“We are going to the village to buy some guitar strings.”
“The shop is closed”
“No, we checked online. They are open until 5 o’clock”
Well, who am I to argue. My youngest son and his wife are back from the USA where they have each successfully completed a Berkley Music College four-year study program in just two years, with distinction. Their ability to conduct their business through the Internet amazes me. Their total reliance on it disturbs me. Namely in this instance they are relying on some light pixels dancing on a computer screen to describe a reality that as a long-time resident of the area I know to be false. All shops in this particular South African village will be closed after 12.30 on a Saturday. They are lucky that any shops are open at all! Thinking back to the glorious seventies (we were young!) all shops, bars, movie houses, theatres, would close on Friday afternoon to only re-open on Monday. That was the time when the country was literally run by the Lutheran NGK church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk), a time where laughing in public felt like a crime and smiling like a misdemenour.
Not that my kids are what we would call typical digital kids. They can be the most analog you could ever imagine just from the fact that they are both string players, violin and viola. That means that every note they play on their instrument has perforce to be invented. No placing of a finger on the third fret of the fifth string of the guitar to get a C, or hitting the 20th key from the left on a piano, they have to first imagine the note, then find it on a fingerboard that has no marks on it whatsoever. I still remember the fights when my wife tried to show the (then) little boy the notes of a violin concerto on the piano.
“Mum, the piano is out of tune!”
“But I had it tuned recently”
“Mum, ALL pianos are out of tune! Even when they are tuned!”
He was right of course, the Even Temperament used in the tuning of pianos basically consists in getting all the notes just that bit out of tune so that the chords won’t clash when modulating from one key to another. Perfected by Johan Sebastian Bach, who wrote pieces for his children in every major and minor key to prove that the system worked. (The well-tempered klavier)
These kids love manual work as well. They attack a garden project or any manual, non-computer work with an energy that belies their vegan beliefs. (They just won’t eat anything that has either eyes or parents).
But their real forte IS the Internet. Tutti mixes music tracks for artists all over the world, produces records for his band from Cape Town while his singer/writing partner is on tour with some other band in California, invents sounds and noises for online games with school friends resident in London. The size of the sound files he sends over the Net are usually bigger than the total memory of my first Mac! His wife, Alliz, simply spends her days on the Internet. As a producer / artist agent she is constantly plugged into different continents. I overheard her directing one of her acts through the Paris Metro on the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Through Google, Maps, Whatsup and God knows what else.
My older son, Nigel, spends his working life chained to a computer predicting what millions of customers will buy the very next day in England so that he can order the stuff, have it delivered during the night to a central distribution centre, have it sorted out and deliver it ready on the shelves of dozens of supermarkets by the start of the next business day. The algorithms he uses take into account how close that day is to payday, the trends, the season, and, of course, the weather prediction. I forget if people buy more or less if it is raining, maybe more TV sets, I would think, more drinks. More umbrellas and raincoats? Fantastic algorithms, he tells me, at the edge of AI. Amazing. Scary.
The kids come back from the village laughing, revelling in their youth and happiness. The shop? Yes, it was closed, as I knew it would be. It is my big chance to use the phrase I have been keeping in my head most of my life:
“You must learn, kids: The word is not the thing. The map is not the territory”. (I stop short of “The Tweet is not the news”)
I expect some reaction but they just shrug their shoulders, carry on laughing at some private joke.. “Yes, Dad, whatever. We’ll get it on Monday”.
My chance has gone, unnoticed. My opportunity to teach my son anything at all, if it ever existed, is no more. They say that kids learn from their parents mostly from example, which worries me sometimes and makes me examine my life with trepidation. I suppose I could have been a worse Dad. Maybe as I have been guided through life by the sort of philosophy I just blurted out my son didn’t need me to repeat it. Maybe today was not even a challenge to reality, just a good chance for a Saturday afternoon drive.
The phrase, of course, is from Alfred Korzybski, the creator of General Semantics, which I saw as a sort of general warning not to take anything at face value and question all received wisdom and conventions.
It first came to my notice when, as a young man fresh out of the comfort of school in the French Pyrennees I walked into a miserable little room in Lagny-sur-Marne, a small town about 100 kms North of Paris, where I had obtained my first job as a design-draughtsman. Cold and miserable. From my drawing-office window I had a view of a long stretch of road going up a hill and could see the articulated trucks skidding their way up and often down backwards, jacknifing in the process and coming off the icy road.
No money till payday at the end of the week, all the way back in Paris, hard rations. After the sandwich supper the evening routine: one cup of coffee in a bar with three songs from the juke-box or two coffees and one song. Favourite numbers, again and again: “With a little help from my friends” by Joe Cocker, “Becassine” by Georges Brassens, “La maison sur le port” by Amalia Rodrigues. Back in the room I try something I had read about: “fill your belly with water and you won’t feel the hunger”. Doesn’t work. On a small shelf three paperback books left by the previous occupant. Authors that would mark me forever: Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick, A.E.van Voght. I grabbed “Le Monde des –A” by van Voght and noticed hours later that a fantastic stretch of the imagination had succeeded where a bellyfull of water had failed. I had completely forgotten my hunger and sad surroundings.The impact of this “new” litterary genre on me was such that I couldn’t wait to get into my room next day after work! I was really transported into a different world, in that case the world of General Semantics, null-A, non-Aristotelian, whichever you care to call it. Yes, “the map is not the territory”, “the word is not the thing” story, a philosophy that encouraged looking beyond appearances and conventions at a more real world. I only learnt years later that the book had been translated from the American by Boris Vian, a French surrealist writer that also became an absolute favourite of mine. Double joy.
It feels sort of odd to say those things today when even a computer program will ask you to prove your humanity by copying some numbers on your on-screen application. It is no longer just me asking a call centre: “Madam, are you a robot? I need a person.” The word is certainly no longer the thing, the image even less. There was a time not so long ago where we would wonder on seeing some amazing scene on a screen: “Do you think it is real?” No longer. We know it is probably computer-generated. Sticking to reality today can only mean an oversight or lack of budget in a project where reality couldn’t be “massaged”. Unless “reality” is the sole object of the exercise, as in the BBC nature programs. There the investment is measured not just in exotic equipment and amazing talent but in a stupefying, difficult-to-comprehend display of patience and endurance from the photographers.
You have guessed by now that I am a total computer amateur. Not in the French sense that I love the dumb machines, not at all, but rather that I am quite clumsy and untrained in their use. As most people of my generation I know enough computer technique and shortcuts to get on with my work but I carry always with me the mute fear that the computer will take over even more of my vital functions, that I will become totally dependent on it and my brain won’t measure up to its CPU. Of course that particular train left the station long ago and I am only kidding myself thinking about our chances of survival without these machines. Slim at best, depending on expectations. If we think of the familiar scenario where an atomic bomb explodes near us, or even not that near, we are informed that the resulting EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) will fry any electronic circuit in a large radius switching off all of our computers and leaving us helpless. Of course in South Africa our electricity department ESCOM has achieved similar results simply by switching off the electricity at its source. These so-called “load shedding” exercises where the electricity supply was cut off for hours at a time at least reminded us of the magic of candle-lit evenings, of family conversations, of story reading for children.
Whereas the measure of the level of civilisation is at the moment thought to be the level of production, automation and internet connectivity there might come a time when the measure of advancement of this same civilisation will be measured by the amount of time (Days? Minutes?) that it could survive without electricity, meaning mainly without Internet or computing power. But we did say an atomic bomb, didn’t we? Nothing to worry about then.
Are we becoming dumb at the same speed that our gadgets are becoming smart? I appreciate when I stick my card in the “loyal customer” booth of my local supermarket finding a list of special offers matching exactly the shopping list in my pocket, but it also distresses me greatly. Am I so predictable? Among other temptations it offers me a discount on mint bubbly chocolate, exactly the type and brand I usually buy, so in a futile act of revolt I buy a different one. Hollow victory, it cost me more than the mint bubbly the computer offered and now he knows that I can be a shifty character. The devices get so smart that most appliances can dispense advice through their connection to the Net (“Your roast is getting over-cooked”). I enjoyed seeing an Afro-american presenter in the Daily Show with a Deep South accent declare after a tech fair: “I don’t want to get no advice from no damn hairbrush!”
As a research tool the Internet seems to know too much and not enough. “A lie becomes truth when enough people have said it” Montesquieu said long, long ago. That, in computer parlance, could be described as the “cut and paste syndrome” No matter the accuracy, if a web page is well designed and has some sort of an acronym in it and lots of links to other pages, its contents will appear in plenty of websites to follow.
Sixty years later Alfred Korzibsky would be rather surprised at the quasi-universal acceptance of his principles: The word is not the thing? Of course not. Neither is the image. Or the sound. Anyone with a bit of brain today will or should classify any piece of news or information crossing one of his screens as “possibly true” until cross referenced with other sources. Only we, digital dinosaurs, have to exercise a little more caution and not take anything at face value no matter where it comes from. The American media in general and President Trump in particular should have taught us at least that with their fluid and cavalier mixing of fact and fiction. How did such expressions as “fake news”, “post-factual”, “post-truth”, “alternate realities” enter our vocabulary when discussing events of world importance?
Also, what would Korzibsky think when confronted with something like a crypto-currency, which can only exist if enough people say it does? There have been millions of words written about it, there have been images created to represent it but it still only exists as lots of bright dots on computer screens and the imagination of the millions of people who have entrusted their good fortunes to it.
I think Alfred Korzybsky still has the last word with one of his famous quotes:
There are two ways to slice easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
So, sorry people, we are back at the beginning, it is really up to us.
