An Age of Hyperabundance | Laura Preston
www.nplusonemag.com
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounded by people who look and talk like me, all of us a little drunk but maintaining our nervous, manic professionalism.

cross-posted from !techtakes@awful.systems

I was in a room of men. Every man was over-groomed: checked shirt, cologne behind the ears, deluxe beard or clean-shaven jaw. Their conversations bounced around me in jolly rat-a-tats, but the argot evaded interpretation. All I made out were acronyms and discerning grunts, backslaps, a mannered nonchalance.

…

All around me, the booths posed a collective thesis on the future. This was a future without busywork or buttons, a future of bespoke experiences, a future where the internet was an ambient thing we’d call upon with our voices — not a service we would use but a place where we would live. Beneath this promised future, however, was a shadow future, one that suggested itself at every turn. This was a future of screens in every establishment and no way to get help, a future in which extractive algorithms yielded relentless advertising, a future of a crapified internet, too diluted with sponcon and hallucinated facts to be of any use. In this future, if you wanted to use a product you would have to download an app and pay a monthly fee. It was a future of ultra-sophisticated scams and government surveillance, a future where anyone’s face could be spliced into porn. Our arrival in this future would be a gradual surrender, achieved through a slow creep of terms and conditions, and the capitulations had already begun.

…

I wondered if I had enough time to write a new speech, something truly hostile. Why not go out on a tirade? But to tell a group of people that their invention could destroy the global order was another way of telling them their invention was godlike, supreme, and was exactly what the tech billionaires themselves were saying to bolster their market influence. In any case, I wasn’t convinced these technologies were sophisticated enough to hasten societal collapse just yet. Some of them couldn’t connect to the internet. What really frightened me was the future of mediocrity they suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.