Let me not google that

I’m asking you — for a reason.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

If you know me in person, you should know that I’m going to routinely start asking you questions I think you know the answer to, if I haven’t already. I know this is aggressive, and it’s not that I don’t care that you’re busy, or that I don’t know Google exists. It’s that I care about our relationship, and our humanity — yours, mine and everyone’s. And I (like so many others) think we really need to talk to each other more, about all the things we know and care about. Please consider it a compliment if I interrupt your day with a question about a flower I could easily use an app to identify, or reply to a text about your obscure medical diagnosis with “What is that??”

I’ve come to believe that the passive-aggressive “let me google that for you” meme (along with its clever ad-derived cousin “there’s an app for that”) is among the worst things that have ever happened to civilization. For one thing, we’ve created absolute monsters through our dependence on tech and apps, our enrichment of their broligarch owners, and our utter abandonment of our privacy to them. Not to mention the environmental damage. But we’ve also lost each other in the process, and the inherent joy and value of sharing knowledge and experiences, human to human.

And now that we’ve spent decades committing all of our hard-earned knowledge and opinions to the internet, where it’s been scraped by AI in order to be muddled and regurgitated back by dystopian “agents,” we (not me, I should note) are asking them the questions we could have been asking each other all along anyway. So let’s do that! Let’s normalize talking to each other again instead of sitting alone with our phones typing in queries of various kinds in various capacities and feeling more collectively lonely with every passing day.

Let’s make time to share what we know. Maybe we’ll be wrong about some stuff sometimes, but the bots are making a mess of all the intel anyhow. This way, at least we’ll still have each other.

. . .

p.s. Hello, Substack! I’m warming up the mic today after moving this short-lived blog from 2024 over here to resume publishing. I’m making no proclamations about subject matter or posting frequency just yet, and it’s also free to read for the time being, so do hit that subscribe button (no pledge required) and follow along as it takes shape.