Shawn Huelle

the ethics of letting technology do the work for you

I like anagrams. Every time I point out that my home WiFi network is an anagram of my partners' and my names, the person I'm telling invariably asks if I made the anagram myself. When I say I used the Internet Anagram Server, they always seem disappointed.

I have a friend who made my daughter the most wonderful baby blanket (which, because of what autocorrect did to my friend's last name, we call "The Labradoodle"). She also bought us a smooshy, cat-shaped nightlight. She's lovely in general, and not just because she's a good gift giver. She asked, after giving these gifts, if I would please send her a baby picture once a month. What new father would not be ecstatic to oblige?! I talked to her after sending the first photo, and she said, "Oh! You remembered!" When I said I had set myself a reminder in my phone, she seemed disappointed.

I've been poking at the above paragraphs for at least two months now, not knowing quite where to take them. Two days ago, I started reading Maël Renouard's newly translated into English book Fragments of an Infinite Memory, and came across the following:

I remember a period when, without anyone saying aloud or even thinking it in a very direct way (I'm speaking here of those little furtive mental superstitions that lie beneath the threshold of direct consciousness), there was something almost shameful in resorting to the internet, at least in certain academic or scholarly circles, as if it was like taking a performance-enhancing drug for the mind, or looking up the answers at the back of your math book without having made the effort to solve the problem on your own.

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And now I know what I want to say: Renouard's book was first published, in France, in 2016, he was, at that point, already writing in the past tense about this "resorting to the internet" shame, and I'm still running into this attitude, in Germany, in 2021.

Imagine now those early humans who refused the adopt the wheel because it was "taking a shortcut."