The first time I saw a mobile phone was in the 1980s, somewhere in Parramatta. It was at a half-day training course on self-defence for wannabe security guards run by a former army sergeant.
The sergeant was small but wiry, strong and very quick. He had boxed professionally and studied all manner of martial arts.
Before I get to the phone I want to make one point, en passant: you cannot learn how to defend yourself in half a day. Alas, many blokes are born thinking they can fight without any training. Most can’t. I learned I couldn’t through the bitter experience of being a fat kid in the 60s and early 70s who had to change schools every two years because his dad was in the army.
The only lesson from many beatings in several states and territories is that I have a very thick skull, a point my online detractors have been making for some years now. As proof they might be on to something, it never crossed my mind as a kid to ask someone to teach me how to fight. Mostly because I didn’t really want to fight anyone. Unfortunately, sometimes you don’t get a choice, something the Australian government would be wise to consider.
The sergeant did give me the second-best piece of advice I ever heard about defending yourself. The first being “Never fight naked”, but I have told that story here before. Anyway, the sergeant’s opening gambit to the group of mall warriors was: “You wanna know how to win a fight?”
We all nodded in unison. This was an excellent opening, cutting straight to the chase without the need to put in tedious hours of hard work.
“Don’t get hit,” he said.
Alas, learning the skills it takes to not get hit involves a lifetime’s worth of training. You want to see how not to get hit, watch the early film of Muhammad Ali. His supernatural ability to sense a blow early and shift his head in the flap of a butterfly’s wing, so the fist fizzes through the air where his face had been milliseconds before, is why boxing deserved its old title of the sweet science.
Ali’s skill was a mix of innate talent and brutally hard work that has never been replicated. And, in the end, even Ali got hit.
But I digress.
The phone. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. The sergeant had come into the room lugging what looked like a car battery with a handle and a handset attached to it, which is pretty much what it was. The thing must have weighed between three and five kilos.
“What is this?” I asked, awe-struck, after he allowed me to pick it up.
“A mobile phone,” he said proudly.
It had cost him a couple of thousand dollars and he was one of the few people he knew who had one. It was a good investment because, as a small businessman who was routinely teaching in different venues, he never missed calls from potential clients.
This device now topped my list of impossible machines, nudging out the photocopier.
Even in the early 90s, when I was working for The Canberra Times, mobile phones weren’t all that common. This was excellent because it was hard for your bosses to find you.
Then came the dreaded alphanumeric pager, and summons to call the office came all too regularly. Not long after, the analog mobile phone became ubiquitous.
There were swings and roundabouts in the rapid rise of technology. I remember calling a senior Canberra bureaucrat only to have him declare, “I’m in Tasmania.” We both agreed this was astounding, and he was so pleased that he was much more indiscreet than he should have been.
Work-wise, there were huge benefits in the rapid rise of technology. Reporting on the newborn ACT Legislative Assembly, my friend Hugh Lamberton and I had to go into the city every day and then return to the office in faraway Fyshwick to file at night. Then we were given two “portable” computers that looked like a typewriter in a suitcase.
We also were given a device that connected our machines to a phone line. This converted the digital signals of our stories into sound, allowing the computer to “talk” to another machine over the public telephone network, complete with the screeching handshake that signalled you were connected.
“You know what this means?” I said to Hugh as we watched the story scroll through the phone plug thing on its way to Fyshwick. “We never have to go back to the office ever again.”
And we didn’t. As long as we filed every day and kept management in the loop using our mobile phones, everyone was happy.
There were roundabouts. The ability to be connected meant you couldn’t disconnect. You were never not working. And there was something else: the once publicly restrained, ugly human id was finding its natural home in an anonymous online universe.
An infant Puck had been released and chaos would follow in his footsteps.
Researching a feature on Canberra’s thriving pagan community in 1994 (mostly bureaucrats), I was asking around about where I could find the Satanists. I was told I should go to a university to consult something called “internet”.
A female computer scientist offered to help, as long as I didn’t name her or her organisation. We scrolled through what was then called Usenet newsgroups – essentially online bulletin boards – and there it was: alt.satan. To be honest, this was not the first thing I was drawn to. I really wanted the researcher to open the one titled alt.sex.blonds but didn’t have the courage to ask.
Everyone largely agreed back then that the information superhighway would be, mostly, a good thing. Then, in 2007, Steve Jobs released the iPhone and the world changed forever.
At its launch, the co-founder of Apple declared his smartphone would put “the internet in your pocket for the first time ever”. No one could have conceived then what that would mean.
This smartphone turned the bulk of humanity into broadcasters and set the world on a radically new path.
We are just a few steps into this mapless journey, destination unknown. But we know it scares us because we can’t control it, and the uses to which this almost unlimited power is put are, in equal measure, good and evil.
The casualties are everywhere. The bullied child can never leave the playground. The mob never disperses. Lies travel faster than truth. Outrage outruns understanding. There is no silence, no privacy and no forgetting because the machine records, remembers and republishes everything. What once passed as personal failure is now global spectacle.
Children self-harm in private. Adults unravel in public. The digital world is as sleepless, all-seeing and pitiless as the Eye of Sauron.
Now we stand in the foothills of artificial intelligence and our brief history with the information revolution gives cause to be deeply suspicious of claims we can manage this godlike technology.
Inevitably, it will spiral out of our control.
The blows now fall too fast. We have yet to find ways to defend ourselves. We keep getting hit. And, as the sad tale of Ali’s late career shows, you can take only so much punishment before permanent damage is done.
And there is no bell to call time on this round.
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