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Social media versus the book.
I am so lost. Yesterday, overwhelmed and gatvol, I took Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space to Shelley’s coffee shop on Gonubie Point.
It was a glorious afternoon. Long, flowing grey cloud streaming silver light, the ocean languid, textured blue and green, soughing west wind.
Occasional biker blipping and braaping, one or two black dots of surfers bouncing up and down on the right into the river mouth.
Slow, so very seaside Saturday slow.
When you get old, kids, you call your mates on a Saturday night — and they answer!
You say: “You not out jorling to the B52s, or The Clash?” They laugh, but not for long because the dagga olies are about to kick in. Not for the partaay, but for stress-free sleep to calm the dodgy prostate.
But you are only old when you are irrelevant, sometimes by choice such as my divine journey into Covid-19-assisted hobohood in Pondok Paleis on the Karoo farm.
Today, I am back at work, something the editor took great Schadenfreude over. Deloris “under pressure”, she chirped to the interns.
Journalism does not phase me. Laundry is my great hoodoo — four bags of it. So, on a glum day I did it all, my backyard a garden of colourful onderbroek.
Where did it all come from? I used to want only two sets of technical pants and shirts, one for today, rinse, and one for tomorrow.
But through generosity and determination to make me presen⁷table, I now have a wardrobe.
I love it, but today it is tjchooning me grief. I have had the most divine swim down Gonubie River with MC and Barbs, finally just MC and I when I decided “I am over it!”, to quote her.
We got out just before the cliffs at the mouth and strolled down the sandy expanse. Absolutely bohemian, or industrial-chic and delightful.
On Friday, I had done the hard yards, cutting through a creamy sea at full tilt towards Kennaway.
I thought I would finally fall off the back of our trio led by B who turns 70 soon, but at the turn, she suddenly tapped back and we made it back to the harbour wall at manageable pace.
Looking at this collection of culturally appropriate coverings draped across my backyard, I was reminded of a story I cleared late on Friday night about how frustrated rural men take young drug-addicted petty thieves flushed from the cities by the lockdown and give them a sound beating, which they call doing “the washing”.
I was not feeling that physical pain, but was suddenly in a state of anguish. Then came the epiphany. I declared: **** all of this, I am going to eat cheesecake!
Would it be caramel or chocolate drizzle? I was asked by one of the lovely waitrons.
I was perched at their outside picnic table, flat white coffee by my side, this towering slice of illegal contraband before me when I saw the car guard woman on the other side of the road.
Why doesn’t someone create an app for car guards so they can study while they themselves are parked, sitting or standing for hours.
Nobody “does nothing”. Everybody’s mind turns and talks — apparently only 10% of us have no inner voice.
And I felt sh*tty, a big old white guy scarfing down an expensive piece of confectionery so I called her over and gave her a slice on the saucer of my coffee cup. Was it for her or me? Emotionally I cannot say.
But now comes a few dilemmas. Do I eat and read? Definitely not, says Ms Nutribullet, my online nutritionist from Discovery.
If you gonna eat bad stuff, you gonna eat it slowly, mindfully. OK, she does not say “gonna”, she was far more cultured and polite, and kind.
And if you eat rubbish you craving weakling, make sure you get back to the good path with a next meal of raw, green, unprocessed food.
The other lesson from AI Jenna was do not walk and chew gum, well, actually do not do anything to distract you from the wonderful act of feeding your soul with nutritional goodness.
So don’t eat and watch Netflix or YouTube, or if you are rich, cable TV. Add to that, do not read a book I guess.
The problem is I don’t eat much cheesecake and truth be told, I read even fewer books.
It’s either pounding the high seas with my compadres knowing that what happens out at sea, might stay out at sea, or doom scrolling on my bed.
There is so much criticism about social media. But, like anything, the truth is far more complex.
We are getting a tremendous amount of information from Insta, YouTube, Grok, and a lot of emotional and social contact through WhatsApp (Facebook is for old people I am told). Add Snapchat and Fish Wrap if you are a lightweight (young person).
Yes, go on Google Fish Wrap, it doesn’t exist. Yet.
I have learnt so much about the rise of dictatorship in the US, I can make pickled onions, and find out about the collapse of the ice sheets in Antarctica.
I learn too that social media is a part of identity. It is real. Children are vulnerable to bullying. Adults too!
We are moving into an age where social media, like cigarettes, will come with a health warning.
I find it somewhat hilarious, in a grim sort of way, that Elon Musk was accused of making his poor black neighbours in Memphis sick through operating his supercomputer, Colossus.
The Guardian reported in April that people next door were suffering from toxic, carcinogenic methane pollution from 35 portable gas turbines which were brought in to power the megalodon of online media because there had not been enough power in the grid.
At first, Elon’s people, speaking through mayor Paul Young, said they only had 15 for peak periods, but the Southern Environmental Law Centre produced drone thermal footage that showed all 35 turbines were huffing and puffing at full — methane — steam ahead!
But who doesn’t love AI? And Elon will probably sort those missing air permits out chop-chop. Or not, but we won’t stop using this incredible advance in technology.
How do you know it’s really me writing this? I could have told Grok, write me a nutty, drifty, slang-riddled, hyperlocal pile of puffery riddled with hyperbole and hubris for one reader in a local newspaper in Buffalo City Eastern Cape? Probably his-her-their long-suffering editor!
The problem is that society and the world (never the same thing) need our full, human attention.
And no matter how smart the machines become, there is always that unfathomable human dimension Hal 9000 won’t be able to capture, capture, capture, cap ...
For youths, Hal was a computer who took control of a Jupiter-bound spacecraft in the Stanley Kubrick-directed 2001: A Space Oddessy which Kubrick co-wrote with Arthur C Clarke.
That was back in 1968. Sci-fi always somewhere in the picture. You think it far-fetched, then it happens.
Nou-ja, we are in the throes of this AI thing, and remember, among all its amazing uses — my dermatologist used AI to find all the dangerous cells to lop off and that was in Vincent, East London — the downside is very scary.
In the wrong hands AI is an iron fist, directing drones to shoot children in Gaza. And what of the people who own and run the system, the “tech bros” who lined up in a row behind Donald Trump, who they bankrolled, when he took his second term of presidency.
Those okies are not all A-OK. Kooky ideas are adrift, there is a worry that their social skills are equivalent to a child of feudal times, the product of too many video games.
They have not been elected, nor do they seek election. Why bother when you have so many billions you can buy whatever you want.
There is a disturbing loss of human rights across the globe, rights which we know all too well in SA are the product of long, serious struggles.
When narrow ideology takes over the human discourse, when people lose sight of what is real and what is constructed, we are in dangerous territory.
My kids used to tell each other to put their cellphones in a basket when they hung out so they could be with each other.
I am finding it hard to sit with Shriver’s hilarious book, so rich with meaning and fine use of language, the best of what I like to call a New York style of intelligence — wry, smart, thoughtful — because there is always that YouTube, WhatsApp and other online cocaine dinging in my ear.
(I actually leave the sound on full just to irritate my wokie younger generation — wicked bastard!).
If we are going to survive an onslaught of the tech bros we are going to have to take a step back and return to ink on paper.
This is a reclamation of agency, your power, your sense of identity, your independence, your healthier approach to community and other people.
AI will never write like Brian Patten did in his poem Party Piece about hooking up when all the guests had gone, leaving a cold place: “Let’s unclip our minds, and let tumble free, the mad, mangled crocodile of love ... And later, he caught a bus and she a train, And all there was between them then was rain.”
And cheesecake!
* From Love Poems (1984), which was left in the newsroom and is inscribed on a cherry-red front page: “Alan, Merry Christmas 1984. May 1985 be the best yet, your Lover.” Come get your book Alan! Or your mysterious lover!
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