Pop 89: Here, Let Me Do That For You
By Madonna Hamel
“Here, let me do that for you”, says the automated voice, assuring me, in carefully programmed language and hushed tone, that it really cares about my needs. Let me assist you even when you don’t need it. Let me make life easier for you. Like the worst kind of helicopter parent, let me keep you safe and immature.
But of course, there is nothing parental about that voice. It is more like Big Brother, listening in, watching your every move. It transcribes your private conversations for you, and noses into the conversation when uninvited, posing as a “companion”, not the data “collector” it is.
And here I want to say that I deliberately choose the word “collect” and not the word “harvest” when it comes to gathering data. “Harvesting” will always be reserved for these prairie farmers and their machines, gathering real crops in real weather in real time and space. Getting really dirty, in real bodies. Life online makes it too easy rob the embodied reality from words. Words like “friend”, “chat”, and “meet” are now used to describe people we’ve never met nor talked to, calling them friends when we don’t know them. But hey, they “like” us and we “like” them until they disagree with something we say and they “unfriend” us.
The problem of sweet-talking surveillance systems isn’t that they are out there, hovering over our zooms, informing us they are transcribing our meetings, whether we asked them to or not. The problem is: we don’t mind. If I were a conspiracy theorist my theory would be this: we have been groomed for this moment. Big Brother, once a fearful prospect, became a “reality” show with people actually auditioning to be spied on. Voyeurism went from creepy to a national pastime. Along with exhibitionism. And once you’ve got people willing to be spied on and given them the tools to spy, what’s one more eyeball and ear in the room? The young were born with cameras in the room. Even in their bedrooms. Surveillance comes disguised as a “service”.
We’ve all been groomed to expect “convenience”. I remember when corner stores were named “convenience” stores. When their hours were extended into the wee hours to serve our every little need. And speaking of hours: I remember moving from analog to digital clocks. Before then we had to learn to tell time, read a face clock. Later, working in radio, I had to “talk to time” - tailoring my words to coincide with the sweep second hand as it arrived at the top of the hour.
To me, the creepiest tech intrusion is cell phones. I’ve gone from rotary dials to push button to mobile to cell phones in the span of one life time. And with cell phones screaming at me to stay current and cool with the latest upgrade, it ain’t over yet. The latest upgrade includes things I don’t ever need or use, but, uninvited, keeps constant track of my conversations and opinions, my cravings and complaints. All in the name of “service”. When Dylan sang “You gotta serve somebody”, this is what what he was talking about.
We’ve been captured into paying more for “services” that direct the world and create desires. This is what it was like when slick advertising burst in a big and intrusive way onto our tv screens and magazines in the 70s. But now we pay to get advertising on our phones, and then we pay more to have it removed. More and more I feel like my cell phone is a stalker, a hungry ghost, that haunts and haunts and is never satisfied.
In the days before cells a long walk did not involve taking the world with me. Now I have to wrestle with the indoctrinated idea that I am somehow irresponsible if I leave it at home, as if I were a bad babysitter. Now I go for walks at night without my phone, so I can focus on communing with creation, which ultimately comes down to listening to the grace that put me here in the first place. I leave my phone at home despite recent family crises. I cannot afford to let fear and worry fill my consciousness, my bones, my very footsteps. When something has that much control over my mood and my day, I have made it a god. We are serving some strange and empty gods.
And I still drive with a map on the passenger seat, having high-lit in pen my route. GPS feels like cheating, like losing one more survival skill. Like not knowing how to tell time. And I can remember not having a computer. I went to libraries and read books. Still do. With books, no one can alter the information between the covers while I sleep. No one can say one thing one day, another the next; no one can edit the facts for me.
I’m not so old that I used an abacus. ( Actually, I did. Once. ) But I remember when calculators were introduced. It also felt like cheating. When I worked in retail and restaurants, I counted back change calculated in my own humble brain. The cash register did not tell me how much was owed. (Also, counting back change is a way to keep your neural pathways active.)
In stores, I go to the human being at the check-out counter, who, while helping me fill bags, confesses in a hushed whisper, “I do fear losing my job to automation. I know that the reason for replacing me is to make more money for the company. So what can I say?”
What can we say? Until we get our sense of meaning and fulfilment from other places - technology will be there to make a few people very, very rich. The rest of us can be humans. Embody action and presence. We can mean it when we say: “I can do that for you.”