Infinite fun machine

This is part of an indie web club exercise to describe an object close to me, which at the moment (and most moments) is my phone.

It’s a small computer attached to other small computers, the sum total of humanities inventions since the dawn of time. It is the most salient example of the scientific exercise we as a civilization embarked on. A small compact representation of centuries of scientific progress.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It’s wizardry. It’s something you’d have been crucified for in the 1600s. It has all the information ever written in the world. You can summon a human being to bring you any food you might desire any time you want. You can see anything you want anywhere you want anytime you want. You can talk to people halfway across the world in seconds. Note that for most of humanities existence, their entire world was the 10 mile radius they were born in. Now suddenly the entire world is billions of people existing in your pocket all the time.

If you have an infinite fun machine in your pocket all the time, what good is the rest of the world? In some ways it’s the ideal utilitarian dream – We all get maximum comfort and happiness and novelty whenever we want. Much like a classic greek tragedy, the thing that is built on centuries of smart and hard-working people being smart and hard-working is responsible for making people dumber and lazier. We are seeing record high levels of dissatisfaction among people who by all metrics are doing fantastic. Walk into any modern day classroom and it’s a scene straight out of a dystopian nightmare. It’s revealed preference at it’s finest — turns out what people really want to do is be spoon fed algorithmic content all day every day. If there’s one thing that capitalism is good at, it’s fulfilling desires even if it means sacrificing everything else about whatever it means to be human on the altar.

I’d like to end this on some sort of a positive note. About how if we all just come together and impose some sensible regulation and stop these evil companies from harvesting our mind for data then we can finally have the utopia we always imagined. But I don’t really see the status quo anytime soon. The system is working as intended. This is what utopia looks like.