Ode to a Macbook, Reluctantly

I post this drab photo, not because I’m an Apple groupie (far from it), but because as I sat down for a lonesome meal at Le Meridien MIT — after two months of travel that included Sao Paulo, Lausanne, Salt Lake City, Marrakesh and Nevis, as well as my regular shuttle between NY and Cambridge — I realized how irrevocably tied to these thin, transportable rectangles we itinerant knowledge workers are. There are ten people at this restaurant right now and five of us have our laptops open. (A couple more have their iPhones in hand, but my guess is they are not working, at least not with the same intensity. Lucky them.) Depressing? Liberating?

What a thing this machine is.

My right brain is in awe of my Macbook. By tying its localized processor to countless others anywhere in the world, it connects me to a virtual machine of collective computation that’s unimaginably powerful. Well worth its $1,500 price tag, many, many times over, it taps an infinitely large, global pool of ideas. It’s my portal to The Social Organism, with all its variety, chaos, beauty and brutality. (Sorry had to make a plug for my latest book.) It drives my career, my contribution to the world, my family’s wellbeing. Wherever it goes, I go. Without it, I’m not sure what I’d do…

My left brain is horrified. This Macbook is a demanding overlord. There’s always work to do. There are always reasons to carry it with me to the restaurant, to take advantage of that scant amount of time, which — this very same machine keeps reminding me — is in short supply. On the flight back from Morocco, having forgotten the U.S. government’s new racially tinged rules about carry-on equipment from select countries, I worried about a seven-hour separation from this machine and the loss of valuable work time I’d previously factored into my trip. In the end, there was freedom. Sweet freedom. (For the first time, perhaps, I was thankful to the Trump Administration…)

Which side of my brain is correct?

The right side tells me that Hollywood’s dystopia industry has it wrong: computers are not inherently dehumanizing. They encourage the sharing of the human experience in ways we could never imagine in the pre-Internet world. Unbounded by time and distance, we can now connect with each other. We can share our humanity. Our thoughts can conjoin. Our culture is changing, becoming more tolerant — mostly for the better, believe it or not — because of this new, globally connected co-humanity.

But the left side is wary. It knows how easily we humans are swayed by the release of dopamine, by deliberately tailored signals that feed on a hormonal craving for recognition, delivering a stream of likes, retweets, shares, and inboxes of unread emails. Are we truly connecting as human beings in this online interchange of commoditized responses? These hypertext links to ambiguously defined identities, these points of departure from the world of one web page to that of another, are these human links? Or are we just feeding the machine’s needs? Are we more together, or more alone?

I wish I knew the answer to these questions. I literally cannot decide who’s right. What I do know is that until they are replaced by something even more transformative, our laptops, as well as our smartphones and interconnected IoT devices, are here to stay. Each one of us will define our individuality within, or in opposition to, the context of this all-pervasive machine. We must take charge of it. We cannot let it take charge of us.