I was in a team meeting  a few months ago and my boss noticed, apropos of nothing, that my name, Mary McCray, has, (eerily and evenly), two Ms, two As, two Rs, two Ys and two Cs. Like my whole name is a duplication of the letters M, A, R, Y and C.

And then he searched for annograms of my name and the one that best described this strange situation was “Marcy Marcy.” He jokingly found said this was probably messing up the matrix.

I said that sounds bad but just add it to the pile of all other things.

Sigh.

Breaking the Spiritual Matrix

I’ve been sitting on this post for months. Months! It felt too depressing to post. Not that I’m above (or below) posting gloomy. When the time calls for. Because I like a good grouse as much as anyone. But this one felt really complain-y.  And how useful was that?

It’s basically about all the tech fails happening all around us (and what this means for creative people). And I’m not just talking about new tech problems, like A.I. or the  occasional A.I. “hallucinations” although those are kind of batty when they happen. Asking A.I. to explain who Mary McCray is has been both fascinating and disturbing. For one thing, A.I. thinks more highly of me than I think is true. I had a book club meeting and we’re all writers so we talked about that and I’m convinced A.I. is trying to ingratiate itself by blowing smoke up our asses. And then just the wrongness. For example, A.I. had me co-writing a very famous song. And aside from helping my brother get out of a lyrical dead-end once every few years, I’ve never written a song in my life.

But I’m not talking about all that. I’m talking about tech things that have been working forever and suddenly they are not working…and nobody knows why or how to fix them anymore because systems and technology have become too complicated to unravel and fix. So the problems are left just languishing out there in the open like abandoned motels on the side of the road.

Wholesale things on websites, like links and redirects not working. Email confirmations not working. Phone apps not working. Virus scanners getting confused. Phone trees breaking down. My text app can’t handle group threads anymore. And it’s been broken for over a year. Business processes breaking the minds of the people and machines tasked with following them. It’s like we’re arriving at a tipping point where technology is doing more harm than good and people are dumping their “smart” appliances for “dumb” ones….just to be able to, for example, do their laundry.

The amount of phone apps we are required to have just to make hair and doctor’s appointments, get grocery store coupons. Not only are we having storage problems, but the elderly can’t fill out copious amounts of pre-visit online forms when they can’t understand the ten steps needed to access them.

A recent airline ticket QR code stopped working for me 30 minutes before a flight and the flight attendant has to print a ticket off for me. Like on that amazing technology of paper.

A doctor I’ve been trying to see finally cancelled my appointment this month because they can’t navigate my insurance situation. They tried for six months and finally we both gave up.

What a mess everything is.

And then there’s this thing they are calling a decline in our attention span. I call it becoming illiterate. Over the years, I’ve watched a very, very smart friend struggle with any kind of longform reading at work. When a long email comes to this person, they struggle with “too much information” and the bullying “wall of text.” It’s like all the microcontent we have consumed over the years has made my friend illiterate.

People are losing their jobs just as paywalls are going up everywhere for formerly free services.

Technology has suddenly become very political.

All of these are major tech fails. And I’m not the only person to notice. Everyone is noticing it.

Good ole Yankee ingenuity, our historical faith in labor-saving devices. Innovation and invention, fads, disruption and planned obsolescence, our obsession with the youth is really an obsession with the new. These are all American themes.

But for the last few decades, technology has been disrupting the wrong things. Why not disrupt health care and the fiasco of health insurance? Why hasn’t anybody taken that on? Imagine the countless amount of suffering that could have alleviated.

But hey, we can shop with our voices now and we don’t have to use our fingers! Next day shipping! Credit card information is saved for all future purchases on any website. We can send our friends money easily now!

Do you see a pattern here?

What is the utility or efficiency of having people forced to be ambidextrous between Mac and PC, Apple and Android? There is none. Why should developers have to design things that need everlasting updates. As we’ve seen with digital art, artists and writers can’t keep maintaining their pieces out from eventual technological obscurity.

You now need a gazillion programs to do your job (even toilets are getting complicated) and none of them sync seamlessly with any other. There’s always a glitch that requires manual intervention and workarounds. I have a whole separate tirade I could make about how work tools have mostly made work tasks more difficult and time consuming for us. We’re doing so much babysitting with the tools, we have less time and brain capacity left over to solve the real people problems our jobs are trying to manage.

TV apps have made TV watching too complicated. To reinstate my AppleTV account takes a phone with a QR code app (that never works), a URL to use on my phone or computer, then a verification number sent to my phone and then a password to get into my website account. So there are many walls I have to scale just to give AppleTV my money. And it’s been that way for years. They’re not trying to fix real problems.

Disruption a big word in technology. It’s a goal for designers and “visionaries” but it’s been a nightmare for real people, especially older people. One of my parents has cognitive issues switching from one streaming TV app to the other (let alone dealing with their four separate remotes) because each one functions differently. As technology continues to make our lives more complicated by the day we’re starting to see that cognitive breakdown creep into younger and younger minds, like my friend above with the reading issues.

If you can’t get your washer and dryer to run because the internet is down, that’s a tech fail. If technology puts people out of work and makes them go hungry, that’s the biggest tech fail there ever was. And the biggest irony is that layoffs are beginning first with the very technology employees who have been designing our human obsolescence.

Benevolent vs Malevolent Provocateurs

I want to talk about the idea of disruption because I hear a lot about it. And not just in technology. It’s a big word for writers and artists, too. It’s just not called “disruption.” But it’s been on most writers agenda since modernism. Shake it up. Helping people is never on the agenda. Not really. Not truthfully. It’s the drive to be known as the person who shook it up.

Figure out a way to disrupt the canon, a way to challenge allegedly complacent people. The most respectable artists have been considered provocateurs. And it’s been so culturally and socially admired, everyone wants to do it now.

And it’s just not scalable, socially or morally.

I was at a party a few months ago and there was a libertarian there who we all like and who is a very smart and funny person. He was talking about trolling his co-workers on Facebook and he said, “I just want to fuck with people.” And I wondered, to what end? To get them to “take themselves less seriously,” he said, very seriously.

I recently read an essay about John Adams and how he predicted that conflict that would keep America on track (conflict, adversity) and not community and stability. This was because, he believed, it is simple human nature to want to be in conflict. People naturally are needy for recognition, wealth, and to feel they are better than their neighbors. They will conflict to attain.

So I try to understand capitalism’s insatiable need for a constant newness and the tech sector’s constant drive toward disruption and society’s decades-long-march toward the pinnacles of every conceivable thing, from singing contests to baking bread to winning a dog on a reality show.

My party friend just wants to fuck with people. But to what purpose? Later in the night he admitted he left a job because he felt he was being, in so many words, fucked with.

So rule number one is if you’re going to be one of those people who fucks with others, you better be amiable when being fucked with. But that never seems to be the case. Rarely are the shit-starters fit enough to have shit started upon them.

And I keep coming back to the impulse to do it. To what purpose. Can you articulate how society will be improved based upon your fuckery? And it better be good, because everyone and his dog are doing it.

If the answer is “I don’t know” or “I don’t care, I just like to fuck with shit,” that’s the definition of malevolent provocateuring. If you just want to cause people to feel like shit because you are annoyed about something (like political correctness) or the opinions of somebody else, that’s not good enough. It’s just “shit rolls downhill.”

If you can articulate an outcome that (1) is not all about you and (2) is actually an improvement to a problem of the human condition, then that is benevolent provocateuring.

To what purpose is your fuckery?

There’s so much of it everywhere you look that to truly be unique these days you need to go completely the other way. That’s where the real risk and adventure now exists, to go up against those who constantly feel the need to go up against everything else because they feel bad and cannot regulate their feelings.

Mostly I feel disruption is just malevolent manipulation, to confound for the sake of confounding. The world shits upon me so I shit upon the world. I have been disrupted and therefore so shall you be.

I’m telling you, you can’t stand out in all this shit. The only resort to distinction now is the impulse toward continuity, consistency, kindness and peace.

I know what you’re thinking: this is why we can’t have shitty things.

So what does this mean for literature? 

Utility in Art. That’s a strange concept.

W. H. Auden once said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Maybe he’s right; but until the end of days we’ll never know for sure.

For a long time we’ve been experimenting with disruptions. I like experimenting too. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It should still exist. But there’s no law that says art can’t be useful: emotionally, philosophically, spiritually and practically.  It has the potential to improve your life. It can do anything. And it can do anything because it’s an easy and open vessel. You can put helpfulness into it just as easily as you can put spite and rage…and fuckery.

For decades we have been asking readers to put up with more and more disruption. For what gain? Look deeply into your own heart.

In a world of the manipulation and disruption and planned obsolescence, utility seems completely revolutionary.