Old man yells at the cloud

As I wade into the high-risk group for grumpy old man syndrome, I aspire at least to be studious about it, for my own peace and to be less insufferable. The gates to seniordom open to me and what I see at the entranceway is discouraging; but what of that? Living on in the face of discouragement is nothing new to me.

What galls me is how little say the majority of us have, still, about how we conduct our business and the means with which we read, listen to music, watch movies and play games, despite being told how much consumer choice we have.

The personal car, a marker of freedom for generations, has been largely what automakers decided we shall have. The technological shifts from record players and tape machines to disks read by lasers, and then away from physical storage altogether for revocable access to streaming files, were not consumer-led. Consumers, in fact, are led by marketing through constrained sequences of choices.

Some consumers notice the tunnels through which we are herded and some do not. Most people would say, if asked, that they do not want others making choices for them; and perhaps they feel, holding the phone that has become their source of news, entertainment and portal for shopping and interacting with avatars of people (who may be real or not), that they are in command of their lives.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously bragged that his company made Google “dance” to keep up with Bing in the race to make us all talk to chatbots, what he did not say is that the tech industry as a whole is making us dance, you and me. Look how well they have trained us to call their plagiarism machines “artificial intelligence.”

Well, this aging man is open-hearted enough to let people enjoy things and to give technologies their due. It isn’t change that rankles, but the gaslighting. As I look to a future with more of my interactions on screens, talking to chatbots and perhaps reading news articles composed by generative software and conducting routine business transactions through self-checkout devices (watched by cameras) and apps on my phone, I have little patience for being told that this is the outcome of my choice, or proof of my freedom.

That’s the point when I will tell you to shove it — or upload it to your cloud, I suppose.