Old Conversations

Notes on a friendship and the changing face of technology

This past week, I lost one of the most important people in my life, a friend for almost forty years, Brian Pearson. While we had grown apart and were physically half a continent distant in recent years, he was always there to listen. I think he may have been a better friend to me than I to him, at least some of the time. His death was unexpected. We had texted back and forth that afternoon; that evening, he was gone. That afternoon felt like a continuation we had started 39 years ago at the University of Missouri. That was the nature of that friendship, a long conversation that could range over anything.

Technology was a favorite topic of ours back in the eighties and nineties. They might happen anytime, but often on a good stormy night. Maybe those put us into a more reflective or speculative mood. Those were the glory days of early PCs and Macs, the beginnings of cellphone networks, the great era of CDs (which for Brian often meant U2), and VHS. The darkness that surrounds so much technology today felt distant and limited to nuclear things - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Minuteman missiles, less than a hundred miles away. It feels like a distant era, impossible to recapture, but still fresh in my mind.

Thursday evening, to take my mind off of Brian's death and the state of the world in general, I watched (really listened to) a YouTube video made in September 2023 called The End of the Smartphone is Near by Joe Scott. He talks about how static the design of smartphones has become, the way they have saturated markets, and permeated life, the possibilities of AI smart jewelry, and Apple's Vision Pro. I was struck by how fleeting that tech moment was, how those two pieces of tech have all but disappeared, about the present rebellion against the latest and greatest devices, and how ephemeral the tech that Brian and I used to discuss and occasionally owned really was. So, instead of getting my mind off Brian, it led back to him.

I have a pretty quirky relationship to technology; knowing him back then made it a bit quirkier. I wish I could have one of those old discussions now, but I can at least share some of the thoughts with you.

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I said there was little of the darkness of technology in our college conversations and for many years after. There was still an excitement, a longing for an exceptional and wonderful future. Yes, Donald Fagen had satirized the gleaming technological futurism of the Kennedy years in the song I.G.Y. (a favorite of mine). Yes, William Gibson and the cyberpunks were creating digital dystopias (some of them still favorites of mine to this day, though not to Brian's taste). It was the age before smartphones had subsumed almost every other communication, information, and entertainment device. As Timbuk 3 sang, "the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

We were passionate in those days about technology and the future we believed it would create. Today, we are scared, scarred, resigned, bored, or even apathetic. If there was one thing Brian loathed more than anything in our college days and later, it was apathy. That was one of his gifts to me: to distrust and oppose apathy. I write a lot about my concerns about technology in this blog. I feel driven to write them out. We cannot permit apathy to win. That would hand ourselves over to the technological visions of a small number of people with dark visions for our devices, our lives, and our future.

So if you are one of my readers (the numbers are small, but that's ok, I will continue to write anyway), know that you would not be reading them or reading something different, were it not for decades of friendship with Brian.