Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Learning to fly

Some months ago, I was at a seminar with several of the brightest and shiniest minds of our age. We were gathered to listen to an international scientist tell us about how advances in a host of theoretical branches of the sciences had progressed, to the extent that it was now possible to produce artificial birds whose behaviour was indistinguishable from that of the real thing.

The birds, the scientist said, would have a range of applications, particularly for surveillance purposes. “And bombs,” I offered. “Yes,” he said excitedly. There would be great interest from organisations looking to avail themselves of faux birds that could covertly spy, fly, or carry weapons.

A cheering thought. At one time, we looked forward to the future. I mean, of course, “the future” as an expression of optimism, a seemingly unshakeable faith that things would only get better, that progress would forever arc unbendingly towards the good. There was something sentimental about that reverently held sense that the world ahead would only become ever more wonderful, thanks to all that stuff we now call Big Tech.

As a child, I remember keenly watching Beyond 2000, an oddly Australian TV series that declared with jovial certainty that all sorts of wonderful technological objects and conveniences were just beyond the horizon. The presenters travelled far and wide to showcase everything futuristic that was in development. Sometimes, there were strange wrong turns: hopefully you don’t have a Kodak Photo CD Player cluttering your living room. Nevertheless, it was comforting to know that there were teams of science-minded people earnestly thinking and working away in laboratories around the world to defeat the problems and constraints of the present.

As far as Beyond 2000 was concerned, the present and all its mundanity was just background for a glamorous future that was yet to arrive. Alas, the future that actually arrived is a sheepish substitute for what promised to be glorious. Who could have predicted that all that expertise would be diverted to turning us into data farms for the benefit of a set of extractive economies? The regimen of swiping, clicking, liking and subscribing, accepting cookies, and sharing what we’re looking at exerts a tedious authority over our everyday lives.

We live by the pace and the rhythm of the swipe, afraid to look away lest anything at all should happen while our attention is elsewhere. The great casualty of a culture that lives through its screens is that there is a critical interpretive infrastructure that’s not being developed. We live through the impressions and reviews of others, and this means that the books we read are the books everyone reads (Colleen Hoover, I’m looking at you), the films we watch are the ones that are suggested to us by bots, and the things we eat are the things apps and YouTubers tell us we need to try. (Are you really still eating that viral salad? Are you?) It would be easier to be upset if it weren’t so boring. And we are bored. It’s why there’s a whole industry devoted to holding our attention.

The worst part of things is that this attention industry doesn’t seem to know who we are at all. You’ll know this if you’ve ever received those spammy shopping suggestions: the algorithm doesn’t know (or seem to care) who you actually are. It all feels very shoddy and somewhat sinister, as though you can’t be trusted to want and desire things on your own. Now, anything you do online is abutted by the constant exhortation to look at (in order to buy) some dreadful four-cylinder SUV, or a pair of shoes that go with nothing you currently own.

In the past, we imagined the future as something expressive and wilful and deeply human-centred. It influenced design in lovely ways: look at Finnish designer Eero Aarnio’s space-age ball chair, a vision of futuristic leisure that has never been equalled for cleverness, to say nothing of visual drama, where furniture is concerned. Aarnio’s space helmet of a chair is iconic because it marries futurity to a quaint idea: that it might be nice to retreat from the world, with a book, say, or a copy of Wanted. It’s clearer than ever that we’ve taken the wrong offramp from the progress highway. Rather than journeying into space ourselves, we’ve been relegated to NPCs (ask your kids), watching a handful of gross mogul types taking it in turn to fire satellites, rockets, and even themselves into space as many times as it takes for it to stop being exciting.

Instead of clever solutions to the problems of moving about, we have ever more cars, and the hollow promise that they’ll drive themselves someday soon. Instead of new ways of eliminating the myriad housing crises, we have securitised housing estates into which we willingly decant ourselves on the promise of having an identical house to our neighbours’ and a community WhatsApp group in which to share our anxieties about strangers. Even though it feels rather late in the day to be thinking about the future, our world depends on it more than ever before. It starts with being attentive to the roles we’re pushed into on a daily basis. We don’t have to be automatons. Go outside. Get off the attention grid for a bit. Everything will still be here when you return.

From the November edition of Wanted 2024