There is a wonderful old hotel in downtown Washington, built in the last year of the Gilded Age before the Great War, with all the classic styling and comfort. When I was a young professional, it was my favorite place to meet, greet, read, eat, and drink. It was history, elegance, comfort, grandeur.
Years later, I returned, and the name had changed, and the place had been gutted completely, turned into a dystopian mess. It was heartbreaking. A very expensive act of design vandalism. It made me wonder at the time how a society could be so wealthy and yet squander so much of it in wanton acts of destruction, justified by post-modern aesthetics that elevated demolition as knowingly sophisticated.
That design iteration failed, and the hotel closed and sold again. The new owners tried their best to restore what was lost, but the effort was diverted along the way. They met the difference between traditional and techno somewhere in the middle, so now it is just disorienting, hints of what could be, but ultimately burrowed down into some phony-baloney version of 21st-century hipsterism.
Much of the problem could be fixed by some nice classical music, perhaps a selection of chamber music by Schubert, Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and so on, recordings of actual talented musicians to root the experience in something authentic. Nothing fussy or too fancy, just enough to create an ethos that the decor has lost. At least in this case, the music could serve to soften the blow.
That’s not what happens. Instead, everyone who stays there is assaulted with an endless loop of techno-groovy sounds created entirely by computers, possibly some artificial intelligence, with percussive sounds not strong enough to work for a casino but too loud and postmodern for a classic hotel.
Sitting there for an hour feels a lot like how Dante imagined Purgatory, that waiting room between time and eternity: not physically painful but uncomfortable enough to make you desperate to get out.
All of the patrons complain. The front desk fields kvetching about the loud tunes all day, but no one seems to be able to do anything. Not even the staff can control the volume or this odd mix of strange sounds that pass for music.
Why would this hotel do this? And how come no one seems to be in a position to make the change that absolutely everyone is demanding? What strange power is behind the scenes that robs even the managers of volition to make an improvement that everyone demands?
Sitting there for a long length of time caused me to think hard about the impact of these sounds. They are disembodied, utterly detached from anything approaching flesh and blood. They are uprooted from all history, aesthetically deracinated throughout so they cannot remind anyone of anything in particular. The impact is literally dehumanizing in the sense of a sound experience that transcends flesh and blood but is devoid of aspiration. It’s the soundtrack to transhumanism.
This is a conspicuous and aggressive example, all the more offensive because customers are paying $400 a night for the experience. And yet we are surrounded by smaller versions of the same. The announcements at the train station are not real people but electronic voices. Our cars create a cacophony of machine-generated notifications, warnings, and alerts. Our homes are filled with the same. Not even the dishwasher can just stop when it is finished: It is programmed to blast eight beeps in succession for no apparent reason.
Digital noises have been programmed into the management of every aspect of life. It has all become a blur such that notifications, alerts, alarms, and music have all blended together in a way that is utterly detached from the physical world. No more acoustic bells, no more scratchy violins, no more hammers on a piano, no more logs crackling on a fire, certainly no more sounds of birds or animals. The machines are the soundtrack of our lives now.
Industrial elites tell us that this is the sound of the future. But honestly, who gifted them with prophetic insight about what must be in the trajectory of time? Maybe we don’t want this kind of future but would rather hear physical sounds of gears, clicks of light switches, engines revving, coffee percolating, and whistles on trains and tea kettles.
There is a neighborhood close to me with the most wonderful lineup of houses built in the Gilded Age. The roofs are all made of limestone, and many houses have wood-fired ovens off the back porch. Many also have cottages off the main house, suggestive of several generations living on one estate. It’s an idyllic neighborhood, a place where every owner has taken on the preservation of the property as a vocation.
At one house, however, there is a Cybertruck parked out front. It’s an eyesore. Whatever you think of this gigantic and edgy steel box on wheels, it absolutely does not belong here. I have no direct evidence, but I suspect that all the neighbors roll their eyes and talk in private about how horrible it looks. If this truck represents the future, I doubt many regular people want anything to do with it.
The scene captivated me because it starkly illustrates the immense divide between the inherent humanity of the past and a soulless imagined future whose complex functions lie beyond our direct influence.
This lack of control mirrors my hotel experience: Just as no one seemed to have the authority to change the music channel or adjust the volume of the techno noise, the more we are encircled by these intricate systems, the less we are afforded opportunities to exercise agency and choice as authentic human beings.
What is to be done? G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1906, “None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia ... have any power except over the people who choose to use them.”
None of us can curate a complete escape from the audible, visual, and mental assaults by the digitization of everything. But there are ways we can make small choices that can gradually plot an escape when possible.
For my part, I work never to buy any product labeled smart. I have enough apps. I don’t need one to turn the lights and washing machine off and on. We can surround ourselves with the products of human hands: an embroidered tablecloth in linen, porcelain plates, iron skillets, paintings in oil and watercolor, and so on. The more we look around, the more we can be surprised by what we can achieve with conscious choosing.
There was a time when I saw the digitization of everything as thrilling and a sign of prosperity. I imagined that we were living in the first season of “The Jetsons.” Something dramatic has changed. We now know otherwise. We know where all this is taking us, toward a surveillance state of globalized technocracy, barren of not only privacy but also human volition itself.
The transhumanist project, backed by technocratic ambitions and elites, dates back at least 125 years. It has never made more progress than in our times. With artificial intelligence everything, it might seem to be inevitable. Certainly we are made to believe that it is.
Around the corner from my hotel in Washington is another that has changed almost nothing in 100 years. Every improvement has been about preservation and beautification. It also costs three times as much to stay there. It’s not just the luxury that allows them to charge so much. It’s that people are willing to pay to escape the digitized future and imagine themselves to be enveloped if only briefly by a humane past.
