The Uses of Disenchantment

Wonder and dread are the same posture in different weather: both hold the machine too high above you to be read. Disenchantment is not a faculty lost. It is one returned.

I no longer find any of it amazing, and I have come to think that is the most useful thing that has happened to me in this entire cycle.

This is easy to mistake for cynicism, especially from someone who has been around long enough to have earned some, and I want to be careful, because it is the opposite. The cynic has decided in advance that nothing is worth much: a verdict, as fixed and as blind as the enthusiast’s, only colder. What I am describing is not a verdict about the technology at all. It is the moment a technology stops glowing and starts showing its mechanism, and I could finally see it.

There is a feeling the new systems produce in almost everyone the first while, and I felt it too, the small vertigo of watching a machine do a thing you were sure belonged to us: it answers, it composes, it seems for a moment to understand. The feeling is real. What almost no one says is that it is also the thing standing between you and any accurate account of what the machine is doing. Awe is a posture of looking up, and from the ground, looking up, you can tell only that something is large and bright and above you: not its parts, not its edges, not the small set of things it genuinely does against the far larger set it merely appears to. Wonder and dread, the golden age and the extinction, are the same posture in different weather, and both hold you exactly where the view is worst.

I have spent thirty years watching that shape of light arrive and then fade, with the network, with the cloud, with the device that ended up in every pocket, and the fading always felt, at the time, like a small loss, the magic going out of a thing I had briefly loved being amazed by. It took me most of those years to understand that the fading was the arrival. The moment the glow went down was the moment the mechanism came up, and the mechanism was the thing I was there to read. You cannot defend a system you are still worshipping. You cannot audit a miracle. The disenchantment was never the end of my relationship with a technology: it was the start of the only useful part of it.

So when people ask me now, a little disappointed, whether I have lost my sense of wonder about all this, I tell them yes, gladly, and that I recommend it. Not because the systems are worthless: in the narrow band where they do what they actually do, I reach for them daily, and the abstinence that passes, in certain circles, for insight has never impressed me. The point is smaller and more practical. The wonder was never information: it was weather. And you do not make a single real decision, about what to deploy or what to keep away from the people you are responsible for, from inside weather. You make it from the ground, inside the mechanism, where the parts are, and you cannot reach the ground while you are still looking up.

What surprised me, arriving late, was that the disenchantment told me almost nothing new about the machines and a great deal about us: how badly we want the object of awe, how tired we are, how much easier it is to feel a large feeling about a technology than to do the slow reading of what it actually does. The wonder is not quite ours even while we hold it. It is the most pleasant part of the product and the least examined, and it asks nothing of us except that we keep looking up, which is the one posture from which nothing can be governed, nothing checked, nothing in the end understood.

I will admit the disenchantment costs something. The wonder was pleasant, the way the first hour of any infatuation is pleasant, and the country on the far side of it is quieter, more accurate and less warm. But it is the country the work happens in, and the one I would wish on anyone who has to make a real decision about these systems rather than merely a feeling about them. The glow will keep arriving, with each new model and each new capability, because it is profitable that it should. The most useful thing I can tell you is that it goes down, if you let it, and that what it uncovers is not less than the miracle you were promised: it is the machine, finally the right size, close enough to read.