towards Old Man Willow

Brian Eno, interviewed by Ezra Klein, recalled a moment some years ago when he was talking with the engineers at Yamaha about one of their synthesizers. Like most synthesizers, this one came with a series of preset tones but was also programmable, and Eno told the engineers that they should make the synthesizer easier to program. They replied that nobody ever programs the synthesizer, they just use the presets. There would be no value for Yamaha in investing the thought and effort into making programming easier, given the vanishingly small number of people who would benefit from the change.

In a sense, these people are not not using the synthesizer; the synthesizer is using them. You know the old line that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg? Well, a human being’s fingers are a synthesizer’s way of getting its preset sounds played. A human thumb is the TikTok interface’s way of getting itself scrolled. The human being is a means to the device’s end. And that’s ultimately what the device paradigm, as Albert Borgmann called it, leads to. When Eno told that story about his encounters with Yamaha Ezra Klein rightly commented that people who think they are using social media end up conforming themselves more and more closely to the affordances of whatever social-media platform they’re on.

I’m reminded of that passage in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are trying to get through the Old Forest, and the one way that they don’t want to go is down into the valley of the Withywindle. But they keep being forced down there. The lay of the land, the affordances of the land push them towards the place they’re trying to avoid. And eventually they discover that resisting those affordances is just too exhausting. And that’s what it’s like when we use social media, and when we use chatbots: it’s characteristic of all of our currently dominant technologies to force us to become devices. The entire system is oriented towards the transformation of what had formerly been human beings into devices. Jaron Lanier says You Are Not a Gadget but, increasingly, you really are. Eventually you’re drawn head-first into the roots of Old Man Willow and in danger of being crushed to death.

This explains why, in the face of varied but always vociferous complaints, the big tech companies keep shoving their AI programs in our faces, keep building out data centers in the face of protests, keep stealing people’s electricity and water, etc. etc. People say, You can’t force this on us against our will, and the techlords reply, Of course we can, we always have. Eventually down into the valley of the Withywindle we’ll go — unless we don’t enter the Old Forest in the first place.

And for now, anyway, we have that choice. The other day I happened to read this piece by Charlie Warzel on the deluge of AI slop that he encounters every day. “This Is Just the Internet Now,” the title says. But it isn’t. I’m on the internet every day, and I haven’t seen any of the crap he describes. Almost all of it comes from the major social-media platforms and I’m not on any of them — and you don’t have to be either. The hobbits had good reason to take the great risk of entering the Old Forest; I don’t.

UPDATE: A friend wrote to disagree with this post, but I think he misunderstood both Eno and me. So I’m pasting in some of my reply here in case I’ve confused others also.

Eno didn’t [criticize people who use] presets. He just said that he thinks it would be better if people had a legitimate option to program if they want to. They shouldn’t have to be technical wizards in order to program. Yamaha could have made it easier, so that someone might think, Hmmm, what could I do with this?

Similarly, with social media, Instagram for example, there might be very legitimate reasons for people to choose an algorithmic timeline rather than a chronological one — but they don’t have the choice. Meta doesn’t make it difficult to view posts chronologically, they make it impossible. With Substack, if I don’t want to see Notes — and I damn sure DON’T want to see Notes — I have no way to opt out. (I just have to avoid the Substack homepage, which I do. That’s something, I guess.) An algorithmic timeline by default is fine, a Notes view by default is fine, but when the defaults become the only option then that technology is undergoing enshittification.

And when you make your synthesizer so that choosing anything but the presets is impossible, or impossible for you if you’re not a wizard, then that’s the same kind of enshittification. [I should add here — I didn’t put this in my email — that I don’t think it’s nearly as bad for an individual instrument to be enshittified in this way, because no single model of any instrument has the kind of dominance that the big social media platforms have in their domain. You can usually, if not always, buy other instruments with different features. The enshittification of the really big social-media platforms is more consequential — though even then we are other options, e.g. for posting photographs, that aren’t enshittified in the way Instagram is.]

Eno’s point is not a criticism of the users of technologies, it’s a criticism of the makers of technologies.