Technology Monster

words Taylor Self
illustrations Bayley Hanes

As our world continues to expand and technology becomes better adapted to predicting our needs, more people weigh the pros and cons of our innovation. You can summon whatever you desire with a tap or click, but what happens when technology’s abilities to recall and replicate become more sinister? Social media has the ability to connect us with people from all corners of our past. But is there such a thing as too much access? The ability to digitally check in on someone at any time tends to bring out the worst in us – the obsessive, the covetous, and the lustful all converging in our direct messages. 

Another example: Siri provides a listening ear for our most mundane tasks. She can dictate our messages while we drive and remind us to pay that upcoming bill. However, this disembodied voice also has a dark side. This manifested for me personally one day while on a break at a retail job in my early twenties. I had arrived before the sun rose, so I was tired and carelessly scrolling through a sea of click-bait articles looking for a distraction. In my exhaustion I must have pressed the wrong combination of buttons because suddenly a robotic voice rang out, reading the title the article I had chosen to the entire room: “TWENTY REASONS WHY YOU AREN’T ALREADY IN A RELATIONSHIP.” It was the stuff of nightmares. 

Our most popular technological platforms and the content they produce also represent a nationwide obsession with farming our collective past. It can be thrilling to visit our past selves and engage with the memories contained in our timelines and feeds. Too often though, the novelty and nostalgia we foster can turn sour. The devices we carry give us the power to access a song that will make us cry at will or a vault of text messages we read to break our own hearts. And still other times, all the data we’ve provided is analyzed and marketed to us in such an unsettling and knife-twisting way that the only explanation is that there must be a ghost in the machine. 

My father passed away in July 2014. On the fourth anniversary of his death, I was feeling okay, great even. I listened to a Leon Russell song as a small form of joyful tribute on my way to work and then I checked my email. I’ve been a Twitter user for ten years, consistent but never fervent. On this day, I received one of those algorithm-determined emails that attempts to connect the dots between who you interact with online and who you should be. This day’s email had decided to ask me if I’d ever considered following a user named @Shannon_Self. 

It was my dad. I had forgotten, but back in 2012 he had created an account in his quest to learn more about the new “adult” me. He only ever followed one account: mine. 

I told a friend about this experience later—how I felt like the entire eye of the Internet had turned to stare at me and my dumb grief. I felt exposed and it seemed unfair. He encouraged me to view it as a sign from beyond. As my shock dissipated, this coincidence felt more natural to me and less uncanny. After all, technology is created and improved with humanity in mind. Perhaps this is just the machines’ way of digesting centuries of human pain they have to contend with. We all know how heavy that load must be.