Resting A Bit

The weather was fantastic but I wouldn’t be going very far in it today.

I had a second night booked here to concentrate on work, so my excursion was just over to the miniature town across the highway.

I warned the waiter I would be there for a while, and he shrugged and said, “You might be our only customer for most of the day. It’s really slow right now.”

That was good. My video meetings wouldn’t bug anyone.

I finished with those, then wrote code and ate snacks for about five hours. Eventually I switched to email and texting with the folks back home.

As the daylight waned, my sense of isolation grew, and it brought along a rare feeling of homesickness. My digital connection to loved ones felt inadequate. Good enough for a while, but not long-term. I knew this feeling would grow with time, and as it did, perhaps I would reach a threshold where all online communication felt as insubstantial as it really was, and I’d have to return home or lose my sanity. Making friends along the way isn’t a near-term option when you’re constantly on the move.

As I rode back to the hotel, I started obsessing about social media, in the impotent way I often do. Most people in my home country get their news from social media feeds now. And without really understanding it, they’ve become vulnerable to bad actors working from far away, who can change or just rearrange their information for some economic or political purpose. The centralized nature of large-scale social media companies makes it easy to interfere in consistent and opaque ways.

An image formed in my head, of friends and family gathered in a living room having a lively conversation. In the center of the room is a chair, and in it sits a person wearing an expressionless mask. The person hears every word of the conversation. Occasionally they raise a hand, and whatever person is speaking is suddenly muted. Their mouth continues to move, but instead of the words they’re saying, a political opinion from a complete stranger, or an advertisement for a carefully chosen product, goes into the ears of everyone else. No one notices. The mind’s eye pans outward, and we see similar chairs in every room in the house, including bedrooms and bathrooms. Masked strangers are stationed outside as well, and at regular intervals up the street. No one sees them.

It sounds like the premise for an outlandish horror film — perhaps something directed by John Carpenter and starring a charismatic pro wrestler. A scenario that people would, upon discovering in the real world, feel immediate revulsion at, and begin fighting. The strangers in the chairs would be knocked down and shoved into the street. And yet, this is effectively the world we occupy, and we collectively embrace it because we can’t imagine these anonymous strangers doing something counter to our interests. Or perhaps, we feel like they’re so powerful already that there’s no alternative…

Back at the hotel I tried to push the vision out of my head and relax. Something big would have to be done, some kind of regulation or trust-busting, and my latest round of obsessing wasn’t going to conjure a solution. I packed my gear for an early start, and wandered deep into the ambient music in my little fold-up speakers.