It’s hard to get a sense of where things are going re: “computer” when the industries move fast, and the headlines about them move even faster. A quick scan of the news now, as I write this, throws up pages and pages of stories: AI Is on the Brink of Transforming How Advertising Works at Its Core (Morningstar). Netflix’s Reed Hastings Donates $50 Million to Fund AI Research for the Humanities at Bowdoin College (Variety). There’s an AI physio seeing patients in the UK. Can it fix my back? (BBC). The Quantum Apocalypse is Coming. Be Very Afraid (WIRED). Most people probably won’t get to grips with the changes barrelling down the pipeline until it’s too late and we’re already entrenched in a system of fully automated luxury labour, where there are giant WeWork-sized server rooms full of computers writing TV shows and making adverts and we, the people, get paid less than minimum wage to clean the floors and stuff.
Just kidding! Everything is going to be fine, probably, maybe! Ironically the lesson in all this is that AI could never come up with a phrase as beautiful and brilliant and utterly stupid as “everything is computer.” He uses it incorrectly as an adjective for one but the fact that he uses the word “computer” at all is actually quite anachronistic and gives the statement a sort of endearing, old timey feel, which is one reason why it has travelled as far as it has – because it reminds us of the past. A time before AI customer service bots and cars without door handles and all the rest of it.
This observation has been made in the past, too, in very similar language by a character at the end of 1989 comedy/sci-fi Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Winging his way through an oral history report in front of the whole school, a blonde jock in a Letterman jacket says: “Everything is different, but the same. Things are more moderner than before. Bigger, and yet smaller. It’s computers…” He trails off here because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying, but the pause adds a prophetic weight to his words. They linger in the air for a few seconds, balancing on a highwire between stupidity and visionary, charged with a collective naivety and anticipation and desire for reasoning, connection, answers… It’s computers… And then he goes: “SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!!!!” Same as it ever was.
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Emma Garland is a freelance writer and former digital editor of Huck. Follow her on Bluesky.
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