Amsterdam To Hamburg

Zach and Michael were going to be moving house before I saw them again, so this was probably the last time I would ever explore this part of the Netherlands, which was fine; it was pleasant but not remarkable. I was ahead of schedule so I got coffee and rolled towards Amsterdam even slower than usual, admiring the flowers and reading the plaques on the monuments and so forth. I also checked through my mental list of bike gear. If there was any unique hardware or clothing I needed, it would be good to buy it in the next few days before I was stuck on the Norway coast.

The ticket for the German train I was boarding had a platform number on it. I had a new appreciation for that after dealing with the French train system, which refused to provide a number until a few minutes before departure. I’d scoped out the platform already, so all I had to do was check the big schedule board at the station to make sure it hadn’t been moved suddenly. At the platform, the letters along the track guided me to the spot where the bicycle car would pull up. The car had plenty of room. So far, so good…

While I was standing around on the train I got a message from the hotel in Hamburg. They’d cancelled my room because of “water damage” – probably they overbooked or something – and issued me a refund before I could do any negotiation. All the hotels near the city center were booked, so I switched to AirBnB and found a room a few miles from the station. It cost $40 more but I counted myself lucky.

As I put my phone away I also counted myself lucky just to be living in an age where this sort of maneuver was possible. I’d found a random private citizen in a different country who was willing to put me up for a night, six hours before I was due to arrive… And I had no trouble with the language barrier or the currency conversion… And I’d done it in 15 minutes, while on a moving train!

It was a triumph of the computer and data industry that I spent my youth exploring. I felt lucky to be experiencing it. Then I remembered more recent developments, and how that sense of gratitude was getting mixed with a sense of dread.

I asked myself, “What’s the next logical step in this situation?” And it was clear: In a few years, the devices in our hands would act on our behalf. As soon as the cancellation message arrived, my phone would start pinging other services – Expedia, AirBnB, Kayak, etc – compiling me a list of options for alternate places to stay that fit the criteria of my schedule: Close to the station, close to the same price, same day, late arrival time, no stairs to navigate on a bike… I wouldn’t need to tell it; it would know all this from context. So when I opened the phone, I would just pick something from a list and it would do the booking for me. Time saved; convenience added. What’s not to like?

Well, here’s what’s not to like: Young people who don’t know how to navigate the world will start asking the thing, “What should I do?”

Just like search engines now, the device will give them a useful answer that also happens to steer them towards services that are paying the most advertising dollars, which is certainly a nuisance. But there’s something about this anticipatory, guiding mechanism that opens a door to something worse, because “what should I do” is not a purely logistical question. Behind every instance of “what” is an instance of “why.” Why do you want to do a particular thing?

If you’re a young person, then hopefully you’re making a conscious decision based on some advice from people who care about you. In days of yore, if you were a kid and you wanted to do something, you had to figure out how, and that meant something like:

• Ask your family,
• Ask your friends,
• Ask a teacher,
• Poke through library books,
• Mail-order some specialty manual,

So unless you worked pretty hard to conceal it, your community got wind of what you were pursuing and had some chance to give you input. Having and interacting with human family, and friends, and teachers, and librarians has generally been the way people thrive — and barring that, the way people learn from each other how to participate in the world, and how to think in general. But now that’s optional. You don’t need to ask your family, or friends, or teachers, or go to some place where librarians have exercised editorial control.

Sweep all that in the trash. Replace it with an obsequious corporate-owned AI agent that you always need to keep inches from your body in order to do basic things like buy a sandwich and unlock your car. Family, friends, and community are now mediated by the agent, if you choose to involve them at all, because processing everything they say to you is part of the “training” that makes the agent so good at anticipating your demands. If you ask – or perhaps even if you don’t – the agent will compose messages to your friends and send them on your behalf. It will tell you it’s being helpful, and at first you’ll agree.

You’ll go from using it to learn, to using it to decide and execute, to having it learn, decide, and execute on your behalf, and your relationships with Apple, Google, and Meta will become more central to your choices and your actions than your relationships with your own parents, friends, co-workers … wives, children … Those companies will know exactly who you are, and the people around you will know less and less.

In due time, like the worst switcheroo magic trick in the world, the device will become essential, and the friends and family will become completely optional, and will start to disappear.

The default version of a person will become an animal in a glass box, wallpapered with whatever ideas a company has been paid the most – or even worse, ordered by a government – to display. Rubber-stamp those individuals out, creating tower blocks of little glass aquariums, filling a city; a country. It won’t be universal and it obviously won’t be ideal, but it will be efficient. And that will make it the new baseline for human society. If you’re lucky you have some kind of life outside the glass box. If you’re not… Well, I don’t know. You’ll probably be entertained and fed, but I don’t think I’ll be able to recognize you as a real human being any more. The social gap will be too much for me to cross.

Sometimes I think I’m living at the tail end of a golden age of humanity. Millions of people are being lifted out of poverty all over the world by better economic networks and medical and farming technology, but at the same time, millions on the other end are also climbing into glass boxes. I get to live somewhere in the middle, for however long it lasts.

But standing on the train this afternoon, I realized that my train of thought doesn’t actually just end in darkness. There’s something else going on at the same time, with the same technology – language models and generative art – that makes me paradoxically optimistic.

Human beings still generally thrive better when they spend time face-to-face, interacting in the real physical world, touching hands, breathing the same air, and looking each other in the eye. … And they know it, even if it’s just subconsciously.

Combine that with the fast approaching situation where, “thanks” to generative art tools, we will soon not be able to consider anything we see on a phone screen – especially on social media – to be the truth, and we will collectively be forced to recognize the infinite capacity these devices have to manipulate us, and begin to distance ourselves from them. We’ll see the glass box for the prison it is, and instead of arguing over the content of the wallpaper – which is what social media is all about – we will actually have to climb out of the stupid box, touch hands with the people around us, and learn how to live some kind of life without mediation. Again.

COVID-19 compelled us to socially distance from other people to stay healthy. In due time we will all understand the need to socially distance ourselves from the internet for the same reason.

“That’s my new bumper sticker,” I thought.

SOCIALLY DISTANCE YOURSELF
FROM THE INTERNET

Still in a thoughtful mood, I arrived at my first transfer. I shoved the bike onto the platform with no trouble.

There was enough time to visit a bakery next to the train station and buy a chocolate covered croissant and a weird sauerkraut-and-cheese sandwich.

I decided to wait in style, and put my folding chair together.

A couple of curious Germans commented on the bike. In general I was getting more actual attention from Germans than I got from people in the Netherlands. There’s an interesting tug-of-war, on either side of the border, between the politeness of minding one’s business, and the friendliness of starting a conversation.

Other things that are immediately different: People here wear t-shirts and hoodies; even the old grandmother types.  The young people don’t just dress like miniature adults.  And lots more smokers, of all ages. Germany has kind of a problem with smoking.

Seems to me, the trains that don’t stop at the station blow through a little too fast…

I had to ride two trains to get to Hamburg, and I’d bought the tickets separately, in order to make a really big gap between the first and second train. If I’d purchased it as one trip the software would have given me something like five minutes to move my bike through the station. No thanks. So instead I had about 90 minutes to wait. I’d rather wait than be late!

After a while I got bored of sitting and packed the chair up, and began to wander the platform. There were only two other people waiting: A flinty-eyed old man coming from an airport, and a mysterious woman with a butch haircut and some really hot plaid pants.

If I felt confident enough to wear pants like that, I’d wear them all the time. Maybe even on bike trips.

We all boarded the same train, bound for Hamburg. The pretty German countryside flew by.

I settled into my assigned seat. The couple across from me got up to visit the dining car. A woman walked over and asked about the empty seats, and I told her I didn’t know when the occupants would return, or whether the seats were reserved. She said she was looking for a spot where her grandmother could sit down, and nodded over to an old woman with a walking stick. I stood up and gave her my seat, and wandered back through the sliding doors to the bicycle storage car.

Back there I hung out next to a German couple who were hunkered down in a stairwell. I guessed neither of them had reserved seats. The woman was dressed in army fatigues and heavy boots, and had a duffel bag resting nearby. I overheard some of their conversation: She just finished a grueling month of training and wanted to fall right into the bed when she got home, and sleep for days. The two of them looked pretty intimate so I assumed there would be at least a little boning first.

As I was standing there, an older man wearing a suit walked through the sliding doors. He was moving very shakily, gripping the rails along the wall. I figured he was suffering from some advanced disease affecting his nervous system. Why hadn’t someone given him a seat? He stood near me for a while, then decided that standing was too hard, and lowered himself very slowly to the floor, nearly falling over. The undignified position clashed with the tailored cut of his grey suit and trimmed white beard.

A few minutes later, the woman with the grandmother came into the car and leaned against a bike rack. She tried to chat with the man in the suit, starting with, “English? German?” but he shook his head, and spoke in Italian. She didn’t know Italian but they managed to trade a few sentences in his really basic English. The man was from Italy, trying to get to Denmark where he had family waiting for him. That was all she could learn.

I liked her. She was trying to liven up the trip with some connection. She turned to another man who was tinkering with his bicycle nearby: “English? German?” He replied in English, but she keyed into his accent and replied in Spanish. He grinned. They had a nice chat about his job and life in Chile, where he was from. He got his bike down from the hook and put his bags on it, getting ready to leave.

The man on the floor checked his watch and suddenly started flailing his arms at the rail, trying to pull himself upright. It was going to be very hard. The woman saw him and looked concerned but the man with the bike was in the way. I’d had practice getting heavy men to their feet from taking care of my Dad. I walked over and stood very close to him – practically over him – and opened a hand and held it down. The man immediately grabbed it, and I pulled him up enough to hook my other hand behind his arm at the shoulder and haul him onto his feet. Then I moved his hand to the railing.

“Thank,” he said, and worked his way around to the exit doors as the train pulled to a halt.

The woman in the army uniform grabbed her duffel bag and disembarked with her boyfriend. At the same time, two much older ladies wearing cycling pants entered from the adjacent car and began prepping their bikes. The bikes were motorized and quite heavy, so I helped them get lined up by the door. The next stop arrived quickly. “Danke, danke!” they said as I helped lift their bikes to the platform.

I realized I was getting a nice little example of life without electronic mediation. All these little interactions made me feel way better than a couple hours of staring at memes on a phone.

(Note for the future: The fictionalized hamster adaptation of this day will be titled “Hambone’s Courteous Journey”, and will feature a ruggedized hamster ball on a bike path with Hambone trotting briskly inside.)

The Hamburg train station was like I remembered: Very big, and efficiently but weirdly organized.

The first thing I did was buy another sandwich. I had some currency left from my trip three years ago — a bunch of 1 and 2-euro coins. While I was counting those out, a young man in shabby clothing wandered over to me with a dazed half-smile on his face and asked me for money in German. I was in the middle of making a transaction so I ignored him, but he got closer and closer until he was breathing in my face, holding his open hand up under his chin. I resisted the urge to shove him to the ground and finished paying.

Then I pressed a 1-euro coin into his hand and told him, “that’s a little too close, man.” He about-faced and disappeared. At least he knew not to ask for more.

Another stark difference between Germany and the Netherlands. Germany has a churning, roiling economy – one of the strongest in the world – much more willing to take in immigrants but also just as willing to exploit them. About a quarter of the current population of Germany either immigrated themselves, or are children of two immigrants. The Netherlands is more socially coherent and manicured, but their walls keep out more than just water: They also keep out the riff-raff.

It was pretty late in the day, and I was feeling a bit tired from the constant motion. I headed directly for the AirBnB room.

When I got there I found several sets of stairs. Blarg!

The AirBnB turned out to be a sort of dorm arrangement. A long, dank looking hallway of rooms, with one common bathroom and food prep area. You could call it “Bed And Make Your Own Breakfast”.

I ate snacks from my saddlebags and did some chatting with folks at home, then crashed onto the bed. Tomorrow would be another very long travel day.