One of the things I did while in China was get accustomed to watching TV. Whether it was BBC World News or CNN, it was usually on at night in our hotel room before we went to bed. I avidly followed the situation in Crimea on whatever English-speaking station I could find, but I also put the television to other, less productive uses. One channel I discovered was called "Home Box Office" by the channel guide in my hotel room. Most everyone else knows it as HBO. During the second half of our trip, I would flip to that channel just to see if there was anything good--or at least interesting--playing. In this manner, I watched Lost in Translation (Bill Murray), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Johnny Depp), and the second halves of both the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie (also with Johnny Depp) and Mirror Mirror (Lily Collins).
One of the more interesting viewing experiences, however, came one night at the end of the trip, when I stayed up absurdly late to watch the last two movies of the Wachowski brothers' Matrix trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed the original Matrix: it was a thought-provoking and imaginative work with a good cast and wonderful plot twists. It made the over two hours of runtime absolutely worth it. These last two movies, unfortunately, were hardly up to par, with cheesy, overdramatic dialogue and absolutely unnecessary sexual content. The series ended with a lame type of reincarnation concept and very little joy for the characters who had managed to survive.
The good that came out of watching those movies, however, was that it pointed me back to the scenario of the original movie: humanity, overthrown and enslaved by the machines it created. Recent movies like Spike Jonze's Her (which I have not seen) bring up the same idea of our artificial intelligences becoming intelligent enough to be our equals, and the advent of Siri seems to point to a similar future coming to pass in reality.
Now, don't worry. I am not about to join the ranks of the many doomsday prophets that haunt our culture; I am instead striking out as a doomsday reporter. I don't believe that we will one day lose our humanity to the machines; I believe that we are already losing it. I don't believe that the Matrix is a future reality; I believe that the Matrix is now.
Just over a one-year period, I have jumped full-force into the electronics scene. I purchased a used original-model Xbox 360 from my friend towards the end of last school year. The beginning of this school year I used my hard-earned money to buy a Macbook Pro for school. Just last week my parents gave me an iPhone 5c for my eighteenth birthday. And at each of those events, my life has slipped a little further away from me.
The most valuable commodity in the world--more than gold, more than electronics, more than oil--is time. Think about it. Each of us is born into the world with a savings account of sorts, and from that account we have to "pay rent," at the rate of 1,440 minutes a day. What's frightening is that each of these accounts can only be withdrawn from: we cannot make deposits into them, and so they slowly run out until we can no longer pay rent and we get evicted from this life and move into the next one. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that the average life expectancy in the United States is 78.7 years, or 41,364,720 minutes. In the first year of your life, then, you use a little more than 1% of your life savings in time. By the time I turned eighteen last week, I had already used nearly 23% of my entire savings. By the time I'm thirty, I will only have about 60% of my life savings left.
And there is no way to be thrifty! You don't earn any more time than you already have, and you can't refinance your rent. You just pay out until you run out, and then you die.
Now, I'm sorry to paint such a bleak picture for you, but it's important that you understand how serious the human situation is before I address the present-day enslavement we live in. The machines we create, we create in order to make our lives more fun, more easy, more convenient. My Xbox is here to entertain me. My laptop is here to make schoolwork faster. My phone is here to make communicating with others more convenient. Those are all good purposes! But unfortunately, technology has a way of serving multiple functions, and every single piece of electronics is not only a servant, but also a thief.
It is frightening to look back over my week and realize that, apart from the times that I was at work and away from my electronic devices, I was almost entirely unproductive. I had so much that I needed to get done, and I accomplished so very little of it. And this, friends, was the point at which I opened my eyes to the very real danger that has crept into our culture and taken over our lives, because I did not purposefully lose that time. It was not willingly given to the electronics in my life; it truly was stolen from me. I'm not on social media, I don't play a lot of video games at all, I don't spend hours texting my friends or talking on the phone, and I don't just sit around browsing through YouTube videos. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm always on electronics. My phone's nearly always on me, and I might pick it up and I wouldn't even be able to tell you what I'm doing; maybe I'm looking through the App Store to see if I can find an interesting new game or program, maybe I'm googling something I'm curious about, maybe I'm playing a social word game with one of my friends. I get on my laptop to do schoolwork and I look up hours later and I haven't even begun my assignment and I couldn't even account for the time that has passed; maybe I was looking up some new hobby or project, maybe I'm reading the post of the day on Wikipedia, which leads me to the next post and the next post, maybe I'm doing the exact same thing on the BBC website, maybe I'm listening to music or reading articles about productivity (oh, the irony!). The point is that my electronic devices steal my attention for hours at a time. The machines I bought to help me have actually hurt me more than anything, and yet I'm trapped because I need them in order to do the things I need to do. I am trapped by those things that were supposed to be my servants.
And this begs a question that has been often echoed in a pithy phrase: are smartphones making us dumber? I would argue that they are: why do mental math when you always have a calculator in your pocket? Why memorize anything when the answer is a few taps on a screen away? Why learn anything when there's an app for that?
But it's not just the phones. I have no problem with a device that reminds me what the conversion factor is from American dollar to Chinese yen, or that tells me when the typewriter was first invented. What's far more insidious is the entertainment technology that has flooded our culture. The board game is a dying breed, my friends. No one gets together for a night of Scrabble or Monopoly or Risk anymore. Go to a bookstore and you will find that the game section has gradually shrunk down from its previously magnificent section of ten shelves to a sad showing of two mini-aisles, a mere afterthought by the magazines at the local Barnes & Noble. Games that people play together are becoming a thing of the past, replaced by the hyper-addictive, fast-paced games of the smartphone. Strategy has been abandoned for reflexes, and we can start to see the signs everywhere. Do a quick web search of attention span statistics, and article after article will confirm that our attention spans are falling.
And other video games--what some would call the true video games of the expansive fifteen-billion-dollar industry dominated by Sony and Microsoft--are beginning to change their face as well. In the past, even violent shooters like Halo and Call of Duty were designed to have a multiplayer component compatible with friends actually getting together in person to play them. Now the trend is moving away from that, as fewer and fewer games (excluding those on Nintendo's Wii) allow you to sit down next to your friend and play together. Whether video games were a viable form of interaction in the first place is still up for debate, but now they are becoming less about in-person interaction and more about isolated gamers hooked up wirelessly, playing with "friends" they have likely never met.
Even beyond gaming, the movie and television industries have transformed the way young people view the world. My siblings and I are blessed to have parents who did not allow us to watch a lot of television when we were younger unless it was educational in some way. Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood was permitted because it involved educational "field trips" to interesting places like camera manufacturers or classical ensemble performances. The Donut Man was also approved viewing because it helped espouse moral and religious concepts in us that are important to our family and its way of life. For all intents and purposes, however, we did not watch children's television. Most cartoon characters were unknown to us except those times when we would go to Cici's Pizza or to a friend's house and catch a brief glimpse of the world of mindless entertainment. Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, and PBS Kids--all networks that form a common background for most of my generation--were unknown to me except as something other kids did, something that was longed for but never experienced.
But the proof's in the pudding, as the saying goes. Other kids watched Baby Einstein; my sister and I learned to read before we were old enough to read. My friends at church watched Arthur & Friends and Clifford the Big Red Dog; I read The Lord of the Rings when I was five years old. The average high schooler watches 2 hours of TV a day and scores a 1010 on the combined math-reading portion of the SAT; I watch no TV during the week and scored a 1510. This isn't to brag on my intellect, because I don't think that I personally had much to do with it: I'm not particularly hard-working or self-motivated. Instead, I believe that my parents simply did not allow me to ruin my ability to focus and think, whereas my peers' parents did.
That is what our technology is robbing us of: the ability to think. I can feel it working in myself all the time; the more I use my laptop, my Xbox, and my phone, the more I simply want to be entertained. The more I am entertained, the less creative I become. The more I watch movies and experience their stories, the less likely I am to try to write a story of my own. We are becoming passive receptors who find it so much easier to sit at home and "veg" than to actually get up and do something. It is truly an indicator of the times that when a new year rolls around, the talk is not about what resolutions we are going to make and use to change our lives, but rather it is about what resolutions we are going to try to make and end up breaking within the first couple weeks. We are a culture of media consumers, and thus we are becoming more and more a culture of dropouts and underachievers.
What truly frightens me, however, is not my inability to manage my time around the distractions these devices bring. What truly frightens me is not our culture's slow decline in focus and acuity. The reality of the threat we face, as an entire species, is far more insidious than a simple loss of time or intelligence. It is the loss of our humanity.
In a practical sense, what is it that really sets us apart from the animals with which we share this world? I know, if you're a Christian it's our souls, and if you believe in evolution it's our ability to think and to influence the evolutionary process, but I'm not talking about philosophy. I'm talking about what we can see, on a day-to-day basis. What do we have that animals do not?
Relationship.
Both animals and humans can interact, but animals can only communicate on a base level dictated by both pheromone and instinct. As far as I can tell, animals do not have ideas, do not even think (at least in an abstract sense), do not form relationships anywhere near the par of human ones. We are better than simple creatures because we can empathize, we can theorize, we can form concepts and share them with one another, and we can build a kind of oneness that is totally foreign to every other living organism on the face of the planet.
My best friend threw me a surprise birthday party last Thursday, and it was a ton of fun. I liked all of the people there, the food was excellent, the cake was delicious, and I was absolutely totally surprised. I didn't have any idea that it was happening, and it totally made my day. We kept up the party spirit for maybe an hour or so, played Apples to Apples, chatted and laughed and had fun and everything that characterizes good times and good relationships. Then the phones came out, and hardly anyone interacted with me anymore except for a couple of faithful friends who chose to stay off of their devices and actually talk with me and play a game or two.
Now, this isn't to throw myself a pity party and say, "Oh, woe is me! All my friends ignored me at my own party!" It truly isn't anything like that at all. I am merely sharing that story because it was what really woke me up to the crisis--no, I would even go so far as to say the enemy--that we face as people living in the technological age.
We are losing our ability to connect.
We as a society have become so much more comfortable catching up with our friends by hopping on Facebook than by actually getting together. Call me a technophobe and an enemy of progress, but I am starting to miss the times when the way people hung out was by actually hanging out and talking or doing something together. Back when I was little, it was easy: we went and had play dates. I have fought my friends with a sword that was actually a stick, I have led to victory an army that was actually an assortment of geometric shapes, I have fought to save a princess who was actually my little sister... Now I have grown up and inherited a world where brothers and sisters hang out by watching each other play Minecraft, where no one tells jokes anymore because it's so much easier to scroll through thousands upon thousands of memes on Pinterest, where you are lost in conversations if you don't watch the latest and greatest TV shows.
I am living as someone who does not participate in the vast culture that is social media, and each day I feel more lost and more confused when I hang out with groups of my friends. Because I am not on Facebook, I am largely out of the loop with what happens to my friends, and oftentimes I am left out of social gatherings because invitations are sent through Facebook and people simply don't bother to take the time to find another way to get ahold of me. Because I don't have a Pinterest or an Instagram, I don't understand an entire culture that all of my friends understand. Because I don't watch the latest viral videos, I am confused by references to nonsensical phrases and songs. Because I don't Snapchat, I get to be the one who stands around awkwardly while my friends make absurd faces at their phone screens and get texts from their parents that ask them not, "Did you have a good time?" but rather, "Did you take any selfies?"
You see, I am outside of the culture. Even though I let the machines steal away my time, I am still aware of myself, still aware of how horrible is the situation my generation finds itself in. I understand the enslavement of my friends, and I know that they will never escape from it. This technology is here, and this technology is not going away. Selfies and tweets and pins and vines are the new reality of our world, and once you are in you cannot get out. I see the bondage, and I can only watch in silence as a man sits at the table with his wife and two toddlers, his face bathed in the glow of his phone, his eyes never once glancing at the faces of his family. I can only watch in silence as my friends sit next to each other and send texts and pictures back and forth, laughing not at each other's real words but at the comments flashing on their screens. I can only watch as couples stand next to each other, their heads bowed, their faces not once turning away from the devices they hold in their hands.
And so there are days that I fear I may be a member of a slowly dying breed. For now, we know how to at least carry on conversations for an hour before succumbing to the draw of Facebook and Pinterests. For now, we know how to balance between talking with our present friends and texting our absent ones. For now, we know how to only partially hide behind our virtual identities. But how long will that last? How long before the ease of online interaction overcomes our desire for real intimacy? How long before the lure of building a fake persona overcomes our desire to truly know someone? How long before, as James Burke predicts, we live completely autonomous and isolated virtual-reality lives?
I think that my generation is in very real danger of losing sight of how important human interaction is in our lives. And I don't mean texting and Facebook posting and snapchatting. That is not human interaction: that is humans interacting with machines and machines interacting with each other. I think I am in very real danger of becoming an anomaly: someone who is more comfortable interacting in real life than over a screen.
And this is not to toot my own horn! The only reason I managed to last up until this point without social media was because my parents were wise enough to refuse me permission to get onto it. I am no better than any of my friends who use social media: I just happen to have an outsider's view of the trap that my friends' technology has become to them, and I hate it. With all my heart, I hate it, but I know that I would be the same way if even a few things had been different in my life.
I believe that the Matrix is now. Humanity is trapped in a worldwide crisis of identity, one where the individual is becoming paramount, where convenience and comfort are becoming more important than reality and honesty, and where social ties are becoming inconstant, ever-changing, and absolutely meaningless. We live in the first days of a revolution, and if we don't wake up, if we don't realize that the Matrix has us, we will lose that which makes us human.
My generation is trapped in the quicksand, but what can I do? They will never come out, and I can either watch them drift away, or I can join them in the trap. Already I feel the tug at my shoes...
If this is the Matrix, then I am Cypher, looking in from the outside and wishing I could just plug myself back in, wishing that I could just forget that the steak isn't actually real, that the wine is just an illusion.
This is 'ding2, reporting live...
Title is from "Gone"
Lyrics by Bono
