generations
The 14-year-old boys and I were talking about A.I.-generated art. At one point, because it was germane to the conversation, I started telling them about Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” The real work of art wasn’t the urinal itself, I explained; rather, the final work of art is the outcome, the urinal sitting in an actual art museum, the photographic documentation of it. Duchamp had executed an expert troll. “See? Art can be fun!” I concluded. One of the kids grinned deviously.
Then I joked that they were too young to remember the genesis of A.I. when “everything turned into dogs and eyeballs everywhere.” The horror tends to be less obvious now—some light uncanniness, that’s all—but in the early days, A.I.-generated imagery was a straight nightmare.
Then we were talking about chatbots. I told the kiddos about how unhappy I’d been living in San Francisco. I’d lived on the border of Chinatown, where many of the neighborhood’s elders were being forced out because housing costs were becoming so exorbitant. I eventually returned to Chicago, to my great relief.
One day I went into the hardware store in my neighborhood. The owner of the hardware store, an old man, also owned the sub shop next door, which had great sandwiches and sodas. I introduced myself. As we spoke, he realized I was living in the building in which he was born. Anyway, I was there to look for a hook that would hold the weight of my deer head, who was named Steven. The old man nodded and ventured down an aisle, and he chose a hook for me. He held it up and said “this is what I used to hang my boar’s head,” and he extended it toward me. Because it was an independently-owned hardware store, the hook’s packaging had a thick film of oil and dust on it.
It was disgusting. I was ecstatic. This is what I had been missing! Old people! “A chatbot can also tell you what kind of hook to get,” I explained to the kiddos, “but it has no firsthand experience. It has never hung a boar’s head on the wall.” When you consult WikiHow for advice on how to remove a stain, it is unlikely that the author of the article has actually removed a stain using the advice they are giving you. That doesn’t mean the advice is untrue, but it is secondhand—a story with no hands-on, real-world experience backing it. With A.I., everything is secondhand. “It’s a game of telephone,” I explained, “and the information might even degrade a little bit as it gets passed along.
“Here’s another example,” I continued. I reminded the 14-year old about the lake day last summer. Another mom had approached his grandpa with her own young son in tow, had asked the grandpa if he could show the kid how to use his fishing pole. (“I keep meaning to watch a YouTube video,” she kept apologizing to him.) The 14-year old’s grandpa’s grandpa instincts had kicked in full blast, and he’d spent much of the day teaching someone else’s child how to fish. I had gotten very misty over the whole thing.
“Is this true?” the other 14-year old asked, looking at his friend. We both nodded at him.
“The information that gets passed down firsthand, from one generation to another, from grandpa to grandson, even someone else’s grandson,” I said, “is so much more valuable.”
We briefly talked about megalomaniacal CEOs: specifically, the guy with the imploded deep-sea submarine. I remarked that he’d chosen to surround himself with yes-men, having systematically driven off the employees who’d correctly anticipated problems. They would have been able to save lives, but the CEO hadn’t wanted any checks or pushback.
As Grandpa entered the room, I said to the kids, “I was gonna say, but now he’s here. But there’s a guy who always stood up to check authority when it mattered: your grandpa.” I did a “this guy” thumb at him.
“Yessir,” Grandpa said, turning to face the two young teens. Then he grabbed something from the fridge and departed. I mentioned Elon’s Neuralink, and then I sighed. “When I was your age I was so into this stuff. Tech, the future. It looked so bright,” I said apologetically. “Now it’s so bleak and dystopian instead.” I feel a lot of responsibility for this. I feel like I’ve put my faith in the wrong things. I looked at the kiddos and shook my head.
Then the kid who likes racing bikes was telling me about a brand of bikes he fiercely dislikes. I was thoughtful.
“Yeah, I see. It’s hard to repair yourself,” I said to him. The bike’s components were deliberately obfuscated under a slick veneer of carbon. This had reminded me of aluminum unibody MacBooks. I explained to the kids that I’d always preferred PCs because you could tinker with them, choose your own components, “libertarianism,” but if something ever goes wrong, you’re kind of out on your own. As I got older and the demands of adulthood had become more pressing, I just had less time for tinkering around and experimenting. So I’d switched to Macs—“it just works,” I said to the boys with a ghastly grin—but the whole point of obfuscating the components is to force you into needing the Genius Bar’s assistance. “It’s great to have that inbuilt support system,” I said, thinking out loud, “but sometimes you want to fix things yourself.” You don’t want to be forced into depending on a Genius Bar you don’t actually need.
Anyway, my crowning achievement had been a Hackintosh, “a Mac made from all PC components.” Kind of the best of both worlds except not at all.
“Cool,” one of the 14-year olds said.
“Yeah,” I said.
The 14-year-old cyclist continued to complain about this brand of bikes he didn’t like. Mostly it had to do with the suspension. I listened for a long while.
“Do you know anything about mechanical keyboards?” I finally asked him.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about bikes,” I said, “but I sure love typing. Anyway, fans of mechanical keyboards talk a lot about travel distance and ‘bottoming out.’”
“Hey, that sounds a lot like bicycle suspension!” the kid said, beaming.
“Right? I was just thinking that,” I agreed, nodding.
“Did I leave my Tamagotchi out here?” I asked, returning to the common area several hours later. Both teens told me yes, the device had been shrieking.
I picked it up. “I hope it didn’t die. Sorry, little guy, for being a neglectful Tamagotchi parent.”
“I gotta see this,” one of the boys said, running over.
I tilted the screen toward him. “Hmm,” I said. “It’s asleep right now, but it’s also kind of tipped over on its side. Haven’t seen that before.” I cringed at him. Then I examined the screen more closely. “And he’s surrounded by little poops,” I said, making another wuh-oh face. Three poops, in fact. I fiddled with the device’s dial, then looked across the room.
“Your sister—“ I started.
“My sister?”
“No. His sister. This little thing cost forty-five dollars. His sister asked me today when we’re getting another one.”
“What? Why?” The kid looked at me with interest. I flipped the Tamagotchi’s lid open, revealing an electronic connection point that looks convincingly like the dangerous end of a taser.
“Because you can introduce Tamagotchi to each other by connecting them,” I said. “So she wants to do that.” I told her we’d try to raise this one first and then we’d see.
I thanked one of the kids for tearing into my snacks. He apologized. I told him I was serious, I’d been worrying about the state of my bag of snack. I picked up the bag. “Best by… the end of the month! I thank you for eating it before it goes stale,” I said, setting the bag back down.
Now the kid was reaching for the fortune cookies. I’d only ordered one plate of Chinese food, but the restaurant had delivered three cookies with it. I took one, too. The kid tossed the third cookie to his friend. Then he opened his cookie.
“Your next triumph will be an act of kindness,” he read aloud.
“Huh,” I said. “Maybe it’s about your Nerf battles.” A ferocious household Nerf war had been going on since Christmas Eve. Both kids looked at me blankly. “You know,” I said, “maybe a great act of compassion or something.” Some magnanimous gesture. The kids looked at me skeptically.
I opened my cookie. “Man, they just give you advice nowadays. I want a fortune.” I pulled out the slip of paper and held it away from me. “‘Do not dwell on differences with a loved one—seek common ground.’ Yeah, okay, that’s pretty good.” I popped the cookie in my mouth and threw away the plastic wrapping.
The sleepover-guest teen pressured his best friend to open his cookie and read his. The kid opened it, but he refused to read it aloud, so the other kid took over. “‘Every friend starts out a stranger.’ Okay, that’s kind of dumb.” We all laughed. The kids trashed the fortune.
“Well, wait,” I said. “I guess that’s kind of wise. Every important relationship probably begins with taking a big social risk.” I opened the fridge. “Hey, thanks, someone, for refilling the water bottles!” I said. One of the kids took credit. I smiled at him gratefully.
One of the kids had started terrorizing the other. I picked up my Christmas Eve gift—a Nerf Sharp92 retro blaster—and made knowing eye contact with the sleepover guest. The sleepover-guest teen tried to not react. I cocked my blaster, then held it behind my back for a while. During a lull in the conversation, I shot the other teen in the ankles. I’ve been firing warning shots at his ankles for a few days now.
The kid laughed and handed me my suction dart back. This dumb thing only came with three, so I’m very precious about them. They’re hilarious, too, the way the darts actually stick.
“Hey, you were right, by the way,” I said to him. “I looked it up. This thing is a perfect repro of the 1992 version, except they resized the barrel to take Mega Darts.”
“Yeah,” he said, “probably cheaper that way.”
I nodded. Mega Darts are the same width as the Sharp92 darts, but they have solid rubbery heads instead of a suction-cup end. No one makes a suction-cup version of a mega dart. So I just have the three darts that are hilarious. I actually love this? The kids have an artillery of Nerf guns with contemporary automatic action. All I get are these three foam bullets, so I have to carefully choose my shot. Recently I used the pantry entryway for cover.
A few days earlier, I’d told the kids I had an old friend who’d been, once upon a time, a designer at Nerf. “He went to Georgia Tech,” I added, “in case that’s a career you were ever interested in.”