A LONGTIME FRIEND IS IN THE EARLY STAGES OF DEMENTIA. He’s still aware, knows what he’s facing, his long road ahead and its cruel, silent end.
I’ve seen it before. A brilliant mind turned discordant, like guitar strings slightly out of tune. I imagine you can still hear the music, at least for a while, but then it fades. You used to sing along and now you can’t recall the words; you continue to hum until you can no longer keep the beat.
You forget. And then you forget all the things you forgot.
HERE WE ARE, AT THE APEX OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, DROWNING.
In bad news and TikTok views. In models and robots, in vibe-coded content, in AI slop and other high-tech dreck. Sometimes I think that the Web didn’t die, as former Wired editor Chris Anderson once mused, so much as it euthanized itself to get away from it all. I’m trying not to be jealous.
Maybe AI is more intelligent than we thought. It tells us it will make our lives easier while making life busier than ever. The conveyor belt was great for factory workers, unless you cranked it up to superhuman speed like in that famous “I Love Lucy” scene. That’s today’s technicolor world in black and white, moving faster than we can stuff the chocolates into our mouths.
It’s not going to get easier. If the world stopped during Covid, our blue pill of a planet is positively manic now. Set aside the slings and arrows of our outrageous misfortunes and you’re still left with…everything. Post-quantum cryptography, superintelligence, space lasers, autonomous vehicles in the streets and Bluetooth in our brains. I thought our civilization was over with Fruit Love Island but apparently the What-The-Actual-F train has barely left the station.
“Gradually, then suddenly,” Hemingway said. Now suddenly is here. And suddenly is accelerating.
We have arrived at our Crowded Hour, an interval far less glorious than in “The Call” of Mordaunt’s meter but no less meaningful for how we must move forward.
Thomas Mordaunt wrote The Call around 1760, during the Seven Years War. It was meant as a rallying cry for soldiers to embrace their duty and show their courage on a battlefield promising eternal glory:
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Throughout the sensual world proclaim
One crowded hour of glorious life
His point, at least in my centuries-long rear view, was that the risk of death in battle was worth the reward to your soul. Time, however brief, can be brilliant.
I don’t disagree. It’s not the time you spend but how you spend the time, as the saying goes. A Crowded Hour for a brave soldier might be worth the cost.
But today’s Crowded Hour today is different. Our battlefield is the future itself. Our ally, technology, is also our enemy.
Let’s go back to Covid (not literally, I’m not sure I could handle Gal Godot and friends singing Imagine one more time.) The initial period from around early 2020 to summer of 2021 was arguably the least “crowded” ever. Nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in.
So we filled it with Zooms and YouTube. Online was our lifeline. If the pandemic was quicksand, then social media was the rope thrown down to save us, or so we were sold. It was already there of course, waiting for the opportunity, for the perfect moment.
We grabbed on and took hold. Then we refused to let go. GenAI, intelligent agents, and the parallel and perhaps no-so-coincidental breakdown of political and societal norms swallowed us whole.
WE FORGET. AND THEN WE FORGET ALL THE THINGS WE FORGOT.
This, I believe, is what our Crowded Hour is doing to all of us. It’s what it will continue to do if we let it.
In 1791, John Scott of Amwell wrote The Drum as a rebuttal of sorts to The Call, its romantic view of battle and how one achieves glory:
I HATE that drum’s discordant sound
Parading round, and round, and round
AI, so far, has helped more than harmed. Humans have a unique gift for extracting order from chaos, from resisting entropy despite every cosmic force conspiring for millennia to do otherwise.
But while we have every reason to be optimistic in this Crowded Hour, we have just as many reasons to be cautious. We can’t afford to slip further into the quicksand, handing over every task and decision to a technology that we don’t understand but promises to understand us.
We still have a choice. We can make this Crowded Hour a clarion call for a better future.
Or we can make it our cruel, silent end.
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