What We Lost
I have no subtitle and I must post
My friend Leslie is an excellent writer who’s published multiple books, most notably The Unmothers, named a New York Times Best Horror Fiction Book of 2024. She’s new on Substack and worth a follow.
Today, she posted “We Are Not Angry Enough About AI” and agreed to give me just a little bit of rope to politely disagree.
Leslie writes:
And thus, we are given crap. The popular phrase for this is “enshittification” where all products become as shitty as possible in order to save a few cents. Our clothes are quick stitched plastic. Our movies are written by committee (or AI). We are charged monthly for buggy services and have to beg computerized customer service to fix the multiple issues. Insurance doesn’t pay for healthcare but you will pay for insurance. It goes on and on.
I have a different experience of the items on this list. My clothes are mostly cotton or other natural fibers, except where I’ve chosen to buy clothes that include synthetics for convenience. The movies I watch are written by people. So are the books I read. I subscribe to a few services, but they’re ones I choose to pay for that I like and value. My health insurance is pretty good. I definitely wish it were cheaper!
I have a lot of choice in these areas. Some of that choice is due to having money. But I don’t spend a ton of money on my cotton t-shirts; it doesn’t cost me any more to buy a book written by a human than to buy some shlocky AI-generated thing. I specifically chose to buy a previous generation car so it would have physical climate control knobs. I can’t wait for that trend to die!
I had an idea that my question for Leslie was “What makes it feel like the things in the list are forced on you, rather than being choices you can make?” And I still have that question, and I mean it sincerely.
But I have another question, one that feels more pressing, and it’s for me as much as for Leslie. If we accept the idea that middle-class Americans are wealthier than 99% of people who have ever lived on the planet, and that our lives have more leisure and luxury than 99% of people who have ever lived on the planet — I realize this may be a contentious belief, but for the sake of argument, if we accept it for a moment — if that’s true, then why does life feel so bad for so many?
Because it does feel really bad. I don’t dispute that. There is plenty of time when I’m unhappy about things in my life. I mostly like the work I do, but there are big parts of it I want to improve. And when I look around, especially on social media, I seem to be quite a bit happier than many people around me. When I talk to people about the world, they feel terrible about it. They sometimes feel good about their own lives, but they feel terrible about the world.
I agree with Leslie that AI is just the latest technological innovation in decades of innovation that haven’t made us happier, haven’t made our lives feel more meaningful, and haven’t made us feel more alive or more connected to one another. I don’t know whether technological innovation can do that. But something needs to make us feel more alive and more connected to each other. It’s definitely not going to be tech companies!
What will it be? What did we lose, and how did we lose it?