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The elderly are being disenfranchised, robbed of some remaining years of their own agency, due to the widespread replacement of human beings with technology for customer service. The incremental cognitive burden of learning and navigating the tech is robbing many senior citizens of their residual independence.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and there’s a side of me that wonders if the increasingly shrill, almost desperate commitment to (sometimes) irrational narratives in the broader culture is perhaps a similar symptom of being overwhelmed by complexity. Maybe people are actually becoming more clingy to crazy ideologies because the growing complexity of navigating their lives is maxing out their cognitive capacity. Maybe what seems like a widespread desperation for some universal explanation of everything, no matter how crazy, is symptomatic of mental overload. I don’t know that this is true, but I have a nagging intuition that some of the cultural agitation we see might indicate that many people are cognitively maxing out.
Over on X, the incessant bickering, even among Christians, is often over things I don’t remotely understand. I mean that literally. I don’t understand what they’re even talking about. They often seem to be fighting over the most obscure issues, frequently using coded language only insiders would understand. Imagine if all the string theorists got into a shouting match at the local pub over a handful of arcane mathematical formulas. That's how it seems a lot of the time on X. Having apparently convinced themselves that they are taking a heroic stand for truth, these X warriors have seemingly concluded that being tenaciously argumentative is synonymous with virtue. I am utterly mystified, not least by how they ever find the time.
Something is driving people crazy.
Maybe the relentless drive to apply tech to every area of our lives just to squeeze out every last ounce of efficiency is actually, in some essential way, inhumane. The counterargument would be that if we hadn’t been seeking maximum efficiency, then the reduction in worldwide poverty that characterized the last hundred years might never have occurred.
Which is the more inhumane - grinding poverty or affluent technocracy? I'm not sure I know.
Discussion (43)
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Being a tech consultant or in technical selling of tech can really distort your values, in favor of efficiency over human factors.
It did mine, anyway. I came to realize it mostly after retirement, I think. The knowledge a technical person has about the theoretical potential that the adoption of ever more tech seems to have for ever higher productivity turns him into a sort of romantic or utopian or idealist. Or an obsessive.
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Well, it’s very difficult to adapt to grinding poverty. I am 78. I would much prefer to struggle with affluent technology. I at least have a chance of limited success.
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Aside from any sensible comments on this excellent article I think that X provides a comfortable pub for many 'string theorists' who otherwise could never have met, hence the tenacious obscurity of their interactions.
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imo what's maxing out our bandwidth is that with social media the conversation never has to end. Or rather, you need to decide to end it, to turn off the phone, to 'walk away'. It's like getting maxed out at Ricochet because there is no 'ignore' function.
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