Is it Possible to Live Without a Computer of Any Kind?
This article was originally published on 19th May 2021.
I am absolutely sick to death of computers. The blue light of a screen wakes me up in the morning, I stare at another computer on my desk for hours every day, I keep one in my pocket all the time and that familiar too-bright glow is the last thing I see before I close my eyes at night. Lockdown undoubtedly made the problem much, much worse. Last year, a nasty thought occurred to me: it might be the case that the majority of my memories for several months were synthetic. Most of the sights and sounds I’d experienced for a long time had been simulated – audio resonating out of a tinny phone speaker or video beamed into my eyes by a screen. Obviously I knew that my conscious brain could tell the difference between media and real life, but I began to wonder whether I could be so sure about my subconscious. In short, I began to suspect that I was going insane.
So, I asked myself if it was possible to live in the modern world without a computer of any kind – no smartphone, no laptop, and no TV (which I’m sure has a computer in it somewhere). Of course, it’s possible to survive without a computer, provided that you have an income independent of one, but that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether it’s possible to live a full life in a developed country without one.
Right away, upon getting rid of my computers, my social life ground to a halt. Unable to go to the pub or a club, my phone allowed me to feel like I was still at least on the periphery of my friends lives while they were all miles away. This was hellish, but I realised that it was the real state of my life – my phone acted as a pacifier and my friendships were holograms. No longer built on the foundation of experiences shared on a regular basis, social media was a way for me to freeze-dry my friendships – preserve them so that they could be revived at a later date. With lockdown over though, this becomes less necessary. They can be reheated and my social life can be taken off digital life support. I would lose contact with some people but, as I said, these would only be those friendships kept perpetually in suspended animation.
These days large parts of education, too, take place online. It’s not uncommon now in universities, colleges and secondary schools for work and timetables to be found online or for information to be sent to pupils via internal email networks. Remote education during lockdown was no doubt made easier by the considerable infrastructure already in place.
Then there’s the question of music. No computers would mean a life lived in serene quiet; travelling and working without background sound to hum or tap one’s foot to. An inconvenience, maybe, but perhaps not altogether a negative one. Sir Roger Scruton spoke about the intrusion of mass-produced music into everyday life. Computer-produced tunes are played at a low level in shopping centres and restaurants, replacing the ambient hum and chatter of human life with banal pop music. Scruton believed that the proper role of music was to exalt life – to enhance and make clear our most heartfelt emotions. Music today, though, is designed to distract from the dullness of everyday life or paper over awkward silences at social events. He went so far as to say that pop consumption had an effect on the musical ear comparable to that of pornography on sex.
The largest barrier, however, is the use of the internet for work. Many companies use online services to organise things like shift rotas, pay and holidays and the entire professional world made the switch to email decades ago. How feasible is it to opt out of this? Short of becoming extremely skilled at something for which there is both very little supply and very high demand, and then working for a band of eccentrics willing to accommodate my niche lifestyle, I think it would be more or less impossible. Losing the computer would mean kissing the possibility of a career goodbye.
Lockdown has also sped up the erosion of physical infrastructure required to live life offline as well as accelerated our transformation into a ‘cashless society’. On average, 50 bank branches have closed every month since January 2015, with over 1000 branch closures across the country in the last year alone. It also seems to have wiped away the last remaining businesses that didn’t accept card payments. The high street, already kicking against the current for years, is presently being kept alive by Rishi Sunak’s magic money tree while Amazon records its best quarter for profits ever. It’s no mystery to anyone which way history will go.
I’m lucky that my parents were always instinctively suspicious of ‘screens’. I didn’t get a smartphone until a good way into secondary school and I got my first – and only – games console at the age of 16. I keenly remember getting a laptop for my birthday. I think my parents gave it to me in the hopes that I would become some kind of computing or coding genius – instead, I just played a lot of Sid Meiers Civilisation III. My dad would remind me that nothing on my computer was real, but that didn’t stop me getting addicted to games. If it wasn’t for my parents’ strong interventions I would likely have developed a serious problem – sucked into the matrix and doomed to spend my youth in my bedroom with the blinds down.
All year this year I have wrestled with my media addiction but been unable to throw it off. I told my friends that I was taking a break from social media, I deactivated my Twitter account, I physically hid my phone from myself under my bed, and yet here I am, writing this on my laptop for an online publication. When I got rid of my phone I turned to my computer to fill the time. When I realised that the computer was no better I tore myself from it too… and spent more time watching TV. I tried reading – and made some progress – but the allure of instant reward always pulled me back.
I’m not a completely helpless creature, though. On several occasions I cast my digital shackles into the pit, only to find that I needed internet access for business that was more important than my luddite hissy-fit. Once I opened the computer up for business, it was only a matter of time before I would be guiltily watching Netflix and checking my phone again. It’s too easy – I know all the shortcuts. I can be on my favourite time-absorbing website at any time in three or four keystrokes. Besides, getting rid of my devices meant losing contact with my friends (with whom contact was thin on the ground already). Unplugging meant really facing the horrific isolation of lockdown without dummy entertainment devices to distract me. I lasted a month, once. So determined was I to live in the 17th century that I went a good few weeks navigating my house and reading late at night by candlelight rather than turning on those hated LEDs.
And yet, the digital world is tightening around us all the time. Year on year, relics of our past are replaced with internet-enabled gadgets connected to a worldwide spider web of content that has us wrapped up like flies. Whenever I’ve mentioned this I’ve been met with derision and scorn and told to live my life in the woods. I don’t want to live alone in the woods – I want to live a happy and full life; the kind of life that everyone lived just fine until about the ’90s. I’m sick of the whirr and whine of my laptop, of my nerves being raw from overuse, of always keeping one ear open for a ‘ping ’or a ‘pop’ from my phone, and of the days lost mindlessly flicking from one app to the other. Computers have drastically changed the rhythm of life itself. Things used to take certain amounts of time and so they used to take place at certain hours of the day. They were impacted by things like distance and the weather. Now, so much can occur instantaneously irrespective of time or distance and independent from the physical world entirely. Put simply, less and less of life today takes place in real life.
The world of computers is all I’ve ever known and yet I find myself desperately clawing at the walls for a way out. It’s crazy to think that something so complex and expensive – a marvel of human engineering – can become so necessary in just a few decades. If I can’t get rid of my computers I’ll have to learn to diminish their roles in my life as best I can. This is easier said than done, though; as the digital revolution marches on and more and more of life is moved online, the digital demons I am struggling to keep at arm’s length grow bigger and hungrier.
I’m under no illusions that it’s possible to turn back the tide. Unfortunately the digital revolution, like the industrial and agricultural revolutions before it, will trade individual quality of life for collective power. As agricultural societies swallowed up hunter gatherers one by one before themselves being crushed by industrial societies, so those who would cling to an analogue way of life will find themselves overmatched, outcompeted and overwhelmed. Regardless, I will continue with my desperate, rearguard fight against history the same way the English romantics struggled against industrialisation. Hopeless my cause is, yes, but it’s beautiful all the same.
Can Britain do business with Taliban-led Afghanistan?
I can’t say I’ve ever hosted the Taliban, although if presented with the opportunity, the Worshipful Company of Brewers wouldn’t have been my initial choice of venue.
This irony wasn’t lost on Daniel Evans, frontier markets and technology investor, co-founder of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange Group, and Chairman of the newly-founded Afghanistan Advisory Council (AAC).
Evans joked the venue would allow him to lay claim to successfully organising a piss-up in a brewery, although it must be said the event wasn’t a piss-up at all – partially because the drinks were appropriately alcohol free, but mainly because the foundation of the AAC marks the first actual step at rapprochement with Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
All-in-all, a pretty serious affair. Serious enough to receive a written endorsement from Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Industry and Commerce:
The launch was attended by businessmen from a variety of interested parties; railway construction, petrochemicals, international finance, and so on. Michael Mainelli, current President of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former Lord Mayor of the City of London was among those present, as well as Miles ‘Lord Miles’ Routledge, adventurer-turned-YouTuber-turned-junior member of the AAC.
Among other ambitions for a hospital, a hotel, a logistics centre, and a railway terminus, the AAC’s flagship proposal of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), set to be attached to Kabul airport, has won the backing of Mohammad and Zahid Asif, Owner and Managing Director of Walid Titan Ltd respectively, who are providing the land for the zone.
The precise details of the SEZ have yet to be fleshed out, although it’s clear that the AAC is looking to Dubai’s International Finance Centre (IFC) as a model; a demarcated zone where the norms and customs of international commerce prevail, and regulations are to be drawn up on the advice of the AAC.
The SEZ is one of several projects set to be funded by a new National Growth Fund, which will provide resources to develop a diverse range of industries and projects, such as a far-reaching hospital construction programme. One of the hospital centres will be located in the SEZ. The AAC has been given the mandate to advise the creation of the fund.
One might ask why the Taliban would allow any of this. If one reads between the lines, the SEZ would allow what are essentially Western standards of conduct to take root in an otherwise Islamic theocratic state. Sure, it’s not exactly going to be Amsterdam but it’s hard to square such a proposal with the totalising ‘Islamofascist’ caliphate prophesised by thought leaders of the dilapidated pantheon of liberal-humanitarian interventionism.
The simple but surprising reality of the matter is the Afghans seriously want to get down to business. In fact, it’s becoming clear the Taliban are more eager to do business with the British than vice versa, and not without valid reason. They’re highly suspicious of the Americans, their opinion of the Russians isn’t much better, relations with Pakistan have massively deteriorated within the past year alone, and China and Iran look more like regional threats than potential allies.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Taliban’s view of the British continues to be informed by the Empire, which they regard in a similar manner to how many of us Moderns regard the Roman Empire; that is, as a milestone in human achievement. The British are viewed less as hated enemies and more as honourable and accomplished adversaries. If that’s not soft power, I don’t know what is!
As one would expect, the Afghans have zero appetite to be controlled by a foreign power, but they’re not completely isolationist; they’re quite happy to enlist the help of foreigners with the know-how required to stabilise their war-battered economy, having endured invasions from the USSR and the US-led coalition, ongoing skirmishes with groups like ISIS-K, and incoming Pashtun refugees from neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s a matter of political ideology whether it’s preferable to live in a less-developed but comparatively liberal country over a more-developed but comparatively illiberal one, but – as a general rule of thumb – it’s better to have functioning railways, roads, and hospitals than to not have them at all. Some things aren’t exactly ideological touchstones. Is it really so polarising to believe that Afghanistan should have a reliable supply of currency, rather than making do with sheets of borderline dust held together with glue and tape?
Beneath debates on the political and religious destiny of Afghanistan lies an economy which needs to be run regardless, and the AAC hasn’t so much muscled into this gap, but waltzed into it; partially because the organisation seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue, but also because its founding members felt they had nothing better to do.
On his release from jail in October 2023, having been arrested for not having his papers in order, Routledge – who described the experience as “the best networking opportunity I’ve ever had” – received an email from Evans with the subject line “Bored/gold mine lol” – a proposal which snowballed into setting up a full-on, nation-wide development fund with the blessing of the Afghan government.
Overall, the AAC is filling the vacuum left by a regime that doesn’t know what to do with Afghanistan. One suspects it’s pretty hard to see a path forward with that much egg on your face!
For the past two decades, Britain’s political system has stuck to the same playbook; a hodgepodge strategy of attempting to nag and bomb Afghanistan into becoming a liberal democracy with little-to-no regard for local idiosyncrasies and so forth.
Indeed, no country is a blank slate and Afghanistan is no exception, but more than an investment opportunity – that itself is laden with several obvious benefits; Afghanistan is rich with natural minerals – but a real chance to rehearse discombobulated statesmen and commentators in the virtues and practices which factor into good nation-building; which I cannot help but feel is the spiritual mission of the AAC, even if not said so outright.
Keir Starmer, take notes!
Photo Credit.