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The Great Disconnect

Three weeks ago, I was sitting on the couch with my mother, one eye on CNN and one eye on the About page of a cell phone company founded by Mennonites. Like any good Millennial, I have a particular fondness for the nineties, and I had recently purchased Chuck Klosterman’s new book with the same title (a book that somehow says more about our current decade than the one thirty years ago) to complement a bounty of think pieces about how life was better then, if for no other reason than we did not have cell phones. I told my mother that I was going to buy one.

But what if…she started. What if

You need an Uber. You want to know the weather. You are in a town and don’t know where to get pizza. You need to check your bank account. You need to look at a menu. You want to FaceTime or call a friend in Germany. You need to know the weather in Germany.

What if you need directions?

Then I will pull over and ask someone for directions, I said. I will talk to someone because I am not sure they really make paper maps anymore.

The idea of talking to someone, a stranger, in this manner, seems almost fringe, but that’s how I ended up finding the unmarked cemetery on the hill where my great-great grandparents were buried outside of Judith Gap, Montana—by stopping at the coffee kiosk, which was the only human-occupied building I could see, ordering a latte, and telling the barista what I was looking for. And she sent me over the train tracks into some barb-wired ranch lands, and I used both arms to sweep away the grasses until their names appeared on the stones. The only time I used my phone was to take pictures, and now I wished I had done so with a real camera, but I suppose there’s next time.

We’ve built a whole life, a whole society where if you don’t want to actually interact face-to-face with someone, you don’t have to. In theory, you don’t have to leave your house for work, go to the grocery store, go to school, meet up with a friend, ask for directions, go to a restaurant, go to the library, shop for anything because almost anything, besides maybe walking the dog, can be done from home.

I was complaining about this to a friend over coffee. I spend, oh I don’t know, probably every waking moment in front of a screen, I told her. I am either writing, researching, tutoring, reading, or sending an email from my computer. And when I’m not in front of the computer, I am mindlessly scrolling on my phone just to numb out. When did it get to be like this?

One in three teenage girls has experienced suicidal ideation, said one of the talking heads on CNN. I think we’re going to see a lot more about how social media has affected our mental health.

Well, obviously, I thought. And then I picked out the best mennonite phone and clicked add to cart.

But it’s not just social media. I don’t need to rehash the research about how these companies have done a number on our country and our self-image and our self-esteem, how they have helped usher in the worst of end-stage capitalism. There’s also plenty of research about how we don’t retain information as well when it’s presented to us on a screen. We spent at least two years of this decade living increasingly online to the point that nearly all of our personal communication was mediated through a phone or computer. That we are anything but extremely depressed should come as no shock at all. And yet, we have swarms of people in Silicon Valley with dollar signs for eyes talking about how breakthrough AI can tell us what to make for a romantic dinner.

Like anyone in the education/literary world, I’ve been reading a lot about ChatGPT, and there’s been enough ink spilled about whether or not this spells doom for writers, whether or not AI can make actual art, so I will not get into that now because the answer, at the moment, is no. Will that change as AI “learns” more about what makes literature emotionally salient? Maybe. I truly have no idea what it will be capable of.

I have been applying for teaching jobs at a lot of secondary schools, and nearly every place wants someone who is either very proficient in technology or is willing to learn the ropes. I utilize technology in the classroom by [example] and [example]. It’s not a lie. I’ve taught using GoogleSlides and PowerPoint, and at the end of the semester in 2020, I had students make YouTube video responses demonstrating a skill or talent they wanted to share with the class. At that point we were all just learning about Zoom right at the same time we were all learning we should wear masks and no one had toilet paper and it seemed like prioritizing emotional wellbeing was, shall we say, the most appropriate in a class thematically centered around the idea of health and healing.

To be clear: I am not against technology in the classroom or in my daily life. It has its benefits. Also, “technology” is such a sweeping term that it would be insane to throw it all under the bus. I need to establish that before we go on. Shall we continue? All right. Let’s.

In a recent article on NAIS, teachers discussed how they were nervous and excited about ChatGPT, but I was caught up in one of the concluding sentiments: “We do not want to simply warn students against using AI, as this would be disingenuous and counter to progress,” and I want to pause a moment here. To me, the question is not whether or not we will adapt or if this is the end of “the written word.” As educators, as the authors point out, we have adjusted to Zoom, SparkNotes, Wikipedia, and other sites and technologies that once seemed like categorical threats. The question, as I see it, is about progress and how we define it.

In the age of our digital Anthropocene, I am having a difficult time seeing how embracing AI or similar technologies is going to contribute to saving ourselves and the planet. True progress is building communities where we have real interactions, can bear witness to each others pain, and provide real tangible, material needs. It is investing in the land and traditional means of stewardship. Progress is not saving Twitter as a “town square” or investing in bots that can write copy for our richest companies. It is about degrowth. But that is a topic for another essay.

Again, I am not a complete luddite, and in some spheres, AI has real benefits, I’m sure, but you cannot convince me that this move does not represent a real threat to education and critical thinking. This is to say nothing about plagiarism, which, it seems, is ChatGPT’s modus operandi. I question the faith people have in technology (broadly) to save us from climate change without a massive shift away from consumer capitalism and greed. I wonder, at this rate, about the possibility of sharing a collective truth.

I could go on and on.

Years ago, I think around 2013, I was sitting in an audatoriam listening to the great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez talk about his adventures in the Arctic. This was back when I was still using washed out ‘70s Polaroid filters on all my Instagram pictures—back when I still used Instagram—and he said he did not have social media. Not only that, but he did not have email. If a student needed to reach him, they would need to call him on the phone. I remember him talking about Facebook as an addiction, and how we had collectively agreed that if we were not on the platform then were irrelevant. I think that sentiment about social media in general still holds true, and I had some of these thoughts when I got rid of my iPhone—concerns that went beyond relevancy but just mere functionality out and about town (again: Uber, tickets, maps).

I think the decision to delete Twitter and Instagram has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last couple years, and I suppose we’ll see how I fare returning to a dumbphone, but so far it feels amazing. It turns out that I don’t feel like I am missing anything at all.

It does feel occasionally like we’ve bought into a psychology of technological determinism, and that we must bend over backwards to accommodate technology that is net harmful, that we must rush “to keep up with the times” in some Darwinian hell or be left behind. We have power over the technology we invent or engage with, however

. When we consider things like social media, AI, or even smartphones, I wish we spoke more candidly about options beyond using them in an “ethical” way, because the world still spins on, and you can remain just as modern and relevant when you opt out.