It happened to me Tuesday. I had just taken part in a tribute to poet Diane diPrima, and it had gone beautifully, beyond what we had hoped for. And I got a message about her son Rudi spearheading a petition to get a park named after diPrima, which I agreed to sign, and then re-post on Facebook so other people could sign too. I did that, commenting that we had just done this lovely zoom tribute to Diane diPrima. Then this morning, I opened Facebook on my stupid phone (which is what I call my smartphone), and saw my post. And what it said was:
“We just did this lovely tribute to diorama.”
What-t-t? And I realized: I had been sabotaged once again by stupid, which, in its zeal, makes everyone else look stupid. By the spell check, that is, that employs some idiot algorithm to check all words it “thinks” should be simpler words, and apparently saw Diane diPrima, didn’t recognize her—she’s only a poet after all— and substituted what it “thought” I meant. And the closest it could come was “diorama.”
This spell-check algorithm is supposed to help us, make us smarter and more educated than we are. But in this case, it made me look stupid—like itself. And I go through this stupidity all the time, increasingly. Any time I’m writing on my computer, using Microsoft Word or composing emails, or on my “smart” phone composing posts or text messages, or anywhere where these damn algorithms come into play, I have to constantly watch to make sure a hard word or a foreign one—god forbid—doesn’t fall victim to a spelling correction that totally garbles my meaning. It drives me mad. And I realize I’m not really the person these “aids” are designed for. They’re meant to help the “average” person—the illiterate, the grammatically-challenged, those in the majority now, who are either mentally defective, or so badly-educated that they require some computer aid to help them write or add or spell or think. In short, we some time ago entered the Age of Idiots: a culture which takes for granted that Joe and Jane Average can no longer perform the basic tasks that any fourth-grader could have done forty or fifty years ago—when I myself taught fourth graders. And so, the modern “geniuses” who design and program computers, do those tasks for them.
As you can see, I’m totally sick of this coddling. This dumbing down of everything. And have been for some time. I think the first time it hit me was when I worked for Harcourt Brace in their schoolbook division. I had already taught in classrooms from fourth grade to college and, therefore, more or less knew what teachers did. And how very hard it can be. But when it came time to create Teachers’ Manuals to go along with the fairly progressive texts we had written, the editors responsible for these manuals displayed what I thought was an alarming contempt for classroom teachers, and what they did. So they made everything over-explicit, not only designing lesson plans, but scripting every word the teacher was to say in presenting them. And when I would complain that teachers didn’t need this, and would probably resent it, I was ignored. Teachers, they claimed, now needed this hand-holding; this clear and precise direction. They were simply not able to think on their own.
That contempt, and that determination to guide and shape and correct the most basic aspects of our lives, has now become ubiquitous. Spelling and grammar checkers on computers are only one aspect of this phenomenon. Hand-held calculators are another, now so universal that even among students, there are few who can add or subtract, much less divide or multiply, on their own. And this translates to check-out registers in retail stores, where everything is done for checkers. In fact, as everyone knows, they simply have to scan the bar codes and the price is entered automatically, and the total calculated, with taxes and discounts, all without human input or thought. What this means, of course, is that corporations no longer need to hire clerks possessed of intelligence and basic skills; they can use the most elementary labor available, and could just as easily use robots—which are coming soon to a store near you. And that, in turn, means (naturally) fewer personnel and lower salaries paid out, and more profit coming in. The same goes for almost any job that once required skills. Like editing the newspaper or even books. Editors no longer seem to understand basic grammar and syntax, much less the flow of a piece of prose. And the composing job—what was once hand-assembled by skilled designers and paste-up artists—is now done on computers. The robots are taking over, in short; and where they haven’t, the skills required (in warehouses like Amazon’s for example), have been reduced to an absolute minimum. Only a warm body is required. And the ability to go long hours without breaks; one is competing with robots after all.
Where all this is heading is not hard to imagine. Robots will be more valuable than people (perhaps they already are). Most people will be valued mainly for their need to buy ever-more useless “stuff” (no ‘perhaps’ about it—they already are; though where they’ll be able to earn the money to afford “stuff” is beyond me.) And the ones who still know how to perform what were once routine tasks? They’ll be looked upon as dinosaurs, luddites, pimples on the blank face of “progress.” Preoccupied with details that no longer matter. Spelling. Adding a column of figures. Constructing a cogent and intelligible sentence, or knowing what agreement between subject and predicate is, or a verb ending, or a subjunctive. Fussy guardians of a correctness that has been outgrown.
So I’m mostly annoyed these days by this mindless interference in nearly everything I do. Mostly my writing, since I’m one of those “dinosaurs” from another era, who does, in fact, remember how to compose a sentence, does know the difference between “like” and “as,” and can still write with reasonably legible handwriting and add a column of figures. Not that I haven’t been corrupted like everyone else. I have; there’s no escaping it. I use a computer program to design my books. And a calculator to do my taxes. But when it comes to spell-check programs, I often find myself with the urge to smash my computer to bits. Or perhaps find out who, precisely, has designed the programs driving me to distraction, and find some way to consign that person to whatever circle of hell there is that stores all the rotten, simple-minded prose that person has been responsible for. And which recycles it endlessly before his or her eyes, blaring a screeching, unbearable alarm for each stupid, mindless change. Forever—as Hell is wont to do. But of course, that won’t change a thing. The stupids, along with their idiot culture, are here to stay.
Lawrence DiStasi
