Looks like a shoehorn, if you remember those
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- March 5, 2022
- 829
For the longest time, I’ve been fighting machines.
I don’t like them; in fact, I don’t trust them, either.
That’s a bad combination, one that defines a straight line between when I first started dating a girl and the moment they dumped me.
It’s kind of like what Kevin Arnold said in an episode of “The Wonder Years,” which is still among my favorite TV shows.
“They knew the rules,” he says, “and we didn’t even know the game we were playing. They were always so much smarter.”
That echoes a passage from “A Farewell to Arms,” my favorite Hemingway novel, the one that goes, “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in … and the first time they caught you off base, they killed you …. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.”
Cue the Rolling Stones.
“But what can a poor boy do,
’cept to play for a rock’n’band?
’Cause in sleepy London town
there’s just no place for a street fighting man.”
The world seems to be spinning off its axis, global centripetal force threatening to throw everything into a chaotic stew of mayhem and madness, and all I can think of is Dave Bowman, trying to get back inside his spaceship in that crucial scene from 1968’s “2001.”
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he says, knowing the computer has gone murderously rogue and that he must stop it.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” comes the mechanical reply.
And it’s at that precise moment that everyone watching knows the stakes have been upped, that technology has slipped its reins.
The first time I saw “2001,” I had no idea what was going on. I was in college, more concerned about the sad fact that Muhammad Ali had lost to Ken Norton than I was about Stanley Kubrick’s film.
I saw the way the bone tossed into the sky by an ape-man morphed into a futuristic star voyaging machine and thought to myself, “Now that’s good movie-making,” but it wasn’t long after that I became confused about the black obelisk and what it represented.
But when it came to HAL, the onboard brain and lifeblood of the mission, I had a pretty good idea that man v. machine was the core.
We’re now more dependent on mechanized automatons than ever before, and I, for one, would like to see that trend, if not reversed, then at least reasonably curtailed. Why, for example, can it take more than an hour waiting on the phone to connect with a human being when all you want to do is cancel your cable TV plan?
My guess is machines don’t want it to happen.
If you remember the film, Dave eventually has to risk his very life in order to access the airlock and outsmart HAL, and then he sets about the task of methodically, carefully deactivating the beast.
“I’m afraid, Dave,” he says, “I can feel my mind is going. There’s no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
If only getting your car to stop flashing that “check engine” light were as simple as that, I think many of us would sleep easier.
But that’s not the devil’s bargain we’ve struck, is it?
Raise your hand — the other one — if you carry your smart phone everywhere you go, if you have your life inside it, if losing it or damaging it would mean the end of the world, at least for a while.
Just as I thought.
I’m pretty much alone when it comes to avoiding that ubiquitous, infernal machine, the one that tethers a person to utter dependence on unseen algorithms and addicts humanity to blind connections.
In the interest of total disclosure and embarrassing transparency, I still use a clamshell phone, a relic that dates back to 2011. It allows me to place and receive calls, to text (though I hardly ever do), to take photos and listen to voicemails, though that’s iffy.
And that’s OK. I don’t want or need internet access, wouldn’t know Bluetooth if it bit me and could do without the flashlight, though once when I was back home, it did help me find my way out of a midnight woods I thought I knew well from high school.
Here’s the thing about my phone, though.
Whenever my wife adds more minutes to it, she gets a warning that the mechanical matrix is unhappy that it still exists, that it ought to have been disconnected years ago, much the way HAL met his end.
But we’re in this together, and even though her phone is like seventh-generation 5G with all the bells and whistles, she understands I want nothing to do with the world writ large.
One of these days, though, the automated posse is going to catch up with me, and I’ll be forced to go along with the mechanized mob.
Then HAL and his, “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” will serve me well.