Rage against the machine
Gimme back my brain, cyborgs
It started with using a calendar app for remembering birthdays, and percolated to using tech for more everyday tasks in my daily life. The convenience felt great when it started, but now I feel like all this dependence is making me dumber everyday.
My memory gets almost no exercise anymore, and I have no incentive to use it as such— owing to a crutch in my pocket that I’ve started to outsource my mind to. In conversation with a friend, I was told that it “frees my brain up” for more creative tasks. But I’m not sure how I feel about that narrative—don’t creative people (or anyone really) need a healthy working memory to be able to remember song lyrics, script lines, dance steps and what not? And just like your body has a limited capacity for eating and digestion, so does the brain.
I’m not excited by having to offer free disk space in my head to every new video or writing on the Internet. I’d like to be able to eat the best diet for me judiciously, slowly and really savour and assimilate it within my body and soul before I have to eat more.
But all this content is designed for you to yield to the temptation of digital gluttony, and I try to figure everyday how I can curate my digital diet so it serves me instead of the other way around. But it shouldn’t have to feel like fighting a new monster everyday, if this tech was truly designed to be useful in my life as they said.
I’m not saying that you and I need to have an eidetic memory, having an external repository of patterns to refer to definitely helps with recall and productivity. But I don’t want to outsource all of my memory to a machine, and make it atrophy. Especially if I want to truly exercise all of my brain.
I think it also takes away from my brain’s ability to decide what also resonates with my heart and soul, and I think that’s how it used to decide what’s worth remembering to me. When my instinct would make that decision. If my default stimulus now is to store and access it in a machine right away, then I’m splitting my brain, heart and soul. And eroding my instinct, as well my capacity to feel and think in a natural way. I feel very wary of declaring this as evolution of any sorts.
Abstracting thought (content), music (samples, virtual instruments), code (APIs) etc is great, and that’s not to say that there isn’t any creativity involved with using abstractions1: most acts of creation have been improvisational to some extent building off of stuff from a lineage. But I still think there is a deeper level of understanding that gets lost there, and maybe that is why true artistic genius and innovation has become rarer over time, as creational patterns preside over unbounded and brave individual thought, and as convenience does over necessary labour.
I do love technology, and the convenience and change it brings. I just don't want to be stripped of my capacity for any independent thought or opinion, let it tell me what to think or feel; and become a machine. I don’t want my instincts overridden by algorithms, and my interests driven by mass trends.
Rage, rage against the machine. Rage, even if for a day in a week, or two weeks, or a month. Throw your phone in the locker, shut down your laptop.
Try and remember the way from your home to work. Sing along the lyrics out loud to an old CD or cassette from memory. Work out the guitar solo to your favorite song by ear, without using Youtube. Mime the dialogues from your favorite movie with subtitles turned off. Get up without an alarm or snooze reminders. Use a pen and paper to write stuff down. Smell the yellowing pages of a book from your shelf (a sense technology can’t yet imitate). Read the local newspaper in the morning. Meditate without an app. Wear a classic wrist watch. Write a small piece of code on paper by hand. Use a landline to call a friend. Go to the local bookstore for reading recommendations.
Go get your brain back from the machines!
Here’s an explanation of abstractions in programming, and another video explaining more.
Here’s a subversive thought: save the rage energy and change the belief that your brain has limited memory space. Your physical life and brain are time limited, but your memory, dreams, creativity and pleasures are ‘up in the cloud’ of your extraconscious mind. Love your takeaway!
"Rage, rage against the machine. Rage, even if for a day in a week, or two weeks, or a month."
Yessss, Abhishek.