Mark Chalmers

Eventually there comes a moment when you come to face-to-face with yourself, realising that your brain has been re-wired by using computers for too long.

If we go online, we become part of the attention economy where global megacorps vie for the means to distract us. It now seems radical to do things in the real world, with flesh and blood people, rather than watching simulations on the screen. Machine learning will likely make things much worse.

A few years ago, a band called Everything Everything recorded a wonderful song, “Regret”. Its structure is clever, both the time signature and melody are complex, with several key changes thrown in for good measure, but the lyrics are strikingly simple:

Maybe I'm a human
The "trying to click 'undo' man"
Or maybe an automaton
Oh how'd it all go so wrong?

That’s exactly what happens, after decades of using computers. Let’s say you take a break from the screen to sit sketching with a propelling pencil, then realise that a minute’s worth of lines are squint – so you intuitively reach for the ⌘-Z keystroke to wipe them out. Your fingers have the Undo command encoded into muscle memory.

It takes half a second to feel stupid, then realise you’ve been institutionalised by technology. You put that right by reaching across the paper for the Rotring eraser then take out your frustration by rubbing aggressively against the paper, until you rub right through it and create a hole. You’re proud of your self-knowledge, and perhaps even think you've accomplished some degree of self-mastery: you reckon you know how your own brain works – but here’s proof that you don’t.

Thanks to what I’m currently working on, I’ve been freed from AutoCAD for the past year, but I’m using CaptureOne and Photoshop much more intensively. Although computer geeks will scream in disagreement, I realise that there’s no real difference between vector and raster graphics programmes: they both use the brain–eye–hand–mouse interface, and over time you come to rely on keystrokes. The more you make the keystrokes, the more they become embedded in the subconscious until you can’t imagine a life without laptops.

That world was just as Robert Hughes wrote in 1995 regarding an early invention. “I have no idea what it is like to spend a childhood in front of a TV set, to have my dreams and fantasies administrated, at an early age, by the Box. What did we do? We had to manage with those portable, low-energy, high-density information-storage-and-retrieval systems known as books.”

Sometimes I wish that the laptop would fold in upon itself and implode, like the haunted house at the end of “Poltergeist”… and don't get me started on iPhones.  Meantime I’d better finish this blog post, save it to drafts, then click “Publish” before I accidentally ⌘-Q.