The Worst Invention of All Time

Atlanta , GA
May 30, 2020

Last Monday politicians plied the usual platitudes honoring those who “gave their lives so we can be free”, even as they ordered us to cower in our homes, keep away from others, or hide under a mask. 

As Pat Buchanan put it, we are treated like children awaiting permission to go back out in the yard to play. Fortunately, many of the kids are starting to ignore their bureaucratic parents, and are going out anyway…without face coverings and at whatever distance they damn well please.

But we may be too late to spare the lexicon. It has apparently become irredeemably infected with such creepy, Orwellian phrases as “social distancing” and “new normal”. Both expressions had brief outbreaks 10-15 years ago, but more recently they seemed to be contained, if not eradicated. They have now returned, and contaminated the herd.

We finish another week at home, sitting solemnly by the window, watching a gentle rain softly pelt the pane. And a question, from an article we recently read, pops into our head.

Has any century started worse than this one? 

It’s a question typical of our short-sighted, self-centered, attention-deprived age. The answer seems obvious, and can be sought by looking only a hundred years into the rear-view mirror.

There we see…closer than they appear…Theodore Roosevelt, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the direct election of Senators, Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, the Treaty of Versailles, the Black Sox, and Prohibition. That recital is worse than the Michael Bolton catalog. 

San Francisco rebuilt, the flu dissipated, baseball recovered, and prohibition was repealed. But the fact or effect of each cataclysm persists to this day. Like herpes, they don’t go away.

But let’s give our most recent two decades their ignominious due. They have been their own impressive litany of self-inflicted calamity, exacted by meddling sculptors and know-it-all painters whose only tools are jackhammers and spray guns. And, to be fair, their work is not done!

In retrospect, the 1990s might have been Peak America…the blowoff top of a great bacchanal. The Soviets fell and prosperity reigned. History was at an end. The party was on. The US then succumbed to what economics calls the law of diminishing returns, and approached what Calculus refers to as the limit. 

After running up the credit card and hitting the casino, it raided mom’s wine cellar and ransacked dad’s liquor cabinet. Then it passed out on the lawn, empty bottles and smoldering cigarettes strewn across the yard as the morning sprinkler sprayed its face.

It has been hungover and searching for its car keys ever since. Along the way, it has tripped and stumbled into several expensive errors: phony terror wars, rigged capital markets, universal surveillance, the cult of “science”, asset forfeiture, perpetual bubbles, fake wealth, real depression, police brutality, urban riots, a tyrannical lockdown, a dystopian aftermath.

And many Americans are just fine with this refrain of disaster that resembles a classic Bradbury book or a bad Billy Joel song. The Fourth Turning seems to be upon us. Not only is the pretense of liberty vanishing, the desire for it seems to be as well. To each his own is not for us. Live and let live is dead.

We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I am holding it in my hand, and most of you are holding it in yours.

This century, we have become an hysterical people. Everything is over the top, overdone, overblown, and overreacted to. Even (or especially) regarding people we never met and would never care to meet, or things we know nothing about and about which, in a sane world, we’d not be able to care less. 

The reaction to this coronavirus has been lunacy, but without it we might still be enduring coverage of Kobe Bryant’s death. In just the last five years, Brexit, Russia-gate, Pronouns, “Terrorism”, “Global Warming”, Impeachment (actually Trump in general), and COVID all fanned fires of uninformed frenzy with little or no substantive kindling.

The smartphone brings such “news” to us the way a magnifying glass transmits sunlight to an ant. It hits us more intensely, and less beneficially, than we initially believe. It allows little or no time to think, and often leaves us worse off than had we not been exposed to it at all. We receive so much information that we usually know less than we did before. Our brains slowly fry.

Public opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks, which inevitably influences what people think they are supposed to think. The smartphone fans these flames, which often burn out as quickly as they ignite. I should know. I’m old enough to remember when a couple self-important royals quit England, and a misguided 16 year-old Swedish girl was talk of the world.

In 2003, SARS ravaged southeast Asia with a death rate far higher than our current plague. It made some waves in Western media, but soon rippled away as the virus ran the normal course viruses run (very much like our current one). But without smartphones, public opinion was far less contagious than it is today. Misinformation and panic were more easily quarantined (on the other hand, so were the antidotes of alternative views and different perspectives).

Social media and instant news are not conducive to subtlety and nuance, but rather to instant reaction and plenty of noise. Smartphones stunt reflection and shorten time horizons. Contemplation can wait. Responses are expected immediately. Stupidity thrives, hysteria abounds, perspective retreats. Meanwhile, movement is monitored and communication is tracked.

It seems appropriate that “silent” and “listen” are spelled with the same letters. But in social settings, our phones encourage the former yet discourage the latter. They “connect” us superficially from a distance, yet push us apart in proximity.

Isolation reigns, even when we are together. A random buzz, beep, post, photo, like, link, text, or tweet is sufficient pretext to disrupt a conversation or ignore a friend. The phone in your hand takes priority over the person in your presence. 

Digital correspondents become highest priority. The world of the real, the tangible, and the personal fades into the background. And, after wading mindlessly thru the self-selected cheer and artificial abundance of other people’s posts, it often feels inadequate.

Don’t get me wrong. The smartphone is one of the most useful, powerful, consequential, disruptive, convenient, informative, miraculous, and remarkable inventions of all time. 

But in some ways, it is among the worst. Like most anything else, it just depends how you use it.

JD