Creepy is the new cool

There's a trend in journalism for cavalier articles describing harrowing abuse of others and self-abuse via tech. "Real-world" accounts of rape, murder, incest, necrophilia, manipulation, destruction of wealth and human life would be wholly unacceptable if written as nonchalant, glib click-bait titillation. But dressed-up in the clothing of "AI" and technological novelty, alongside comments like "this feels straight out of Black Mirror" seems to be code for audiences to nod along at what is monstrous and sickening as if it were "normal". It is after all artificial and therefore somehow 'okay'.

Ten years ago I wrote "Creepy is the new cool" as a headline for the inaugural Mary Shelley Halloween Lectures at the now closed Shelley Theatre in Bournemouth UK. I was too ahead for it to register fully with that audience, but I think we're getting there at last. What we perceive as "creepy" and "disgusting" is a complex social construct that carries valuable information.

What is cool anyway? Why, even for fully grown responsible adults, does Western society have such a deep obsession with inauthenticity around discomfort and fear?

Brooker's Black Mirror is of course a horror show. Enacting scenes from horror stories in real life is usually the fast track to a secure psychiatric detention facility. Like all entertaining cautionary tales it is primarily an exploration of behaviour we should avoid. As Christopher Hitchens once said of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, "it was a warning and not supposed to be used as a blueprint".

Somehow we have developed an armour with which to deflect criticism of self-destructive and anti-social behaviour around tech. Indeed, many early adopters of offensive and dehumanising tech seem to positively delight in the harm and discomfort it causes others. Technology compensates for their insecurity and provides a source of power for their ego. This sense of power seems rooted in a desire to see how much self-inflicted or invited abuse they can tolerate as a mark of strength.

As we learn that people are falling into dangerous addiction to "AI" chat and that the whole hype-cycle is a pointless trap and dead-end fantasy, on Mothers' Day this week David Kushner writes merrily of his tears in Business Insider about his necromancy with the "AI digital twin" of his dead mother, while Jaron Lanier offers little more than an amoral, wistful lament on the rise of "AI lovers" as inevitable and tragic. He suggests that only an "old-fashioned romantic" like himself would be troubled by it.

What is going on with this projection of normalcy onto a vague Other, plus timid avoidance of confronting horror? Where is the journalistic honesty? Where is the expressed disgust?

The feeling remaining at the end of Thorne and Graham's Adolescence is, more than anything, of helpless bewilderment in the face of new social horrors. It is the complete inability of good, intelligent, well meaning people (whether police, teachers, therapists or parents) to confront unfathomable harms.

Digital technology brings a whole new world of denial, avoidance, spirals of silence and percepticide. People feel as if they have no say and that their opinions don't matter! They suppose that they "do not understand" and that not "understanding" delegitimises not only their opinions but their basic human needs.

This creates a synthesis of bandwagon and bystander effects whereby otherwise smart, moral people who would naturally be averse to objectionable products or activities are softly-coerced by the idea that other people are okay with it - indeed that "everybody is doing it" and so you'll be "left behind" if you don't join in harmful mob behaviours. It's very easy for advertisers of the tech industry to accomplish such propaganda since they own the channels of dissemination. In "Adolescence" the parents rationalise that it's okay to leave a pre-teen alone in their room with a phone or computer because "that's what normal parents do… right?".

The mission of the manipulators behind toxic tech is to convince you that "everybody is okay with this". And if everybody is okay with this, but I am not okay with it, then that makes me weak, a freak, an outsider and so I should not trust my feelings or speak up.

People die because when there's a suspicios package on a bus or public space, nobody wants to "make a fuss" or "rock the boat".

What we are seeing in society today around technology is the death of appropriate, healthy negative emotion. It's okay to say. "I'm not okay with this". In Britain we have a slogan to sum up security.

See it. Say it. Sorted.

I think it will take decades to sort out the societal mess we've allowed BigTech to wreak on human affairs. But at least we can now see it. You don't have to be "cool". Sometimes creepy is just creepy and self-evidently wrong. There is nothing cool about failing to call it out. You are not alone thinking that. So say it, clearly and loudly. Make a scene. Rock that boat.