The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.

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Sitting around last night with a few of our friends waiting for the phone and internet to come back into service after the Bomb Cyclone, we hit on the subject of Artificial Intelligence used to facilitate the drudgery of data entry in their genealogy research. Always a day late, a dollar short and probably a half century behind, I was amazed my friends all had AI. Turns out, surprise surprise, it comes with their smartphones and laptops. Just jumps right in to give a friendly assist, unsummoned, ready to serve.

Apparently you can turn the digital servant off. You know, if you want to navigate the universe without auto-pilot. My friends didn’t. Oh, it annoyed them occasionally, jumping in with unwanted suggestions, but they could ignore it and anyway, mostly it was useful. “I only use if for the boring stuff,” Linda said. “Saves me a lot of time.”

The world moves too fast for me down here in my hidey-hole at the end of the island. How is it possible most of us only just heard of AI a few years ago and now it’s embedded in our devices? It’s 50 years since Toffler’s book Future Shock came out, warning us about the accelerated speed of change in our societies. How long did it take from the first home computer to the year we all had at least one? Remember those first portable phones, the ones about the size of a shoe box with an antenna you pulled out for better reception? Now I’m the last person in America without one carried everywhere I go.

Linda claims she doesn’t plan to use the AI app much. I claim we’ll all be using it in no time flat all the damn time. Technology has a way of worming its way into our lives, becoming more and more indispensable. Today our internet is still down. The neighbors are complaining. They’re cut off from the outside world. They’re living like animals in the last century. The Dark Ages are back!

Course, I’m doing fine. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Maybe so. All I’m sure of in these once future days, a world without AI is okay too….

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Sometimes I lose track of time. Not just the days of the last week. I forget how old I am, all those years behind me. I’ll be looking at one of our Doug firs and think, my god that’s one bigass tree, neglecting to consider that it was fairly large when I came here 47 years ago. You stop and think how much difference half a century made the first half of last century, then how accelerated change was the second half, trust me, future shock is real.

We live down here in the backwash South End of Camano. What was a fairly desolate tail end of the island is now filling in with Boeing and Weyerhauser retirees, Dot.comers who cashed in early and refugees from California whose house back when it cost a couple hundred grand now makes them multi-millionaires up here. I suspect if we sold our homestead we could probably be the Nuevo royalty in Kansas or upstate Alabama. But then who wants to be King of the Louisiana swamps or Duke of the tundra in Upper Michigan. I already left those places — sure don’t want to go back just to own more acreage of swamp or snow drifts.

But … you stay put, the world doesn’t. I’ve resisted change ever since I parked my hippie ass down here, just wanted to be left the hell alone, good luck to the rest of so-called civilization. Still don’t have a cellphone but the mizzus does. I finally had to learn how to use a computer, got one on my desk up at the house I built 30 years ago. All those homesteader skills I learned, everything from plumbing to electric, carpentry to woodworking, they’re all mostly anachronistic now. 3-D printing, Artificial Intelligence, 5-G networks, drone warfare, hundreds of satellites orbiting, electric cars, social media, driverless vehicles, gene manipulation, not all of it bad, just the relentless push of progress, technology ascendant, all of us wired, connected to the Hive.

My father, recently deceased at 100 years old, told us boys on one of our Huck Finn Mississippi River houseboat trips back through the Wisconsin/Minnesota and Illinois/Iowa cliffs, he thought he’d lived in the best of times. Despite the Depression and World War Two. I think maybe I’ve lived through the tail end of those times. What’s coming next will be totally, unpredictably, different. Personally, I’m glad I’m old.

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