A contrarian in the age of AI
I guess I’ve always been a bit of a crank—never much of a joiner, never one for groups, organizations or teams. Whenever someone has suggested to me that I should be a part of something, my instinct always says to hesitate. Even if I come across something intriguing, I have to accept it on my own terms, not through anyone’s urging.
My other problem is with the new and the shiny—as if the new and the shiny is always head and shoulders above the tried and true. Over the years people have asked me why I don’t try or use such-and-such a thing. Often the such-and-such has to do with technology. My response to using or not using a specific piece of technology is pretty simple. I want to make sure that whatever I’m using is not using me. And if you tell me I have to use something—forget about it.
Waves of new “necessities” have come along and I’ve shrugged. I didn’t get my first computer until 1999 and my first cell phone until 2009. My wife and I bought and returned our first DVD player when it seemed the picture quality wasn’t a massive improvement over a VCR. I dropped cable as fast as possible when we realized we were just mindlessly flipping through it. I’ve never been on social media. And I never purposely use artificial intelligence, although that is getting more difficult as ever more search engines are employing it. Of all my tech issues over the years, this one has my crank concerns on the highest of alerts.
At this point, I’ve seen enough to want to avoid the tolls on the information super-highway. I don’t know what they will cost me. I’m not sure if I have enough cash to pay my way. So I want to take it all as little as possible. The rutted county road and the slow saunter of life have always been fine by me. I like to ramble with my hands thrust in my front pockets taking a measure of things, seeing how my own self fits into something before conforming my life to it.
I’m weird. I know.
Why do I do all this? It’s much easier to just go along, right? Find a group and stick with, no? I wish I could give you a sure overarching answer. I’m not very good at technology. I do want to avoid adding complexity to my life. And part of it is applying to my life Groucho Marx’s old line of never wanting to belong to any club that would have me for a member. But here’s a plain truth. It’s likely most connected to my overwhelming desire to remain part of the only club that has ever mattered: the club of human individuality, in which each of us is in charge of our own souls.
Call that dramatic if you want. No problem. But that’s how I see it. And I’ve always felt this way.
Having somehow awoken in middle age—how exactly did I get here?—I’ve found myself more or less intact. I am who I was. I’m still the guy I had been before all the insistent have to’s of our modern world took hold in our collective psyche. So here I am, fly in amber, and nobody knows what the heck to do with me. The fact that I’ve maintained a less technologically heavy existence seems baffling to some well-meaning folks. I’m fine if they want to make different choices. I just wish they would let me alone with mine.
My fear of the crowd is an old one, formed by being an awkward kid and refined by a more mature understanding of mercy. The eager and often unthinking push toward technological conformity gets me the most. These days so many really good people are telling me I have to adapt my writing (and my life) to the tidal wave supposedly coming with artificial intelligence. I must accept it, they say. I will come around to it, they tell me, all grinning knowingly. (You can’t imagine how grateful I was when Pope Leo XIV spoke out in terms of caution with AI. I felt I had met a fellow contrarian and a very powerful ally.)
I’m not the sort of person you use strong modal verbs with. Nothing ever gets my back up more than someone telling someone else they have to do something. Occasionally I’ve questioned this worldview of mine, but never enough to keep me from going back to not caring too much about what people say. I’m not this oppositional because I have any anger toward the human race, but because of how fiercely I love it. I don’t want anything to come between us and our divinely made individuality.
Allowing people to choose the way they interact with technology is not the only concern I have with the modern world. Maybe the greater one is how so many of these technologies seem to be complicit in shoving us into labeled boxes and categorized groups, instead of just seeing us as messy and complex individuals. In word and deed, in action and thought and belief, we’re all supposed to join teams, ever being one thing or another and never allowed to be part of one great all—as if only some of us are permitted to add to the sum beauty of this world and the rest earn eternal condemnation and scorn. From my contrarian’s perch, I can’t for the life of me see how AI will improve this situation.
Search the internet for contrarians and too often you just find ones who stand opposed to just another group. Our digital world has scaffolded an era of binary thinking. One side good, the other bad. One group the arbiters of truth, the other heretics. The cool kids and everyone else. The only place I can go now for really original thinking seems to be authors who lived decades or centuries ago. Or I can just drop into the New Testament and see some true contrarians at work.
Now I know the misfits have ever been misfits, the outcasts and outliers never accepted, but something feels different about the way we live now. Modern conformity feels as stifling as the hot summer days of my Brooklyn youth. I’m in desperate need of relief.
What keeps people from allowing others to live their lives as they want? I’m not talking about intervening from a moral dimension or in trying to help someone who is struggling. If we are to be the most authentic versions of ourselves, then we can only do so outside the flood lights trained upon us through the conforming aspects of mass media and technology. Be truly yourself, be sincere and honest in what you really feel, be dubious about shouted “truths,” be open to nuance and complexity, and you are shunted to the dark end of the high school cafeteria with all of the other “uncool” kids. So I have zero interest in wanting to help AI speed up this awful trend.
Like Melville’s character Bartleby, I prefer not to. And I’m fine with that.
I just hope ever more people will pause during our forced march toward an AI-dominated world. Maybe wander down to that dark end of the cafeteria. A whole lot of contrarians hang out there, including a very interesting carpenter’s son who’s willing to listen to all comers.
Christopher Mari is the author of Ten Worlds Away, a short story collection, and The Beachhead, a novel that was an Amazon Book of the Month selection. For more about his work, visit christophermari.com.
