Becoming The Computer: An Essay

Note: This is the text of a video essay which can be watched here

One of the perks of having a subscription to The Atlantic is getting access to over 150 years’ worth of articles that have now been digitised to form a staggering archive of American cultural history. From the vantage point of the present, it’s fascinating to see how the ebb and flow of ideas over time have led us to where we are now. In reading these, you realise that the past can offer us something that the present never can: a sense of perspective and distance, the opportunity to pinpoint a quiet moment in time and to know with certainty that right here is an idea that will shape the future of humanity.

This particular quiet moment came in July 1982, when The Atlantic published Living With A Computer, a longform piece in which the author, James Fallows, falls madly in love with a strange and alien machine. It cost $4000, has an Intel 8080 Processing Chip, 48k of RAM and is capable of performing seemingly impossible tasks which leave the author nothing less than dumbstruck:

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen… you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line..each misconceived passage can be made to vanish instantly… leaving a pristine green field on which to make the next attempt.

For Fallows, the presence of a computer in the home has the quality of an extra-terrestrial invasion. One day it wasn’t there, and now it is. Beeping and whirring with its unintelligible noises, like the baby from Eraserhead composed of unknown circuitry and wires. At this point, the very noun itself, computer, is alive with space-age connotations. Blank-faced Soviet scientists sat in front of vast, inscrutable modules, yards of cassette tape that spool with the mechanical effort of labour. As Fallows wrestles with the device, he becomes more and more attached to it. Unlike the television, this is a screen on which his own imagination is reflected back to him. That the ancient practice of writing could somehow be welded with the animal electricity of the machine leads him further and further into a rabbit-hole:

I can hardly bring myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers, which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them. To the outside world, I present myself as a man with a business need for a word-processing machine… But the truth is that I love to see them work.

During the first lockdown, I got into the habit of filming myself hitting a tennis ball against a wall in the building of my car park. I propped my phone against the ledge of a metal pillar about two feet behind where I was standing and recorded myself, hoping to improve my double-handed backhand technique. This was effective enough until one day, an errant shot collided with the phone and sent it crashing to the dusty concrete floor. When I picked it up, the screen display had a thick blackish vertical line from top to the bottom which, over time, began to bleed into the rest of the screen, making it completely unusable. This was the first time I properly acknowledged that my phone was something separate from myself. A device made from constituent parts and manufactured on the other side of the world, a piece of hardware whose performance can be interrupted by, amongst other things, a direct hit with a tennis ball. Unlike Fallows, I had no fascination with how this thing worked, only irritation that it no longer did. There is no way to peer inside a modern smartphone. There are no whirrs or bleeps. There are no loading screens. There is no physical connection of mechanical parts that stands between the user and the device. You don’t need to know a thing about computers in order to use one. Indeed, a two-year old can achieve perfect competency on an iPad without ever having a clue that it’s anything other than an intrinsic part of the world around her, like a chair or a bowl of fruit.

Seven years after Fallows wrote the Atlantic piece, Bill Gates, on a video shown to new Microsoft employees, said that he wanted to see ‘a computer on every desk, and in every home.’ Fast-forward to today, and the idea of a computer as an ornament that sits quietly in your study ready to be interacted with seems rather quaint. We no longer live with a computer, the computer lives within ourselves.

Here’s a story I can imagine telling my future children: Once upon a time there was an online world and an offline world. The online world was one we had to physically connect to. We would sit in a stiff office chair, dial-up the modem and listen for the familiar whirrr, screeee, tsssssssssss, blip blop bleep blop blip — — — cktsshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Once online, you could surf, chat, browse, research, read, play games and shop. When you were finished, you returned back to the world around you, leaving the green light of the desktop computer to glow a steady orange. Then, as time progressed, the distinction between the two worlds began to blur. Rather than being viewed as a destination, the Internet became more like the very fabric of the environment itself, an inexorable part of our identities and relationships, the water in which we all swim. It became physically impossible to even imagine what it would be like to be offline. Novelists could no longer write a story in which a character gets lost or a valuable piece of information is forgotten, ordinary people could no longer leave their house without their movements being tracked, and everything you ever purchased was twinned with every message you’ve ever sent to form a database of personal information whose scale overwhelms the human capacity to store memories.

So we arrive at an unusual paradox where the ubiquity of technology renders it almost invisible. Research in Indonesia reveals that millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re even using the Internet. In a 2020 American study, one in four adults reported being online ‘almost constantly’, with this descriptor applying to nearly half of American teenagers. Ease of access, ease of connectivity, ease of use; increasingly, the path of least resistance leads us back to the comfort of our devices. This is no accident. For Silicon Valley’s biggest players, an ideal conception of the world is one in which they dissolve into the ambience of the everyday. Soon, the Internet will subsume reality in such a way that we will occupy a world of shadows, where simulation is more authentic than reality and a handful of tech firms will be in possession of the raw data and processing power to reach unparalleled levels of omnipotence. Imagine being sat in a train carriage of the near-future, fully immersed in a flow of images received via an AR contact lens. Every instinctive movement of your pupil is tracked and added to a vast pool of data that has been collected since your childhood — for how long did you look at that advert? Where did your gaze fall when that young woman sat opposite you? What’s your resting heart rate relative to the rest of the carriage? Are you bored? Thirsty? Tired? As you sit staring listlessly into space, predictive algorithms so powerful that no single human understands them are working away to pinpoint every single facet of your desires, hopes and worries from now until your eventual death — the date of which can presumably be determined with a chilling degree of accuracy.

As we sleepwalk further into this frictionless, surveilled world, perhaps we should remind ourselves that ultimately, no one asks to be buried with their smartphone. We all instinctively know this. The vision of the early tech utopianists is dead, replaced by exiled Silicon Valley philosophers like Jaron Lanier who forcefully argue for the destruction of what they helped to create. When I return to Living With A Computer, I realise that what the author loves is not the promise of surrendering his soul to an algorithm, but rather the craft and physicality of using a machine for his own ends. This makes sense, as happiness arrives when we feel in control of our environment and interact with the world in a meaningful way. In his book, The World Beyond Your Head, Michael Crawford describes the merits of ‘skilfully engaging’ with the obstacles and frustrations of reality. This might be learning an instrument, playing a sport, repairing an engine, baking a cake or using your hands to produce a piece of artwork. Increasingly, the simulated world gives us the illusion of experience without the physical receipt of it ever having taken place. The more we surrender ourselves to the computer, the more we become bored, listless and alienated. If we want to guarantee our future happiness, we should remember that our devices are not an inherent part of our humanity and resist the urge to drift into a catatonic state where all of us are merely part of the computer.