I thought my children would lap me technologically, but they've been apped into a stupor. A torpor where thing either just work or they just don't, with no understanding of how they work, or what to do when they're broken. I realize that when I was young everything started broken. That's why I learned how they were working. Nobody sat down and explained filesystems and RAM to me. I was like ‘where is this game?’ and ‘why is it slow?’ and the information found itself, through my deep and shallow motivation. Now kids get all that on a plate and never have to go in the kitchen. So how do they know what's cooking?

Today, the older generation still asks me for tech support and I'm like, where are your children? I thought my little cousins would be taking over this role, but here I am pushing 40 and still going through settings for both of them. The grandparents and grandchildren are at about the same level of technical sophistication, the former because they matured before the technology, the latter because the technology matured before them. I'm stuck in the middle doing tech support for both of them. I wonder if the knowledge of how computers actually worked will one day be reduced to the generation that grew up with them. As the cyborg said, someday all of this knowledge will be lost, like tears in the rain.

I don't mean to dunk on my children, degeneration is a process that started generations ago, probably going back to the start of the Kali Yuga around -3100. I can fix a computer, sure, but my father-in-law can fix a house, and my grandparents generation could run farms, and go far enough back and they understood nature on a much deeper level than we can imagine. What we call progress has really made babies of us all.

We really have to question what's progressing here, is it us, or the technology itself? We dump more processing on our collective knowledge embodied in technology and lose the individual ability to do stuff ourselves. Knowledge that used to be common becomes c'mon, isn't there an app for this? Things a child used to know become incomprehensible to manchildren. Technology is portrayed as this march of progress, and within a certain time frame it is, but what they don't mention is that the technology is getting smarter, not us. If you look around, we've actually been getting dumber for not just centuries, but millennia.

As Socrates said about the degeneracy of writing technology (via Phaedrus), “The loyalty you feel to writing, as its originator, has just led you to tell me the opposite of its true effect. It will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds.” I think of this as I can't remember what happened to me last year without consulting a photo album. Dudes back then could remember whole speeches verbatim because their attention span didn't depend on constant electrical stimulation. But any modern dude can't tell you shit without consulting something and killing the conversation. Sock Rats called out insufferable tech bros and hos in the BCs when he said, “this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.”

I reference the Kali Yuga not because I believe in it but because I see it. I remember reading (in some unlinkable recess of my Internet) about an indigenous civilization commenting on technological civilization. They noted that these people had many capabilities, but understood none of how it was happening. A village child understood every basic operation around them—from fishing to making clothes to existing in the jungle—but a city boy can merely perform complex operations without much understanding of what was actually happening. I challenge you to get a coherent explanation of how electricity works or what WiFi is from many adults. We just get angry if it doesn't work and expect someone else to do something about it. If you look closer the answers are A) magic rocks and B) magic spells, if you really get down to it. Most people today just take this on faith, and laugh at the ancient beliefs. But progress itself is a belief, and one which leads only to grief.

I remember talking to a friend about how I don't believe in progress anymore and they were flabbergasted. They said, but today we have apps that let you point to any plant and identify it. I responded, is this really the hill you want to die on? Any village child or even my gamay uncles knows the forest better than me, a random idiot holding a phone up to every twig and leaf. Who is knowing in this situation? The tech, or me? Or is no one knowing anything and everyone just going through the motions, like cogs in one big inanimate machine, bulldozing the jungle and calling it mastery? If you're using an app, the app is using you, forming some distributed intelligence linked from phone to cell tower to server, with your brain being the dumbest part. Our wetware is just the regret where a soul used to be. We have mistaken connectivity for connection, photographs for seeing, and maps for the territory. So we're just part of one big bulldozer destroying the forest, and calling it progress, regrettably.

I'm not saying that some people don't have these skills, I'm saying that most people don't, by design, by deleterious destiny. What used to be unspecial knowledge has become specialized, what used to be common has become commodified, what used to be known becomes technology. You can certainly still meet people that know how can build a house, fix an engine, and feed an army, but this used to be much more common knowledge. As it became commodified, however, it became specialized, so more people could take it easy. And thus what one generation makes the next-generation takes for granted, and so on, until degeneration becomes complete, the whole thing collapses and no one knows how to rebuild the thing because the Internet is down and there's no YouTube. Just you and me and we're fucking tubelights, pre-historically speaking. I think of this as I watch my kids using technology and all they really know is turn it off and turn it on again. So it shall be.