We live in a curious, confusing time. To try to make sense of it all, to make the switch to the new way things are being done in the world, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge, and perhaps come to terms with, how much of our privacy, our individuality and our freedom we have relinquished control of. I am suffering from the reverberating echo of my own thoughts, being hounded by the technology that I am using to help me navigate my way through an information overload.
I am in the throes of planning an overseas holiday. Though, if you consider the meaning of the word throe to be a severe pang or spasm of pain, I should not really be in the throes at all.
If anything, I ought to be having the time of my life looking at options and having deep conversations with myself about what it is I want to do, where it is I want to go.
When my parents went on holiday, they got in their car, drove to town, parked and walked to their travel agent’s office. If they hadn’t made an appointment, they sat and read travel brochures while they waited.
They knew where they wanted to go and the agent made it happen.
I, on the other hand, find it ridiculously frustrating being faced with so much choice, so many options that decision-making is best left to the algorithm. They find me the best price, the best time of year, the best tours.
And so, for the first time, I have given in and let Dataism rule. After all, as historian and author Yuval Harari says in his mind-altering book Homo Deus, it is the new religion with algorithms the new God.
Am I actually making my own choices? I don’t think so. I am — very subtly at first, and then increasingly with more “in your face” force — being led down a very specific path.
I think I’m in control of my choices, but am I? Am I being guided by being given more of what it is I think I want?
Anyway, the planning part of a trip is as much fun as the actual trip almost (well, probably more). It’s the armchair bit that requires the most effort.
By the time you climb aboard an aircraft, knowing that when you wake up you’ll be somewhere on the top end of the world, it’s all come to full fruition, hasn’t it? By that time, you just have to get on with having as best a time as possible given the variables that travel throws at you.
The virtual world of travel (the planning part) is predictable, and so much more sanitised. Much, much cleaner — an important factor for the germophobe me.
When you’re on your (freshly cleaned with an astringent spirit) keyboard, you are not faced with having to deal with grubby sheets, or a suspicious ring around a hotel room bath, or public toilets or open drains.
There are no sneaky bad smells wafting off sewers or the sweet, unwashed reek coming off fellow passengers on planes, buses, the subway or underground.
When you’re in the planning phase, you often forget to factor in having to fight the tide that is the sea of humanity, heaving and sighing and weaving in astonishing symmetry in cities. Have you ever watched people at a pedestrian crossing waiting for the traffic light to change to Go-green?
Whether you’re in New York City, London, Sydney or Paris, it’s the same dance: stop and shuffle — the foot-to-foot hop, the gentle stretch, the bag shift from one shoulder to the other, the cellphone held against the head.
Then, like the corps du ballet dancing in concert, there’s the light change surge, movement in unison as the crowd gathers momentum and the push forward begins.
Armchair planning is quieter too. No incessant chattering, beeping horns, grinding brakes, bicycle bells.
As a southern hemispherean, I have always boarded north-bound carriers that have taken me to places above the equator line (apart, of course, to our immediate SADC neighbours).
As I sit here, planning and plotting I am astonished by how much the thought of virtual travel seems to be winning out on actually getting on a north-bound plane.
I have always had a burning desire to travel to Berlin, spiritual home to that most astonishing German playwright, poet and theatre practitioner, Bertolt Brecht.
I’ve been a Brecht acolyte since I played the pregnant sister-in-law in The Good Wife of Szechwan, in my first year of university 40 years ago. He transformed the theatrical experience, taking it from pure illusion to hard, nitty-gritty staging that captured some of his Marxist philosophies.
The question during my online explorations, during my Netflix documentary watching, is whether it is necessary to actually make the trip when I can access a virtual tour of his Berlin home and watch — real time — an actual Brecht production online.
I want to go to India, to explore the home of my paternal ancestors, the land of mysticism and intrigue. And bad smells, and blistering summer temperatures and colour and the threat of Delhi Belly and teeming, screaming masses and bone crunching poverty.
To get back to my original point — I am being hounded by my explorations. All my investigations into the destinations that I want to visit are being fed back to me in persistent advertising, across all my devices, on all platforms.
Yes, I have willingly handed over my personal information to this new Dataism god, whose algorithms pursue me wherever I go.
It’s terrifying. And there’s not a thing I can do about it.
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