In the early 1960s, a Broadway play entitled “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” seemed to capture a feeling that many Americans were experiencing. The musical itself (written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse) was a short-lived success, receiving several Tony Award nominations. But its story wasn’t really what the title suggested. (It concerned a married circus performer who had a succession of affairs in an effort to find true happiness or a more meaningful existence or some variant of that theme.)
The play’s title, however, was quickly adopted by the generation that had only recently defeated fascism and that was now struggling to “keep up with the Joneses” in the midst of a Cold War that threatened to make everything meaningless in the time it takes an atom to explode. For those caught in that rat-race existence, the idea of stopping the world, even if just for a few hours, if not permanently, appealed greatly.
Looking back from the vantage of 2010, that world now seems far less frenetic than the one in which we currently reside. And if that era was a rat race where keeping up with the Joneses was the biggest challenge facing bread-winners and their spouses, this one must be more of a rat’s maze, in which any path seems destined to lead not to an end point, but just to another path.
My point is that the world, while perhaps not threatened with sudden complete destruction, is changing with increasing rapidity and thereby is becoming a place where certainty in anything is highly problematic.
Case in point: Blockbuster has filed for bankruptcy protection, a step towards its ultimate demise. Think about that fact for a moment (if you have the time). As recently as ten years ago, a Blockbuster franchise was a veritable goldmine for its owners and a threat to the movie theater industry. Movie theaters still survive, albeit they, too, have undergone drastic changes, but the marketing of the films shown in them has morphed several times over.
First there was the advent of on-demand viewing, by which cable television providers were able to make recently released films available for home viewing. Then came Netflix, which allowed consumers to rent and keep videos in DVD format (forget VCR tapes which have become the 8-track tapes of film). Then Netflix improved on its mail-order system by providing streaming options to allow viewers to instantly download and watch feature films on their computers or TVs.
Thus the demise of Blockbuster.
I-Pods were big for a while, but they too have numbered days, as I-Phones and now I-Pads one-up their utility (as do software applications like Pandora, which allows the listener to choose instantly whatever he or she wants to hear, either by title, artist or genre).
Of course, much of the rapidity of change in the lives we now live is due to the explosion of technology generally and to the continuing advances in computer technology specifically. Computers are to this stage of human development what the printing press was to the stage that preceded it. They shorten the time it takes to perform tasks, they increase the type of tasks that can be undertaken, and they reduce the number of tasks that need to be done at all.
Of course, computers are mere tools; they don’t control our lives. They don’t think, as any computer geek will tell you; they have to be programmed to accept instructions and then can only act precisely as those instructions dictate. And so, we find new ways to instruct them, thereby increasing their utility and making our lives ever more simple and complicated at the same time.
It’s a paradox to be sure, but the reality is that life in the computer world we have created is as uncertain and unsettling as life has ever been. We have so much more available to us and so much less that we can expect will still be current ten years, five years, even one year from now.
And then, of course, there are the nightmare scenarios where the computers of the world seek to destroy us. HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the classic example, but other fictional depictions are even scarier. (After all, in the end HAL is defeated and David Bowman becomes the star child who saves the world, in Arthur Clarke’s novelization, at least.) And in Kubrick’s earlier computer-centered story (“Dr. Strangelove”), the network of computers envisioned by the title character would actually save the human race, after another network had almost destroyed it, courtesy of the “doomsday bomb.”
But another film from the same era as “2001” depicted a much less happy result, and it perhaps is more plausible, if not probable, since interplanetary travel doesn’t appear to be in humanity’s immediate future.
“Colossus: the Forbin Project,” adapted from the book by Dennis Feltham Jones, tells the story of a massive military defense computer that somehow intuits through its connection with similar computers in the defense ministries of nations around the world that the future of humanity cannot be left to humans. Thus, it assumes control of the world, dictating what can and cannot be done by government agencies, the people who work in them, and, ultimately, by all the people those agencies serve (which, of course, ends up being everyone).
The Colossus in the film is fiction, of course. Computers can’t become sentient, because they would then have to be, well, human, or at least alive.
So don’t worry about it, right?
And yet, getting back to my original theme, when was the last time you wrote or received a letter? Remember those charming personal documents, handwritten with a real ink pen? Remember how enjoyable an experience it was to receive a real letter from a friend or relative? It had been written days earlier with loving care and sent by mail (snail-mail!) so that it arrived in your mail box.
Remember that experience? Long, for just a moment, to have that time back again? Oh, but e-mails are so much faster. And text messages are so much more convenient.
Stop the world; I want to get off.
We have letters from a several times great uncle who wrote them while serving in the Civil War. A family treasure. This generation will probably leave some handwritten treasures behind but we might be the last. It probably won’t matter. Now that kids are not being taught to write cursive they won’t be able to read handwritten letters anyway.