Have you ever thought about David Brooks, gentle David Brooks, his angelic face pursed in concentration, balding pate shining in the early-morning light filtering through the shades of a hotel room in Chicago, freshly laundered bedsheets falling around him, early 1980s adult contemporary playlist chock full of Air Supply and John Waite softly undulating from the tinny speaker of his iPhone as he tries to fuck a pair of wireless earbuds?
No, of course you have never thought about this. No one has thought of this. Nobody in the history of time has ever imagined this scenario. Humans have evolved from single-celled organisms floating in the primordial broth, they have discovered fire and invented the wheel, empires have risen and fallen, Tinkers to Evers to Chance has become the most famous double play combination to ever stalk a baseball diamond, and still no one, no one, has ever contemplated the image of David Brooks sexing up a tiny technological marvel of plastic and miniature circuit boards.
Thankfully, David Brooks himself has now rectified that oversight for all of us, for which we are eternally nauseous grateful.
But first, we must wade through Brooks’s “old man yells at cloud” routine about modern technology being Satan himself, or something, we don’t know, our higher brain functions shut down before we’d finished reading the first graf of his latest monstrosity of a column:
It is never easy to re-examine one’s fundamental convictions, but now I am forced to question my previous disbelief in the existence of Satan. I am compelled to confront this ugly possibility by the fact that from time to time my electronic devices seem to fall under demonic possession.
Eye-watering, no? Admit it, you were all just instantly reduced to a bundle of autonomic nervous system processes, heart rate rising, breathing in and out and in and out.
Let me describe the events of last Friday, when technology was especially mean to me. I woke up in Chicago to find that my phone, which normally charges through the port on the bottom, was no longer accepting charges from that entry point. I didn’t think much of it, assuming I could clean out some dust or something.
Sure, just blow into that sucker like it’s a videogame cartridge. Assuming you have ever owned anything so base and common as an Atari 2600, which, you being David Brooks, we would certainly not assume because an Atari would just be a distraction from reading Proust or contemplating immorality.
Then I tried to pair it with my earbuds, which it usually automatically pairs with. Nothing doing. […]
I did what any master technologist would do. I rubbed the earbuds against my phone in a seductive circular manner that I thought might foster a rapprochement. I put them in my ears and grazed the phone against my cheeks with a pressure that was amorous and gentle, but also firm. Still, the phone and earbuds refused to sync.
Dead, we are dead, we are but dust, cremate our mortal remains and fire our ashes out into space so that we may journey as far away from the opinion page of The New York Times as we can get.
Does the paper of record no longer employ editors or some sort of quality control process or even just one functional human being who has been outside even once since 1993, someone who could have sent this back to Brooks with ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT US TO PUBLISH THIS AS-IS scrawled across it in the most cautionary shade of red they could find?
Also, remember that little tangent about how there might be dust or something in the phone’s charging port? Hold on to your hats, we’re about to come full circle on that one.
At the airport it occurred to me that I might clean the charging port by using a suction technique. So if you were at Midway International Airport last Friday and a small child asked you, “Why is that man sucking on his phone?” that man was me.
And then this anonymous adult took one look and dragged the small child to seats at the far end of the waiting area as fast as her legs could move.
We bought a new printer, but it’s snooty. Asking it to print something is like applying to Harvard. It was willing to print out an essay from the journal Daedalus and an academic paper on aging, but it was unwilling to print four other documents from mere newspapers and websites.
Why read an academic paper on aging when Brooks could just read his own damn column?
I want my technology to have many capacities, but free will is not among them.
Does David Brooks think his electronic devices achieved sentience and decided they would prefer to not work for him anymore? Dear Lord, he’s writing knockoff Stephen King stories now.
For a decade, if I deleted an email on my phone it was also deleted on my laptop, but one day that stopped working, too. Every time I log onto my bank’s website, using the same computer each time, I get an email telling me a new device has been detected.
Like humans, artificial machines also grow old and stop functioning like they used to. This is only a surprise to the rare soul that understands how linear time works.
How am I supposed to remember what my favorite pizza topping was 15 years ago when I opened that account? People grow and change.
Well, some people do, anyway. Then they divorce their wives and marry their much younger research assistants. Then they become the sorts of people who complain about technology and can’t remember if they liked pepperoni on their pizza in 2009 as much as they do now. Then for some reason they write about it in the nation’s most widely read newspaper where other people can actually read it.
In conclusion, horny David Brooks. You’re welcome.
[NY Times]
Your much-appreciated donations will be put to use going all “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” on our brains after reading that column.