The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every blue moon or so I stop loitering in our gardens and tune in briefly to the world at large outside our gates. Actually I don’t so much go searching for it, it intrudes on me. Folks who say the world is shrinking, well, from my foxhole, it seems more like it’s expanding, same as some of the invasive weeds that come creeping in the night, magically appearing next morning.

Try as I might, hoeing isn’t all that effective. Technology, once unleashed, is pretty much an onslaught. Everyone I know walks around with it strapped to their belt, parked in their purse, stuffed in a pocket, carried in their car, enveloping them in a cyberbubble they now feel uncomfortable without. No cellphone, no laptop, no I-pad — they feel naked and vulnerable. Doesn’t matter I don’t attach the umbilical myself, the digital electromagnetic pulses lap at my brainpan anyway. The engineers, aliens to me, have won the battle for our consciousness. More and more we are ruled by technocrats, those busy little beavers intent on morphing their rules and parameters and metrics onto our flesh and bones. Or simply working 24/7 to create Artificial Intelligence… They imagine a future of exponentially increasing efficiencies. They argue this will be good for us humanoids, a gift from the scientists and technicians. Even quite a few of my fellow artists have begun to believe this.

Lately I’ve been hearing the drumbeat to scale back Humanities in universities, substituting more degrees that lead to high paying jobs, degrees in programming, coding, engineering, all those ‘practical’ careers. But I think we need more impractical degrees. We need musicians, sculptors, painters, writers, dreamers. We need to tether ourselves through them to what makes us human, not cyborg.

A sea change is coming, a digital tsunami, a revolution that will implant its seed in all of us. Technology is easy now — being human, soon that’s going to be very hard. Soon most of us won’t know the damn difference. The difference may just be Art. Humanities, well named. And I may be forced, reluctantly, despite a lifetime of self-deference, to admit we artists are somehow special after all.