Technology

I first came across the Zoe programme when a bright yellow package arrived on my parents’ doorstep last year. My mother, like many, had been wooed by the TV personality Davina McCall into ‘living her best life’ by ordering a Zoe gut-health testing kit (at an upfront cost of £299, or £599 for the Plus plan).  Zoe is the invention of Tim Spector, the professor-turned-health guru who ran the Covid symptom-tracker app throughout the pandemic. It’s a personalised nutrition programme that promises to make you ‘feel’ healthier and improve your gut health, energy levels and even flatulence.

Before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer admitted he was concerned about what life in Downing Street might be like for his children. It was, he said, the ‘single thing’ that kept him awake at night. What’s notable is that we aren’t even aware of Starmer’s children’s names. They are teenagers but that’s about all we know about them. They were not photographed when Starmer and his wife Victoria entered No. 10, nor have they been seen since. ‘We do try to protect them… we don’t use photos of them in any way,’ Starmer said. There seem to be no pictures in the public domain of Starmer with his children. A smartphone ban shouldn’t come from the government; it should come from parents I’d say that is quite an achievement.

Home Britain enjoyed its share of the worldwide failure of 8.5 million computers reliant on Microsoft, through a faulty update of the CrowdStrike antivirus software. On the first day, 167 air departures were cancelled in the United Kingdom – 5.4 per cent of those scheduled. (Worldwide it was 5,078 – 4.6 per cent of those scheduled.) Doctors’ appointment systems stopped working and customers at Gail’s bakery could not pay for their pains au chocolat. BT was fined £17.5 million for a ‘catastrophic failure’ on 25 June last year that led to 14,000 999 calls not being connected. National debt, which fell from 251.7 per cent of GDP in 1946 to 21.6 per cent in 1990, had risen by June this year to 99.5 per cent.

Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the dotcom era, I’m not missing this one,’ someone says. ‘People need to stop moaning about artificial intelligence,’ says another. Future House, in an old coaching house in Hackney, is described on its website as ‘London’s techno-optimist members’ club’. Techno-optimism? Adherents believe that technological progress is the best way to fix the world’s problems.

Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet. That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos.

Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with rapidly advancing technology. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top “autists” if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on — and tycoons are eager to cash in on the final frontier. Shane Cashman dives into the new wild west of explorers and entrepreneurs commercializing the great unknown. Lionel Shriver brings us back to earth with a look at the electrical grid and our government’s push for green energy and electric vehicles.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the first and biggest tech convention of the year, took place earlier this month, where the strangest, newest products were shown off. As usual, there was a lot of fluff — pointless gizmos that work on a show floor but never make it to stores — but there were also core signs of the technology trends we’re going to see this year, and products I’m excited to try. Screens are always a strong point at CES, and this year proved no different, from pure quantum dot prototypes, translucent televisions and yet another laptop with a glasses-free 3D display; but it’s the arrival of great OLED screens to mainstream laptops that truly excites me.

In the Phetasy.com book club, we recently read the famous social science tome, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. In it he examines the decline of social capital across various facets of American life. Based on his 1995 essay of the same title, the book was groundbreaking when it appeared in 2000. Putnam had noticed a trend: Americans were spending more and more time alone. His book analyzed the data and contemplated what it meant for our democracy and humanity. Although his observations were a harbinger of the oft-cited “epidemic of loneliness” we are currently living through, in our post-Trump, post-pandemic pre-maggedon reality, Bowling Alone reads like a nostalgic look at the good ol’ days. Days when people still interacted at all.

Several years ago — long before Elon renamed it X, restricted most features behind a paywall and made it altogether less pleasant to use — I uninstalled Twitter from my phone. Then, on my laptop, I set the Minimal Twitter extension to hide all interaction counts. I still have no idea how many followers I have.  I wasn’t hopelessly addicted to the site, nor was it enraging me on a frequent basis. Put simply, though a Twitter-using liberal, I was not a “triggered lib.” But whenever I wasn’t doing something else, or waiting in line, or walking to make some coffee, I flicked through it. When I should have let the silence breath, I pulled out my phone and refreshed my feed.

As I sat down to dinner in a lovely old country pub my reservation was cancelled by my iPhone, which was having a tantrum. The owner of this restaurant was serving us with a smile, we had been shown to our table, drinks and menus had been brought. But the buzzing lump of metal in my bag was adamant this was not happening. My iPhone had packaged up a montage surprise, complete with a replay of our private conversation I was experiencing one of those moments where reality splits into two: the one you are experiencing and the one your phone claims you are. A lot of people obediently accept the phone’s version no matter what. This is presumably why drivers follow their satnavs into garden walls, or swerve along the motorway looking at pictures of dogs on Facebook.