It should come as no surprise that we, as a global society, are getting dumber and dumber. I mean, really, just read a few of my blog posts from 14 years ago and compare them to now. It’s as if the pharmacological tour de force that was my college years caught up to me all at once. At least it waited.

In reality, this dumbing down is all part of The Plan.

Hang on. I’ve got to go get my tin-foil hat………. Okay, I’m back.

Don’t do that. You’re making everybody else wait.

Anyway, The Plan…

The Plan is nothing that was done with any kind of forethought. There were no back-room meetings at midnight, no under the table deal makings. In fact, its long-term effects were not really considered beyond a hazy impression that something had to be done so let’s do something. Despite these rather slipshod underpinnings, The Plan moved forward.

While The Plan was being developed, another trend had been put in place by certain members of the last pre-Plan generation. These individuals started working tirelessly to bring Technology to the Masses and make their humble lives better by freeing them up from the onerous tedium that “humble lives” is a euphemism for. Sort of like the “Better Living Through Chemistry” bullshit from the 1950s and 60s, only with fewer dead birds. During this time, the technological push was taking up more and more of the slack between what used to be expected from a typical member of society and the empty shells that remained after The Plan kicked into high gear. And it all happened so slowly that we didn’t even notice.

The Plan was based on a realization that the world would no longer need a highly skilled workforce in the future but would need a bunch of people with modest skills that could be slotted in wherever needed. And, once slotted, could be brought up to speed fairly rapidly in the new slot. Think of the button-pushing George Jetson for the archetype. So, wrapped in egalitarian swaddling, the education system started teaching a standardized curriculum to allow students to succeed in passing standardized tests without any consideration for what the students were good at, or interested in. Just as long as the test results showed that no child was left behind.

Now, well into The Plan and the Technology to the Masses efforts, it has become quite apparent that, despite spending a basically constant amount on education compared to GDP for the last seven decades, no child has been left behind. All children have.

I will pause here for effect.

This fact affected me greatly and has become more and more obvious, through listening to news commentators, our political leaders (actually, their younger speechwriters), and even people worthy of being interviewed, that we have been dumbed down so far that the point of no return is in fact far behind us, shimmering in the distance. 

This was brought home to me when listening to Apple, Inc.’s latest September event and hearing – buried within the piles of Corporate Speak bullshit – the same mistakes over and over again. The highly paid scriptwriters for Apple’s even more highly paid executives were spewing garbage without anyone doing any deeper analysis than: Oh, look! Something’s on the screen, I should read it.

I was deeply, profoundly, and utterly impacted. Or should that be affected? Effected?

During the presentation, these words – including several derivatives of “impact” – were spoken a grand total of thirty-two times. Twenty-four of those – 75% – were “impact”, Six were “effect”. And only two, spoken within thirteen seconds of each other, were “affect”.

Yeah, that is how I spend my free time. You have a problem with that?

This was all because the scriptwriters were too busy learning how to pass the test that they never were taught that words matter. In fact, nobody seems to know, or care, which word means what and which doesn’t really mean what one might think it does or maybe even when one of those words might be wrong. Wrong enough to make what you really said be absolutely nothing like what you think you said.

I’ll pause here for everyone to catch up.

Several weeks ago, in my ill-conceived yet still executed post on the malleability of the English language, I discussed how for a new word to take root in the language it has to be used by people beyond its original coiner. The metaphor was to pick up the word, as a torch, and run with it. In the modern world, torches are not being plucked from the ground and run with. They are left spluttering in the mud, until they finally wink out.

For example, I might write: When I affect my pedantry, it may effect a misinterpretation in my motives but will not affect you beyond that. 

Affect = to cause a change, to pretend to something

Effect = the result of that change or pretense

Impact = to hit something

But, because affect and effect sound alike and have three (at least) meanings – and five shared letters, between them, it gets very confusing very quickly.

But English, with its infinite malleability, comes to the rescue of the modern, test-focused masses by allowing impact to be used figuratively, without requiring any violence, injury, or visits to the local emergency department. This figurative meaning: to affect something suddenly or violently, has been further whittled down to mere affection or effection (see, I did it again). So that I wouldn’t have to waste any unused synapses trying to determine whether “The lack of milk impacted my breakfast plans.”, should have been affected or effected. Problem solved.

But not really because literate laziness is a slippery slope indeed. Going back to Apple, Inc., the most highly valued company on the planet, their scriptwriters couldn’t even figure out which was correct; so they bailed, and chose impact. Even when it should have been affect, effect, or something else entirely.

Which is where Technology for the Masses intersects the storyline.

Technology – these ubiquitous computers we carry or wear – which was supposed to free us to build, create, and learn has instead turned into the largest data grab in the known universe (to date). Humans, surprisingly enough, are as fond of not having to work to survive as all the other domesticated species and so have latched onto our PCs, Macs, phones, watches, doorbells, refrigerators and whatnot like white on rice. In exchange for a peek at our daily lives we get all sorts of helpful and entertaining software that is specifically designed to let our untrained minds wander and focus on less important things than word choice.

What this does, at basically all levels, is standardize what we produce to the same set of rules – be they the word choice used in a mega-dollar product launch by a zillion-dollar corporation to the recipes fed to an aspiring baker writing up his own plan for a new business.

When we offload some of the responsibility for what we say to one of these ubiquitous helpers – whether we’re Apple, Inc, an aspiring baker, a struggling student, or a grandparent trying to connect to their grandkids – the result is a removal of our individual voice – the way we would say something face-to-face – in favor of a more standardized product that has lost a bit of what makes us, us.

These tools we use to talk with each other now learn not by emulating us, but by averaging out the way everything writes. They don’t improve our voice, but sand off the edges and remove our individual rhythms in favor of the Rules of Grammar, as interpreted, and the average voice of all writers. 

This flattening of our individuality to accurately and precisely communicate by slavishly accepting the highlighted blocks, red or blue underlines, and edited-for-tone/clarity/whatever suggestions of our Grammarlys, Words, and Assistants is, in fact, self-reinforcing. These tools – now with various Artificial Intelligence agents incorporated therein – are being trained on an ever more standardized set of data that those helpers, in fact, have a share in creating. 

So, as with the education system failing to support our unique skills and interests, the unfortunate coincidence of the Tech Revolution also fails to support our unique perceptions and ways we communicate. This impacts (a correct way of using it) everything from a student’s efforts at creativity to global travelers pushing a button on their phones to say something almost, but not entirely, completely different from what they think they’re saying. That button push or AI helper removes the responsibility for someone to actually learn something to get by in the world. A way to make things easier at the same time it makes things worse.

In the Olden Days this was known as Garbage In – Garbage Out. Now, it’s just the way things are.