How Well Can You Wish?
Went to a Telltales event in Falmouth the other night. The theme was ‘Let’s Talk’, so I read my story God — The Interview. Theme for next time is ‘Wishing Well’. I came home and thought about that, and then I wrote this to read aloud to an audience that will likely share at least some of my memories. [Note. I haven’t worried too much about getting the timeline straight. This all happened in the past, but not quite in the order that I’ve remembered it.]
It is possible to wish too well. I remember sitting in a newsroom in the early 1980s, and wishing typewriters didn’t make so much noise. If only there was some quieter machine on which to write, I’d be able to hear myself think.
And then when I got to be Features Editor, I remember sitting at my desk with layout sheets, galley proofs, a Pritt Stick and some scissors, and wishing there was an easy way to lay out columns on pages that didn’t involve sticky fingers and finding stray paragraphs of cut-out text stuck in my hair. Perhaps the text and the page could be combined on the screen, in some kind of — what would one call it? — “layout program”. I laughed at that, but I wished for it.
I sat in a coffee shop once, in the nineties, and attempted to program a Psion Organiser Series 3 to talk back to me. When I turn you on, I told it, show the words “Good morning.” When I type in a reply, show a question about the weather. But the coffee had long gone cold before I had given it enough words for even a short conversation about a simple rainy day. I wish you could talk to me, I told it. I’d name you, and you’d be unique, and nobody else would have a machine with the same name as you.
Some time around then, or maybe it was earlier, I sat in my office, late in the afternoon, as the light outside began to fail, and wished for a machine that would sit on the table and connect to the world. Full of information, and conversation, and on an afternoon like this, even capable of turning on the lights.
I wished for a worldwide network of connected machines that would give access to all the wisdom of the world, on which I could engage in deep philosophical discussions with like-minded people in other countries and advance the cause of knowledge and mutual understanding. With such machines, there would never be wars.
I opened up my copy of Time Out to the cinema listings, and looked for a film that I could see that evening. I wish there was some kind of machine on which I could just look this up without having to buy a magazine, I told myself. Terminator. That sounds interesting. Rise of the Machines. I wonder what that’s about. I went to the cinema, and while I was waiting for the lights to go down, I saw a man two rows ahead of me turning off his mobile phone.
That’s so cool, I thought, and wondered if they’d ever get it down to the size of a brick. I wish I could have a mobile phone, I thought, and remembered to switch off my pager before the film started. I definitely need a mobile phone, I decided, as the terminators laid waste to civilisation on the screen in front of me.
That’s such a cool design. The body of the phone no bigger than a printed hardback encyclopedia and the handset clamped to the top. I’d wear it with the shoulder strap rather than clearing my briefcase to carry it. If I had a mobile phone like that, I’d stare at it for hours.
And then I did. And then an animated paperclip showed me how to use Microsoft Office. Siri came into my life, and had to be addressed as Siri. Alexa came into my life, and had to be addressed as Alexa. Everybody had Siri. Everybody had Alexa. On my desk at work, a very large screen appeared, with an apple embossed below it. A colleague showed me how to turn it on, and how to switch from the tropical-fish screensaver to the simple space-invasion game.
We couldn’t use our big screens for work yet, because we hadn’t been through the training course, so I’d sit in front of mine cutting out columns of text and pasting them to layout sheets, while the fish swam back and forth or the aliens continued to invade.
I miss Pritt Sticks. I miss layout sheets. I miss doing things by hand. I wish for human beings at the other end of the phone. I wish for pictures of typewriters, because nobody ever illustrates an article about writing or creativity with a picture of a word-processing laptop.
I wish for those battered manila folders of crime-scene photographs and statements that detectives carry in crime dramas. I wish technology would shut up about itself and just be useful. I wish our screens would work like they do in the movies, instantly picking out the suspect in the crowd, not pausing to take in yet another upgrade, nor pinging to announce yet another pop-up ad.
What does it say about me, that I wished this world into existence? What does it say about all of us, that we all did? Why do the terminators, and the zombies, and the helpful household robots that go bad — why do they all continue to roam through our imaginations?
If we have the whole surveillance economy watching to sell us the next thing we wish for, why aren’t we satisfied yet? Why does the whole promise of e-commerce, online shopping, 24-hour online connectivity, come down to a tired van driver in a hurry leaving our fragile parcel outside the wrong front door in the rain? Why does nobody ever recognise that doorstep?
In entertainment, in fiction, in books and in the movies, it’s as much a commonplace that the technology is about to turn against us, as it is that the contagion is going to turn us all into zombies, or that the weather is about to do whatever the crazy maverick scientist says it’s about to do.
I didn’t wish for a world in which the crazy maverick scientists are the ones denying that there’s a problem with the weather, and like everybody else, I don’t believe them. But I suspect that fiction is a rehearsal for reality, in which we work through our real fears. Denial comes into that, of course, as a last resort. When the crazy maverick scientists are the ones denying that there’s a problem, we know that we’re really in trouble.
In factual programming, when technology is discussed as technology, just that word, and not as some gadget that’s being sold to us as a new idea — the opening title sequence of the programme on technology will almost always include a flicker on the screen, a glitch, as though to hint at what we really suspect. It’s all flawed. Is this the wish to end all wishes? In the myth, Narcissus stared at his reflection in a pool. In the reality, with our phones, we don’t need the pool. We stare into the abyss, and as we lose ourselves, it shows us pictures of cats.
I want to know the joke that’s amusing those smart young people in that smart young office, in the ad for that shiny silver gadget that they’ve grouped themselves together to admire. I want to know what the occasion is, as that diverse gathering of photogenic young people in bandanas, cut-off jeans and loose tie-died blouses all drink the same fizzy drink at their bonfire party on the beach.
And I want to know how that sleek young man cleared the curving road for his drive down the mountain to the sea, in the ad for that chubby little hatchback. How did they get that music to sound so good? How could I possibly, even for a moment, how could I possibly feel an urge to buy that car? Alexa, tell me, please.
