The Weekly Screed (#853)

Alone and palely loitering,
among the deviceniks
by David Benjamin

“The spread of automation could cause some Asian countries to lose eighty percent of their textile industry jobs. What on earth are they going to do? How will they support their families? What will they do with their time?”
—  Jim Yong Kim,  President, World Bank Group, at Mobile World Congress

BARCELONA — The contrast is almost disorienting.

Every year, when I come here to attend the Mobile World Congress, my first impression is the narrow lanes of this old hill-city by the sea, tight-squeezed tenements hung with laundry, balconies drooping greenery, music leaking out between shutter-slats, kids punting soccer balls and grandmothers dragging their provender home. But I come here to work, a day or two on the treeless outskirts, at the Fira, an antiseptic convention hall surrounded by concrete, cacophonous with traffic, shaded by giant, unsightly hotels and guarded by cordial paranoids peering suspiciously at geek badges and waving blunt ID light-swords like Jedi eunuchs.

In the Fira, for some reason now, the press room is a “media village” and the bleak courtyard where conventioneers tap myopically on their tiny screens is a “networking garden” where the sedge is nonexistent, there is no lake and no birds sing.

But you hear them in the networking garden, the architects of our dystopia, conversing in a code unfathomable to the denizens in the nearby city. Kids in Barcelona, grandmothers and the tchotchke hustlers on the Rambla all speak at least two languages, Spanish and Catalan, plus smatterings of English, French, German — whatever serves to sell. But the argot bandied throughout the Fira would confound the most cosmopolitan among the live citydwellers.

This year, the Mobile World buzz is all about AI, robotics, autonomy and automation, machine learning, neural networks, blockchain and high-frequency spectrum. And the buzz is deafening. As one who has “covered” this spectacle for 20-odd years now — as a sort of Luddite blowfly on the wall — I eavesdrop reluctantly. The discourse tends to be circular and self-validating, a sterile maelstrom that sucks in and consumes any flesh-and-blood that ventures too close.

Mobile World started out as the biggest annual mobile-phone showcase on the planet but is now propagating technologies beyond voice and ear, beyond mind and body, beyond the hothouse of the Fira. So much of what comes and goes every year here just… goes. More technologies fail than ever get heard of by most of us. But the tech that sticks tends to cling, like wet cellophane over your face.

As I listened, alone and palely loitering, to this year’s jargon, I pondered the evolution of invention, a concept on which I’m ill-qualified to comment. But it struck me that in the first era of invention — from the Stone Age to about 1980 —our geniuses conceived of what we called labor-saving devices (LSD). These included wonders like Ogg’s wheel, Eli’s cotton gin, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, Tom Edison’s lightbulb, the internal combustion engine and the mystery (at least to me) of hydraulics.

Ironically — perhaps felicitously — many of these LSDs doubled as labor-creating devices (LCD), because they infused society with jobs. Eli’s gin and Cyrus’ reaper vastly expanded the amount of crop that could be grown and harvested in a season. Edison’s bulb kept factories, markets and offices buzzing well after darkness fell.

But the computer wizards of the 20th century re-defined the LCD, by destroying and redistributing whole categories of labor. When computers became small enough to carry around and became “devices,” millions of valued clerical workers became expendable. Chores once assigned to secretaries and assistants — correspondence and communication, filing and calendar management, expense sheets and travel arrangements, and the vital job of gatekeeping — all were assigned to the portable, inescapable devices of the professionals who had previously saved labor by depending on helpers earning a decent wage for helping them.

The computer obliterated jobs but created labor, adding hours of work for every manager, administrator, associate, teller, editor, executive, lawyer — every white-collar professional whose middling status no longer merited the sheer, profligate luxury of a breathing human secretary. Intelligent assistance became a “perk.” Our newest labor-creating devices — unlike Gutenberg’s press and Kodak’s camera — snuff out workers while heaping busyness onto the survivors of the purge.

But Mobile World is not — as was implied by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim — about saving or creating labor. The new age of invention is focused on the LED, the life-eating device.

Of course, there have always been life-eating devices in the analog realm — guns, guitars, canvases, clay, farms, children, typewriters, stamp collections. But most of these came with a vocation, a dream, a purpose. Today’s LEDs are more like cigarettes and opioids, and the technology industry more and more akin to the tobacco barons of the century past and the vicious present-day pill-pushers of Purdue Pharmaceutical.

Right now, the focus of Mobile World is on the introduction by 2019 of “5G,” the fifth generation of mobile phone technology. Most of us who’ve been using “cellular” phones for a decade or so were blissfully unaware of the halting but relentless progress from 2G to 2.5G, finally to 3G and now, in the halcyon days of a million downloaded apps, streaming Kardashians 24/7, an idiot in the White House who tweets but can’t read beyond two paragraphs — ta da-a-a! — 4G.

Before 2G (some of us remember) a phone was a “telephone,” otherwise referred to as a “dedicated device” for “voice communication” only. It had been refined to the point where a call from Kuala Lumpur to the North Pole was as clear as a Bell and it never, ever turned into a blast of static followed by silence. Phone conversations ended when both people hung up.

We’ve traded reliability and blessed simplicity for portability and epidemic, life-eating multifuctionality.

Is life better this way?

I know, you haven’t asked.

If you’re under, say, 30, you can’t ask because you’re too young to remember.

Soon, your children will be too young to remember the dreary old, slow-download days of 4G. They will be hooked and mainlining, their lives devoured by devices, to 5G “content,” so much of it — movies, games, cat videos, Bridezillas, texts, sexts, tweets, streams and selfies — that the streets of Barcelona, the sedge, the lake and the birds will be to them as the canals of Mars and the sirens of Titan, fantasy realms beyond their imagination.