Our modern times

Countdown “Ten, Nine, Eight…”

Press and drop to Usher in the New Year.

Mechanically predictable! the law of physics:

e.g. Trains arrive on time, auto-payment, life expectancy.

Flip over another calendar page.

Set the alarm.

Direct withdrawal.

Punch in and out mechanically just as the machine at work.

Auto-reminder, preset dental appointment.

Ours has been a clocking society (data quants know this).

Homo Sapiens are behavior-modified and clocking regulated….to fit and function in a mechanical and technical society (the train will only stop at predesignated stations at a certain time for only a certain minutes).

Forget “hunters and gatherers days”. Stay put. Amazon Prime will deliver.

Man in turn adapts and speeds up just to keep up…e.g. a tennis star hitting those machine-spit balls like McEnroe or Charlie Chaplin lab-lunch eating corn on a self-mechanized rolling feeder (to shorten break time).

We used to have Recreational Hall (Rec Hall) – where at least, we bump into fellow joggers (“excuse me”, “Pardon me”). Now it’s just a gym, loft-type ceiling and individualized cubicle station. Work culture has spilled over to non-work, warehouse-style (re-industrializing our individual lives).

On top of it, people use their own devices to atomize music and audio books, ignoring gym etiquette (everything is now wearables). Even the big screen TV’s and big popcorn buckets can’t make it nowadays (unlike shared moments of grief of the past when bystanders stopped in front of an electronic store to watch an unfolding event e.g. Dallas 1963 or Moon Landing 1969).

Atomizing. Atomic Habits. Mass-Customizing. Starting with paperbacks that fit in one’s pocket, then phones that fit. Strangers mumbling or facetiming to someone through the ethernet, the other side of Earth, in-language.

Slowly then suddenly, we acquired machine-immunity while machine cross-adapts (per evolving algorithms) to human (our “Likes”, comprehensively converted into data stream and customer profiling to be auctioned and bought by highest ad bidder).

Voila. Our modern times.

Man, and machine meet each other half-way, no longer alien to each other – it’s us human who are.

We are people of “low-tech” and high-cholesterol in a high-tech low-cholesterol society.

No longer do the mass tune in to mainstream news broadcast at 6PM (900 million on Sept 5, 1972, when PLO took Israel Olympic team hostages) or to catch a Connecticut commuter train, before a ride in “maximum occupancy” elevator of the Twin Towers … That social context and shared common e.g. gray flannel suit/hat in Richard Yates novels are bygone.

Instead, we avail ourselves with flex and freedom @WeWork i.e. sharing cubicle and software. The later eats everyone’s lunch (remote workers’ 35% more likely be laid off). As of this edit, IBM and Tesla try to reverse remote work in our post-Covid era.

The inflection point. Yes, we’ve got some setback (Y2K). But machine learns to learn. VC’s also learned. Society sifts and filters to force-rank talent like a Yelp rating. The measures of a man.

It’s easier for man-machine, than for East- West (man-to-man) – so called the Last Few Inches – to relate. So big Tech exploit the minutia, the minutes and the brain power of the mass: massive Supply Chain. Economy of Scale. Zero-marginal cost economy and social media.

You may watch a Kung Fu, interrupted frequently by YouTube’s Cyber Monday ads. That is, if you had not ordered your groceries from a personal shopper … that which used to belong to Beverly Hills concierge class (Warren Beatty type).

Machine conforms to people’s wishes having known almost everything about them.

Apple evolves to its 17th version, but users are still on their nature-born 1st-version. Our sensory perceptions get inundated while we amuse ourselves to death, this time, not via Television, but Twitter (now X) and Tik Tok. Gone were the days of searching for cave painting and hunters’ arrows.

Last century called for an ethical decision: to press or not to press (the nuclear button). Now, it’s him/her who presses what and when, to destroy where/whom via drones. We’re busy watching “unprecedented” reality TV, “the like of which we have never seen before”. Again, sell the sizzle not the steak. Let the red phone ring-no-answer and go to voicemail (sorry, but your voicemail box is full).

This is huge. An existential matter. How are we going to measure the worth and value of each transaction that adds up (Walmart self-check-out: the usual bait-switch, pushing Holidays purchase as if they care for sabbath).

We have access to data which grow exponentially at Moore’s Law speed. But we don’t know how to extract them to exploit nuances (nutrition) for a usable narrative that serves our core needs: who am I, what am I put here for? where am I going eventually.

Like a non-stop machine, we also sift, extract and de-fragmentize. But currently we’re confused and desensitized per deluge from the sewage and feces our of 8 billion + people, all turned “creators” from being “creatures” of recent one-way broadcast blast. All are returning this time to lost (digital) Paradise (again without shame of being naked like a Rodin statue). Our passport is our log-in code and command are at the speed of thoughts.

All of a sudden, it’s not Charlie Chaplin that makes us laugh. It’s us who entertain ourselves to numbness. By morphing and conforming to machine, we have become what we made, all Frankenstein, or a religion of make-believe i.e. the more Likes, the more ego on passing our inevitable journey from the Here/Now to the Here After.

Machine and man waltzing and stepping on each other while the Titanic is sinking, an inch at a time toward the center of the Earth in icy cold data deluge. Sink or Swim: Without an acquired skill set on how to calibrate and curate in an age of information excess (long ago, scarcity is key motivation).

“If you missed the train I am on, you’ll know that I am gone” (smoke and sound of steam engine gaining speed as it pulls out of Istanbul station). Then Sydney Lumet would say “Print”.

That mechanical society and its associated melancholy: steam (stimulus and substitute for tears) now belongs in the industrial past.

“You will hear the whistle blow a hundred miles”.