A World Of Tinkerers

It was Thomas Sowell who said, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs”. What he was referring to was the system, when maxed out in ideas, could no longer handle any new ones. That whatever solution that could be proposed must have an equal and opposite reaction. I visualize this “system” as a balloon. When the balloon is inflated with ideas to its maximum, it can no longer entertain any new ones. Whatever solution is proposed, an idea must be taken away.

We live in a world of tinkering. Endless and mindless production for the sake of production. We are, the lot of us, busybodies buzzing for the sake of the buzz. It is my opinion that we are constantly being duped by the commercial, the technological app, the CEO, the corporate motto, the new invention, and the promise that all these things will make our lives better, easier, and more efficient. It seems the individual cannot resist these temptations nor are they aware of the obtrusive tempting nature of these concepts.

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I say obtrusive because I believe our humanity is being obtruded upon––but for so long now and so completely, we take much of it as fact and we forget to ask questions of ourselves and of our technocratic overlords. Most of which, I believe, are tinkerers. It is as though nothing can be left alone. Everything must move forward either by mile or by inch and the result, much of the time, is a product, a service, or an invention that nobody needed and nobody asked for in the first place.

I rather dislike scanning a QR code to read a menu at a restaurant. It presumes I have a smartphone and that it is with me. I find it hilarious that you can connect your refrigerator to an application on your phone. I have never, not once, had an AI-generated customer support rep that did not end with me asking, for fuck’s sake, please let me speak to a human. Just recently, it was reported that AI is now being relied upon to decide some aspects of court cases.

From Brazil’s UOL publication:

Startup creates AI and is already selling a robot judge: 'Overcoming the judiciary'…

“…In the US, this may already be a reality as of last week. The startup Fortuna Arbitration, led by lawyer Brian Potts, Harvard law student Kimo Gendall, and computer scientist Kenny Mclaren, launched Arbitrus on the 3rd, an artificial judge created to resolve private disputes outside the judiciary…”

I wonder, where someone obtains the right to do this. And by right, I mean gumption, nerve. We move so quickly, so desperate to tinker, that products and services and even our world rarely resembles what it used to just a few years ago. It is natural that to expect change, evolution, etc. But the rate of such rapid and systemic growth is leaving the modern human in a daze, a flurry of technological paraphernalia that leaves us supremely detached from reality, detached from our own lives, detached from one another, detached from ourselves. The zombie apocalypse, after all, never came in the form of rabid humans hunting the unbitten, but in the form of the cell phone which is now so completely integrated with our bodies that it has become an appendage.

In my last article, A Personal Revolution, I tried to describe the victory of doing nothing. That if we can learn to sit in the quiet, sit with ourselves, ruminate on our own lives or the lives and existence of others, then surely we have not been completely infected by the technological disease––an affliction I am sure goes by many names. It was during the 20^th century that fascist, totalitarian, and authoritarian governmental personalities were the greatest threat to modern humanity. That their violence, their persuasion, and their force was too powerful and too reliably at odds with free thought, and free expression to be ignored or underestimated.

Orwell’s “boot” was not a product of subtlety; but was the warning that the boot of power will forever be stomping on the face of man. Today, I believe, we are facing a similar threat—but one that is subtle is at times useful, but has obtruded on every facet of our lives. That threat is our endless technological tinkering and those technological fiddlers who cannot help themselves. They claim they speak on behalf of humanity, but they grow very rich, richer by the day, and the rest of humans are left holding a sack of mostly broken toys. Orwell’s famous boot is no longer just a boot––it’s an app that connects to your blender.

We are giving up much of what makes us human and even worse, we are giving it up without a fight. I believe we should reevaluate who is tinkering around with our humanity and ask if it is really on our behalf––is it all really for the good?

JSV
2025

Judson Stacy Vereen is the author of American Pleasure, 62 Poems from Judson Vereen, and Like A Bird Knows To Sing. He is also a staff contributor to Wrong Speak, where he publishes a bi-monthly opinion column. His substack page is Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.