I’m Not a Robot!

My Love/Hate Relationship With Technology[1]

Audio Version

Technology

No matter how advanced I think I’ve become, I always end up feeling Amish. I grew up near an Amish community, and one of the stories I heard (most likely apocryphal) was how the Amish men could go to a bar and get as drunk as they wanted, because all they had to do at the end of the night was crawl into the back of the buggy. The horse knew the way home. This was over fifty years before Waymo.

Every generation struggles with the advance of technology as well as with the question of whether technology is truly an “advance.” It all started with fire. Fire kept us warm. It cooked the parasites out of our meat. It gave the kids something to stare at for hours. A campfire lit up the evening just enough for us to gossip and tell stories as we chewed on our trichinosis-free meat and contemplated the invention of the s’more.

Yet I’m sure as soon as a fire burned down the first hut and scorched the nearby field, some cranky elder raised his fist and railed, “You crazy kids with your fire and your haircuts and all that pounding you call music! The whole world’s going to hell! I’d say, ‘hell in a hand basket,’ but you burned all the hand baskets!”

In the ’80s movie Quest for Fire, when the flame they are carrying is accidentally extinguished, three members of a prehistoric tribe, Naoh, Amoukar, and Gaw, set out on a perilous journey to search for fire. Along the way, they battle other tribes and escape cannibals, but not before one of the flesh-eaters bites Naoh in the crotch.[2] Eventually, they manage to steal fire from another tribe.

That’s pretty much the plot of my life whenever I misplace my iPhone power cord.

The power cord has become as essential for life as fire. Even in a world that’s so crowded, when your phone dies, you feel so all alone.

The “Quest For Fire” becomes the “Quest For a Three-Pronged Adapter.”

The Smartphone

I have farmed out many of my brain functions to my phone. In fact, it’s now my mainframe. That soft, wrinkled pink thing that sits inside a globular bony casing on my neck is just the back up. My iPhone is the responsible, rational adult. Me, I’m all emotions. In my own head, I’m just a 12-year-old boy who cries a lot.

I used to be able to get to places on my own. Now, I can’t go to the bathroom without a calm female voice intoning, “Turn left. Continue straight down the hallway. Laundry hamper ahead. You are still on the fastest route.”

Somehow my phone knows when I’m in the car. That’s a little freaky. It will ask me, “Are you driving?” I usually say “no,” which is a lie. Once on a train, my phone asked me if I was driving. My phone may be smart, but it’s also gullible.

I keep my phone in my front pocket, which is dangerous. Not because of the radio waves. But because if a phone is in a man’s pocket long enough, eventually his penis is going to turn to his phone and say, “…Take my picture.”

That’s something that did not exist when I was young and single: The dick pic. Is this really a turn-on for women: a picture of a disembodied penis with a pair of Crocs in the background?

Some of the most powerful men in the world have sent dick pics, Brett Favre, Kanye West, the aptly named former congressman, Anthony Weiner. Jeff Bezos has sent dick pics.

As of this writing Jeff Bezos is worth over $280 billion. The man can afford flowers.

Now, to be fair to Jeff Bezos, it may not have been a dick pic. It may have been just …a picture of Jeff Bezos. Have you seen pictures of Jeff Bezos?

“Jeff, is this you? Or is this your penis with a face drawn on it?”

I’m not sure this is what Steve Jobs had in mind when he conceived the iPhone. Imagine him in his black turtleneck at one of Apple’s product launches:

“The new iPhone is a complete digital assistant. You can make calls, text, get emails, search the Internet.” Then he points to the big overhead screen, “And hey, take a look at this…

…That’s my cock.”

What in the name of Mathew Brady is going on here? If Abraham Lincoln had asked Mathew Brady to take a dick pic, it might have changed history.

“Mathew, after we do the official portrait. I’d like to send a little gift to Mary. A picture of Willy.

No, not my son, The other willy, my free willy.”

“Certainly, Mr. President. Pull down your pants.”

Boom! The magnesium flash sets Lincoln’s willy on fire, which sends him to the hospital with third degree burns, and the North loses the Civil War.

When I was young and my penis was more photogenic, we didn’t have all these fancy cell phone cameras. In my day, you had to flop your dick onto a Xerox machine and fax it. I can’t tell you how many times I got thrown out of Kinko’s.

The GPS

I do appreciate the patient tones of the GPS. Even when I make a mistake, it simply informs me that it is “recalculating.”

What sounds forbearing coming from a machine sounds cold and ominous coming from a human.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No. Just recalculating… recalculating how to murder you. I’m trying to figure out how to make a legal U-turn in our relationship.”

How is it we let these contraptions correct our grammar, our spelling; we let them finish our sentences, and tell us we took a wrong turn, but when a spouse does it, we want to throw a toaster across the room?

Life Online

I spend a lot of time online trying to prove I’m not a robot. It’s hard for me to believe that the essential difference between humans and robots is our unique ability to identify traffic lights and random sections of a motorcycle. I sometimes fail this test. Does that make me a robot? On Battlestar Galactica, there are Cylons who don’t know they’re Cylons. That could be me. Although if I really was a robot, I don’t think I’d be getting up three times a night to pee.

Make it a urine test. I’ll pass every time.

I get this question a lot online: “Allow Notifications?”

I always say, “No.”

I don’t need any more notifications. I get plenty of notifications. I am highly notified. I don’t think the human brain is designed to be so notified.

You would think because we are so notified, we’d be wiser. We would use these notifications to make better decisions, draw more accurate conclusions. Instead, they just confuse us, make us angry. Our brains are swirling with notifications like a swarm of midges on a humid summer night. I keep swatting the notifications away. But they are relentless. I need a notification repellent I can spray around my head. Once those notifications insert their tiny proboscises, they inject you with all these tantalizing offers designed to suck out your money.

I always get this one, too: “Google would like to know your location.”

So does Shelley. Shelley always wants to know my location.

So I tell Google the same thing I tell her. “I’m in the bathroom... taking a test.”

Cars

It’s hard not to anthropomorphize our machines. We spend so much time with them; we include them in our social circle like we do our pets.

One evening in 2020, about three weeks into the Covid quarantine, I shuffled down the driveway to retrieve the mail. I didn’t realize my smart key was in my pocket. As I passed our Prius, which had been sitting idle since the shelter in place order, the interior lights came up like a dog wagging its tail. “Are we goin’ out! Are we goin’ out! Let’s go to the store! Let’s get some ice cream!”

“Sorry old girl, I’m just getting the mail.”

I felt a touch of guilt when, as I walked away, the lights slowly dimmed, sad and disappointed.

The same thing happens when the automatic doors at the grocery store open even though I’m just passing by. I reflexively apologize to let the doors know that I’m not taunting them. That I’m not a big tease. As the hydraulic doors hiss closed, I can’t help wondering, though, if they’re whispering, “Ass…hole.”

Every time we buy a new car, the dashboard looks more like the cockpit of an F-16 fighter with an array of symbols I don’t understand. Nothing is in English. Nothing is in any known language. As we move forward technologically, we move backward linguistically. The dashboard is alight with its own system of indecipherable hieroglyphics. A sensor flicks on with a graphic that looks like… what? A steaming cup of coffee? What’s that supposed to mean? Is the car sleepy? Am I supposed to meet someone for coffee? I left the coffee pot on the stove?

No. The manual says it means “Reset the clock.”

How am I supposed to get that from a cup of coffee? Why can’t it just use words I learned in school.

Or how about this? How about a picture of a clock?

Computers and the Cloud

“Don’t worry. Everything’s in the cloud.”

I wish I really knew what that means, but I trust others when they tell me that nothing is ever lost… as long as it’s in the cloud.

In one way, the cloud sounds to me like some form of the afterlife, like “puppy heaven,” a mythical place where you will be reunited with everything you’ve ever loved and cherished.

Can the cloud get too full? What if the cloud bursts? Will it rain photo albums? Will it eventually be part of the weather report?

“It’s raining metadata! Hallelujah!”

A cumulus cloud is now just something that has accumulated all our personal information.

In reality, the cloud is just an enormously intrusive storage unit packed with ones and zeroes that goes by the much less poetic moniker: data center.

I don’t mind updating my software as long as I’m not going to have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, and it doesn’t take too long, which is rarely the case. I don’t get why, when the timer tells me the update will take fifteen minutes, I watch patiently to see it get down to two minutes, then a minute later it jumps back to eight minutes! What happened?! Was there an accident? Did they encounter bandits? Were they waylaid by highwaymen? Bushwhacked by brigands? What’s going on in there? Did the bugs they were trying to fix revolt?

Or maybe they just tripped over a laundry basket.

These days, whenever I get up from a chair, knees popping after a long sit, I slowly straighten up and stagger down the hall like I just got off a boat.

I’m okay. I’m just loading.

Cryptocurrency

I guess cryptocurrency is supposed to be money. Though I also hear that it’s really just a pyramid scheme, and yet another thing making the Trump family rich.

I don’t know anything about cryptocurrency except that Crypto Dot Com[3] bought the naming rights to Staples Center for $700 million, so they must have convinced somebody it’s a thing.

I barely understand how real money works let alone cryptocurrency. It seems enough of us have agreed it’s worth something, because all money operates on faith. But why call it “crypto?” That sounds nefarious. “Crypto” means “hidden” or “secret.” A crypt is a vault for a dead body. I’m suspicious of anything that has the prefix “crypto.” It usually means something less than delightful. Crypto-fascist, crypto-Nazi. Crypt-keeper. Not great branding.

Would you buy food with the word crypto in front of it? “We have a special today on “crypto pork.”

I might have called it something more positive, suggesting transparency, openness. I might have called it “sunshine currency.” Although that also could have a negative connotation when you think about the phrase “shooting sunshine up your ass.”

***

I’m as drawn to digital technology as anyone, but I try to keep some areas sacred, like the baseball field or the gym. I can’t stand waiting for someone lounging on a machine between sets checking his messages or watching a TikTok video. I’d say something, but he won’t hear me. He wears earbuds to keep people like me at bay.

So many of us now walk through life shutting ourselves off from the world we actually live in, sheltered in our digital isolation chambers, chattering aloud to someone no one else can see, reducing the odds of a chance encounter, a spontaneous moment, acknowledging no faces and clocking no landmarks that will enable us to find our way home.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my willy is requesting a selfie.

---

[1] This will not cover AI. That’s for a whole other post.

[2] “Naoh” is also the sound he made when he got bitten in the crotch, “naaoooooooh!”

[3] The worst corporate name for an athletic venue since Guaranteed Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, which previously had the most unpronounceable name, U.S. Cellular Field. Try saying that three times fast. I’m sure all the White Sox announcers breathed a sigh of relief when U.S. Cellular was traded for the few hard consonants of Guaranteed Rate Field, which was eventually simplified to Rate Field.