Dark Energy

On the forces that tear us apart

Photo by Andrew Schultz on Unsplash

The last three men I matched with on dating apps were not men at all—they were bots. In two of those cases, it was immediately clear to me that the responses I was getting to my attempts at playful chit chat did not pass the Turing test.

“I would like to get to know you,” the words in my chat bubble said. “Would you like to get to know me?” When I responded in the affirmative, the lines unfurled onto the pace lightning-fast, as if robot fingers were flashing across the keyboard at superhuman speed:

In my free time, you can find me immersed in a good book, cheering on my favourite sports teams, or embarking on a road trip to discover hidden gems. I’m also a dance floor enthusiast, spinning and swaying to the rhythm with abandon, even if my moves don’t always hit the mark.

In the third case, I was temporarily fooled. The guy seemed very considerate. He had certainly read my profile and was responding to specific details I had posted there, asking careful follow-up questions about work and hobbies. But something seemed a little off, a little pat. And when I asked, “What do you do for a living?,” the response was, “That’s fascinating! What an insightful thing to say! I would very much like to know what you do for a living.” Looking back at our previous conversation, I saw that all the rejoinders I had thought showed genuine interest in me were actually a mixture of sycophancy and rephrasings of my own words.

I’m not the only person to have noticed that the apps have become infested with such bots and to feel rage and despair at encountering them so often. It feels like the very worst kind of teasing. I am a digital Tantalus, clutching at branches laden with fruit only to find myself repeatedly grasping thin air. At the very moment at which I most long for human connection, I am offered a hollow simulacrum. I already feel like a fool a lot of the time when I’m dating—foolish for getting my hopes up only to be stood up or ghosted. This makes me feel doubly foolish. And it sews distrust among those of us who are human. Anyone of us could be a Cyclon! And you never know when “All Along the Watchtower” will start to play.

---

It feels like the worst possible manifestation of a wider phenomenon that has been worrying me for years: the increasing shift away from real-life, person-to-person human interactions.

There are many things I hugely appreciate about the increasingly online nature of our world. It means, for example, that instead of trekking out to an office every day, I can remain comfortably ensconced at home, browsing the fridge for leftovers if I get peckish, taking a cat nap if I’m drowsy, pre-listening to podcasts and recordings (part of my job) while walking Cookie through the local park, stooping to pet every silky-haired cavoodle we pass (they are legion in our genteel Sydney suburb).

The easy accessibility of the digital also means that I retain at least a tiny thread of connection with friends from past stages in my life, from whom I am now separated by tens of thousands of miles of land and ocean. And it means that I can interview fascinating people I would never otherwise have been able to make contact with. I’ve even used social media to amass a real-life group of friends. Thanks to my work, I have a lot of Twitter mutuals and if I see that someone who seems simpatico is based in Sydney, I arrange to have coffee in real life and we generally end up becoming offline friends, too, who see each other in the flesh at least periodically—and in many cases, often.

So, yes I love the geographical freedoms and enlarged sphere of acquaintanceship that technology brings, in enabling us to communicate across wide distances. I even feel close to some people whom I know only as disembodied text on a screen. But such things can only be a supplement to real-life intimacy. And its ease and immediacy make online communication all too ready a replacement for physical presence. Since our time and energy are finite, we humans evolved to take short cuts wherever possible. Those who preferred to meander along by the scenic route were probably bred out of the gene pool eons ago.

It erodes our social relations when, instead of calling someone on the phone or meeting up with them for a drink, we content ourselves with sending a WhatsApp message or commenting on a Facebook post. But alongside this attenuation of our interactions we people we know in the flesh, there is an uncanny valley of conversations with interlocutors whom we will never know, of threads of text that seem like a sheet woven from spider-silk, a translucent pico-layer of reality, beneath which is the abyss. And it’s at the times in my life when I’ve been at my most vulnerable—looking for a job, looking for a companion—that possibilities have proven most ghostly and insubstantial.

A decade or so ago, I was working as a editor and translator. There were many different online agencies that offered to pair up freelancers in those fields with jobs—sometimes for a small fee, though most were free of charge. The more “reputable” ones set various translation tests and exams and even held Zoom interviews. I was repeatedly told that I had aced the tests and that they would be excited to pair me up with commissions soon. Soon, I was signed up to dozens of such agencies. None of them ever resulted in a job. Thankfully, I now have a job I love—but finding love has itself become a thankless job.

---

In his book A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss imagines life in a distant future, when the universe has expanded to a point at which it is impossible to even see the stars across the vastnesses of empty space, leaving the inhabitants of any future Earth to look up at a black sky. I found this vision terrifying and beautiful and wrote a sonnet about it.

We are alone. Our warp ships have not found
On any planet other than our own
Life forms except bacteria. All around,
Beyond our mega galaxy, a zone
Of nothingness extends: without a star,
Nor radiation, plasma everywhere—
A universe in which Zorbanians are
The only sentient species. But I hear
A crazy scientist claims that long ago
The universe was more compact; and near
Enough to see, they set the sky aglow
Our stellar neighbours, our red-shifted brothers
Until the dark force tore us from each other.

In many ways, technology has shrunk the globe. In the world of Jane Austen’s novels, thirty miles of muddy, rutted country road can be an impassable distance. A different county can be a world away. The hundred-odd miles that separate Mansfield Park and Southampton keep Fanny Price from seeing her own parents for eight years—and is probably a longer journey than Austen herself ever made. By contrast, I have crisscrossed the world dozens of times. But yet technology has kept us apart because it has made it possible to replace warm breathing human beings with mere words and images on a screen. Like the dark energy that is scattering the stars, we seem sometimes to be accelerating away from each other. Or worse—there may not be an each other; behind the pixels there may be no human consciousness at all.