Is the Arc of Dysfunctionalism Accelerating?

My previous post, “Is Dysfunctionalism the New Norm in Modern life?” must have struck a nerve. It received almost 30,000 hits and generated a 1-hour recorded interview with the United Kingdom’s Can Art Save Us? podcast.

The essay examined the proposition that many of the things we create to make our lives easier often end up complicating our lives and professions until it becomes impossible to complete even the simplest tasks.

Have we become like Bartleby in Herman Melville’s short story, who, in the middle of the 19th century, gave up on the complications of the modern world of his time? He moved his life’s meager possessions into his office, where he slept and ate but refused to do any more work. He simply replied, “I would prefer not to,” to any request that he do his job.

Today, the arc of dysfunctionalism seems to be accelerating, not slowing down.

It appears that we are now officially at the mercy of unbridled, uncontrolled, counterproductive, merciless, job-killing technological advances. Every new “improvement” often creates more anxiety, confusion, and a desperate sense that we are losing our humanity in the crush of the world’s technological machine that rumbles across the horizon like Ezekiel’s crab-like nightmare in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

(I have more adjectives I could add to this list, but I will stop and take a deep breath.)

My previous post explored some of the outward manifestations of escalating dysfunctionalism in the modern world. As I learned after it was posted, there is much more to explore—including the universal question: Are most things “improved” until they become fully dysfunctional? If so, the inevitable aftermath of humanity’s best inventions, unbeknownst to us, is to improve everything until it is unable to perform the very function for which it was invented.

If that is the case, then almost everything has an arc in which it is systematically improved until it reaches the end of its functionality. Everything thereafter only makes it more dysfunctional until it can produce nothing useful.

To test my humble proposition, I scoured several newspapers every day to look for those areas where human ingenuity had backfired and created the potential seeds of its own dysfunctionalism and possible destruction.

In doing so, I had to acknowledge that I have no intention of going back to writing novels and op-eds on a typewriter. I remember all too well the tedious, mind-numbing tasks of skipping a phrase or complete sentence and having to retype the entire page or plaster it with whiteout and try again.

Thank you computer technology! I am forever indebted to your savants who created word processing and eliminated those frustrations from my earlier life.

However, I am still wary of the future “improvements” of modern technology.

As I write this, I know that I will soon have to grade almost 200 pages of student writing, not knowing who the real authors are. It could be the students themselves writing the essays. It could be that the students’ names on the essay are all that they have contributed to the actual writing—and AI has done the rest.

If so, is it possible these students will go out into the world to create more arcs of dysfunctionalism because that is what modern technology has taught them to do?

I felt an intense, albeit brief sense of Schadenfreude when I recently read in my local newspaper, “Data from Layoffs.fyi show that a growing number of layoffs have hit software developers, also known as coders, who—after decades of disrupting other industries and other workers’ jobs with their programs—find themselves victims.”

The most obvious evidence that my proposition regarding the accelerating arc of dysfunctionalism has merit is nuclear-generated power. Since Oppenheimer almost blew up the world in 1945, nuclear energy has left behind piles of waste that future generations will have to deal with long after we are gone.

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The Internet is another obvious example. Its initial goal was to unite us into a more closely-knit community that could collectively work together to solve complex problems. Today, it seems to be a tool that is often used to plagiarize, destroy reputations, undermine privacy, and create a dangerously lawless environment. The Internet has certainly made some advances in human life, but it has often brought out the worst in human nature.

Perhaps the best example of the arc of dysfunctionalism is the cellphone. They are one of the most addictive toys the human race has ever invented. Recently, a close relative described an incident she witnessed in an automobile dealership. As she approached a counter where a young woman was working, conscientiously typing information into a computer, my relative realized the clerk had cleverly placed her cell phone on top of the keyboard. She was not working. She was texting her friends.

But all those examples are easy “scrapings,” to use a term Big Tech has coined to justify organized plagiarism on a massive scale.

Isn’t there a little voice inside of us that keeps whispering, “If we make it better, better, and better, won’t it someday become worse, worse, and worser?” (My coinage.)

A recent op-ed by Ashley Goodall confirmed my suspicions that others also believe we are on the downward side of an accelerating arc of dysfunctionalism. One of Goodall’s sources described the constant workplace changes as “soul-sucking.” Another told him, “Perpetual change drained the energy from work.”

Henry Adams (1838-1918), a writer and philosopher I frequently quote, saw this coming a hundred years earlier. His “Dynamic Theory of History” prophesized that change would someday be the dominant driving force in human life. He believed powerful technological forces could someday bring all real meaningful progress to a complete halt—and replace it with change for its own sake.

I can cite many other examples of the arc of dysfunctional that came into existence a hundred years after Adams died. My revered USB drives, some of the greatest inventions produced by the human mind, were, or so I thought, immune to the arc of dysfunctionalism. I was wrong.

Computers today don’t even have USB drives. Everything goes to the “cloud,” whatever that is. But what happens when the cloud fails? Everything is lost.

I mean everything.

An author’s loss of a book manuscript may be the least of these losses. I wondered if ancient civilizations, which we are told “vanished without a trace,” may have also had some centralized form of data and record keeping that was irretrievably lost in an electronic wasteland.

Did the loss of those records contribute to their demise?

As I struggled to understand my proposition regarding the seemingly inevitable arc of dysfunctionalism, I found two new computer apps in my email. Each described how to improve my courses by using its teaching, testing, and lesson plans.

Who was I to challenge the computer programming savant who had found a better way to teach the literature I had been teaching for almost half a century?

Whatever happened to the concept of teaching as a “creative art” and not a computer-driven series of “pull-down menus”?

The lure of automated lesson and testing plans was enticing, especially since they promised to be less work. However, I was still enamored of the illusion that perhaps I had something unique to share with my students. So I held onto my aging, scribbled-over lesson plans in the hopes that maybe some students might still prefer them to the glitzy, supercharged option of my nemesis—AI-generated educational programs.

Are these modern-day Bartlebys in their abandoned offices?

Source: Charles Forerunner/Unsplash

As I was editing the final drafts of this essay with pen and paper—as I often do as a sort of curmudgeonly protest—I glanced at my muted television screen and saw the words at the bottom: “Companies may be unknowingly fueling disinformation online through ads.”

I later learned that AI had become a possible tool for 20 different types of organized criminal behavior. AI had apparently completed its arc and subsequent descent into terminal dysfunctionalism in breathtakingly record time.

Is Bartleby’s fate the fate for all of us?

We should remember that Melville’s short story ends with the prophetic words, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!”