well-Curated Libraries (for purposes of research)
For the average person who knows nothing about a subject, a well-curated library is far superior to internet searches and especially AI, which is nothing but an aggregating tool that routinely gets basic things wrong. The point is a very simple one that is made by a fictional high school teacher in my serialized novel, Gendrome. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
You’re researching the structure of DNA for Bobbie Novak’s Honors Bio class. There are two rooms, both filled with books. In the first room, there are a hundred books, handpicked by a group of top molecular biologists. In the second room, there are ten thousand books, which include those hundred books, plus nine thousand, nine hundred others selected indiscriminately. So, it’ll include stuff written by mediocre biologists, science popularizers, Young Earth Creationists, and assorted cranks of every other variety. You have a limited amount of time and know nothing about the subject yourself. In which room are you more likely to find a greater number of good sources on DNA?
An academic library like ours is the first room. Every book in it has been hand-selected by experts. The history teachers pick which history books the school buys. The science teachers pick the science books, and so on.
The sheer amount of what is available on the internet may be of utility to those who are already experts on a subject, and the ability to instantaneously access well-curated libraries other than one’s own is probably its greatest virtue for scholars. But it is the libraries that are of value to the research, not the internet, which simply provides a quick way of reaching them. If there existed teleportation technology that allowed a person to travel to any library in the world in the blink of an eye, no one would call the teleporter the greatest research tool of all time.
For the average person, posing queries to AI-powered chatbots has been demonstrated to effect “cognitive atrophy,” in which one’s learning capacities are diminished rather than enhanced. In the case of learning and research — as with most things — how one does it matters as much as the result one gets and especially over the long term. No one teaching in the university today will tell you that their students are better served in their research by Google or AI than their counterparts in previous eras were by undergraduate and graduate libraries, and there isn’t a high school teacher in the land who wouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief if their students stopped using ChatGPT and spent a few hours in their humble school library instead (if their high school even has a library that isn’t just a literary-themed computer room).
[10] High-Tech Cars vs Mechanical Vehicles
The more complicated a thing is, whether in design or in parts, the more likely it is to break in one way or another. The more multi-faceted its design and parts are — and especially when they involve advanced electronics and computer systems — the more types of expertise are required to fix it. And the more there is of all of this, the more expensive fixing the thing becomes.
The main purpose of owning a motor vehicle is to get you from point A to point B. If you are in a rural or suburban area where there is no public transportation and live at some distance from retail districts, you need a car to purchase groceries and other necessities, go out to dinner, or catch a movie or show. Regardless of where you live or of the availability of public transport, doing any large-scale shopping — say, buying groceries for the week for a family of five — also requires you to have an automobile, as lugging ten full shopping bags onto a bus or train by oneself is impractical.
Cars today, however, are essentially computer and home entertainment systems on wheels. They break down often, cost a fortune to repair, require highly specialized technicians and facilities, and are entirely unnecessary, given the reasons for having a car just outlined. In this regard, there is nothing that a current Tesla, Lucid, or Avatr 12 can do that my mother’s 1972 Plymouth Valiant couldn’t, and whatever they can do above and beyond that is not what anybody needs a car for.
[11] Social Media vs. In-Person Socializing
Of all the transformations we’ve discussed, this (combined with the next) has probably had the greatest and most destructive impact and cannot be treated adequately in an essay like this one. Fortunately, it is a major subject of social-scientific research, and it’s in that context that the magnitude and scope of the damage being done by this hybrid technology/system will be properly identified and analyzed. I will restrict myself, then, to several bulleted observations.
–Online interactions are with avatars through which one’s engagements with other people are mediated, so you never know who you are actually dealing with.
–Knowing who you are dealing with is not just a matter of understanding their utterances but of interpreting any number of essential non-verbal gestures and cues, which is not possible when interacting with people online.
–Social media is governed by an attention economy that incentivizes people to behave in a far more extreme fashion than they do in real life, so one’s experience with it will always be soaked in hyperbole.
–Very few of the social constraints that operate in real life are in effect on social media, so people are much more likely to be abusive. Act like a jerk to someone in public and you might get punched in the face, so you’ll think twice before doing it. Be a jerk online, and there is very little the other person can do, so you’re less inclined to exercise self-restraint.
–Human beings are mammals and more specifically, social primates, and we require physical interaction for our psychological and emotional well-being. While social media does not preclude this in principle, the unfortunate fact is that people are spending more and more time on it and less and less engaging with one another in person. That mental and emotional health as well as public behavior and manners have deteriorated precipitously — and especially among the young — is unsurprising and cause for great concern. We are, in essence, creating a population of recluses, neurotics, and douchebags, and the problem is self-replicating: the worse everyone becomes as a result of this wretched technology, the less they will want to spend time in one another’s company and the more they will use the technology. It’s a social disaster on an epic scale and feeds many of the other anti-social technologies and systems already discussed. Why don’t I want to go to the store, movies, mall, etc.? Because the people I will encounter are horrible.
[12] Smart Phones/Portable Phones vs. Landlines
This is probably the most controversial of all of the entries and likely will receive the most pushback.
With regard to the “Smart” aspect of portable phones, the problem is that they are the primary means by which people access social media, so they are a source of tremendous individual and social harm just by virtue of that fact. Worse, they actually amplify social media’s negative effects, insofar as their portability means that people can access it constantly throughout the day, as opposed to having to wait until they get home and can use their computers, as was the case with older versions of social media like Xanga and Myspace that predated smartphones.
I would suggest, however, that the “Portable” dimension is equally deforming with respect to individual and social life. Unless one is an on-call surgeon or the Secretary of State or some such thing, there is no reason whatsoever to be “always available” and have one’s conversations, dinners, outings, lives constantly interrupted. It is almost impossible to socialize or interact with anyone today without them incessantly checking their text messages, voicemails, notifications, and social media in the middle of whatever it is you are supposed to be doing together, and daily life has come to feel as if the entire world is suffering a perpetual case of the hiccups. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that some restaurants and cafes are actually banning cell phones from being used in their establishments, and one cannot sit in a waiting room or on a bus or train, without some jerkoff playing videos or podcasts on speaker for everyone to hear.
Beyond facilitating bad manners and spasmodic social experiences, carrying around a tool of perpetual interruption and distraction compromises the flow and pacing of one’s life and makes for a generally anxious and jittery experience. In my fifty-seven years on this earth, the handful of times that I’ve needed to find a pay phone or use a highway call box because of a bona fide emergency were the barest of inconveniences compared to the never-ending interruptions and distractions caused by cell phones. The impression that but for these accursed devices, everyone would be an inch away from tragedy and disaster is a false impression created by the technology itself, which becomes obvious once one realizes that no one felt this way until the damned things became ubiquitous. Having spent nearly two-thirds of my life without a mobile phone and a third with one, I have no hesitation in saying that it was much nicer when we didn’t have them.
