Lately, I’ve been lying awake in the small hours, hypnotised by watch repair videos – pinions, train wheel bridges, pallet forks, barrel arbors, the literal works. Am I interested in watches? No. I could only become less interested in horology by slipping into a coma. My wristwatch hasn’t worked in months, and I may never want to know what time it is again – standardised timekeeping just makes people expect things of me and I don’t feel I can currently deliver. I just want to stay quiet and peaceful while people with teeny screwdrivers talk about amplitudes and restore components smaller than the light in a robin’s eye. This is what the 21st century has made of me. I am not a watch person. I already had my own interests: I’m meant to lie awake reading novels, checking on current affairs, bingeing Korean vampire-medical-action-romcom series. (Lordy, Korean vampires are attractive.) Watches? In a reasonable world, I wouldn’t care if you told me your crown gasket was rotten or your balance staff awry. In a reasonable world I wouldn’t know what the Patek Philippe you were talking about.
But this is the world where the internet isn’t binding us together in knowledge and strength – it’s drowning us in the monetised nightmares of a) a child’s drawing of a haunted candle b) a fascistic South African goblin. Wealth addicts farm us for anxiety clicks and radicalise us as race war foot soldiers. Exquisite computer programming, based on top-grade research, helping rid humanity of work and woe? Nope. We get Shit AI. We didn’t want it any more than we wanted Clippy, but here it is, scraping data everywhere all at once, turning the rich tapestry of human achievement into a slurry of plagiarism, racial bias and porn, then serving it up in disturbing beige nuggets. And if I need to write an email, I don’t want AI to “help” make me sound like a cursed mannequin pretending to be an intern, I want to sound like me. In a reasonable world the power to save our planet or boil it away into radioactive misery and blood dust wouldn’t rest in the hands of a Botoxed Russian mobster with a tracksuit fetish, or a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike who’s into mass incarceration and maybe organ harvesting. At least the malignant narcissist Hannibal Lecter fan unable to remember which women he has sexually assaulted probably won’t get near the nuclear football again. But why was that even a possibility?
