Divination in the age of vibes-based tech
If we assume that the youth of today are learning tech skills, but different ones from our generation, what might they be?
Since forever, the details of weather has been notoriously unpredictable, and as humans, we are deeply dependent on it. Many of the things we need to do can only be done under certain conditions: from household chores like drying laundry, to work like spraying pesticides and laying concrete.
Trapped between a system that we can only have a limited, indirect understanding of, and a strong need to gain some kind of actionable insight into it, we have developed a skill-space of pattern-recognition and intuition. We look at the clouds, taste the air, pay attention to the aches in our bones. We share our predictions with each other as small talk, and communities put together tools like almanacs to collect any insight that might be available from astronomy and astrology (and whatever else we thought might help).
One is welcome to pooh-pooh the particulars of past/alternative weather prediction methodologies, but let’s face the fact that modern meteorology goes to a great deal of effort to achieve improvements in accuracy that are useful but hardly perfect.
The Algorithm
Increasingly, the capitalist technical systems around us are moving from being tools that allow us to have direct control over our environment to more of a vibes-based approach. It’s no longer possible to apply settings and configuration to the services we use; instead we must adapt to arcane and shifting controls, controls that often secretly reset on us.
Social media is the obvious giant for this: Twitter and FB’s non-chronological timelines with its ever-changing reasons for showing or hiding posts. TikTok’s arbitrary censorship of videos based on keywords.
Perhaps the OG, though, is Google’s PageRank. An entire cottage industry has developed to try to keep up with, and take advantage of, the PageRank process. You may have heard of Search Engine Optimisation.
Google Search used to work. It was possible to craft search queries with precision that would return a single page of results that matched what you needed. Adding an exclamation mark before a term no longer guarantees the removal of pages with that term from results. Wrapping a phrase in quotation marks used to allow searching for a specific phrase or spelling; this hasn’t been true for some years. These controls have been replaced with… something else. It looks the same, but it runs on vibes.
Of course there are clear economic factors at work in the ongoing enshittification process, but for now I’m not focusing on the broader analysis. I’m interested in what kind of skills are required to navigate a world like this, and my thesis is that we are back to divinatory practices.
Creative Hopelessness
I’m misusing the Acceptance & Commitment Therapy term here to describe a kind of pragmatic acceptance that we increasingly are losing levers we can pull to achieve direct results, and that the replacement levers are floppy ropes that we must wiggle just so to get anything like what we want from them.
I assume that the generation growing up on this are no more fools than we are. Academics are alleging that their students lack any kind of deeper understanding of technological systems; if this is true perhaps it is because the students recognise that the underlying knowledge has ceased to have much bearing on whether they will achieve a linear result from their actions.
Only a fool continues to tire themselves out paddling a raft when pulled by tidal forces an order of magnitude beyond their own efforts. The wise move is to conserve one’s energy, observe the signs, be flexible in one’s targets, lean into clear directions when they present themselves.
Vibes-based technology necessitates a divinatory skill-set. I suppose we’d better get used to it.