I spent most of my day reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching football. I made a big fun dinner (potato and kale soup with turkey sausage), and during that cooking time I was angry that I wasn’t reading Babel. I’m so glad people are still writing books like these. It’s about a lot of big things like race and sexism, the ethics of violence in revolution, and imperialism, but I want to focus on the technology of silver, which is the fantastical element.
In the Babel universe all of this is supported by magical silver activated by translators. The entirety of the infrastructure is propped up by all this magic invisibly smoothing out the rough edges of life. But over time it doesn’t even effectively do that. An example in the book is a silver spell that brings additional catch to fishermen. It requires an annual costly refresher from the translators. Unfortunately the increase in yield means fewer crabs in the fishery, which means that eventually the fishermen require the bars to catch as many fish as they did before the bars. The Oxford of the book knowingly exploits people’s dependency on their silver to make themselves wealthy and indispensable to the world.
It’s hard not to read it in 2026 and think it’s about AI; it probably isn’t given when it was written. And it doesn't even have to be a metaphor for today because being about the devastating impacts of the industrial revolution is already enough. Rural craftspeople being forced out of comparatively pleasant lives needing to move into cities to work in factories and making worse products. Then the products are only cheaper at first, but eventually aren’t even cheaper, just worse? Well that’s a pretty universal historical thing.
This made something in my mind itch so I tracked down a story I remember reading called “The Rat Race.” It turns out that it’s in the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. It’s only two paragraphs long:
“It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town—so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.
Again. Not exactly a foreign concept. Cory Doctorow calls this increase in efficiency leading to an ultimate decline in user experience enshittification. His theory for why is a little different than my two preceding examples. It’s a new name for an old thing. But I still like it.
AI is looking like this. At its best, it smooths over our emails and provides sketchy summaries of things that were already written pretty concisely by trained writers. It gives us ugly art, bad writing, and hallucinated scientific studies. At worst it’s leading to what researchers call “skill decay.” This is where reliance on AI could lead to the decline in basic skills in professions that sometimes matter a lot, like radiology and robot assisted surgery. It does not seem like a stretch to say that it could lead to a medical industry that is completely dependent on AI, and if something were to disrupt that, people could die.
I had a severe nosebleed once and visited an ear nose and throat doctor who seemed almost relentlessly old fashioned. He had a pump blood pressure monitor that he used with a stethoscope. His tools were all stainless steel and not reusable, and he had what looked like a very old autoclave to clean them. It felt like visiting an old-timey country doctor in a black and white movie. He’s retired now and at the time was training a young doctor to take over the practice. I hope that in addition to reading all the new research he still knows how to do things the way they were done. I think it’s worth knowing.
Once when working in the Alaskan rain forest, our GPS unit didn’t work because of the density of the tree canopy. I was the only person on the crew who knew how to use a compass from my boy scout days, so by using a paper map, I navigated us almost exclusively that way through the deep forest. This example doesn’t really add anything new vs. the one in the previous paragraph but it makes me sound cool so I’m leaving it in.
In Babel, this complete dependence on silver magic by the whole of the British Empire has disastrous effects. The entire infrastructure depends on it and in its absence, death and chaos ensues. We’re not there with AI yet, and I don’t know if we ever will be due to what seems like pretty profound flaws in its ability to scale, but I’ve been wrong a lot in my life. We are certainly dependent on the internet, though. And even with a tiny bit of imagination we could see what a disaster awaits us if the whole of it went down for even a week or two. That’s also not terribly far-fetched given the extent to which the internet has consolidated to be hosted by an increasingly small number of mega providers.
Outages impact banks, airlines, medical care, and like a thousand other things (including how fast people could see their matches on dating apps and me getting my dopamine source of choice: internet likes). One outage that lasted an hour and a half cost the economy upwards of 5 billion dollars.
In Babel silver can cure illness and hunger, but instead of being used in places where these issues are the most needed, it’s used for the wealthy for things like making their gardens feel more peaceful, or improving the smell of floral bouquets. Again, it’s not a stretch to look at the real life economic and political landscape of Victorian United Kingdom for modern comparisons, even without the magic. Resources are extracted from exploited countries to enrich a tiny fraction of the world population. The fantastical element makes it feel especially vital to modern readers, though. The components of the phones we’re scolded for not replacing regularly are mined by children.
The changes in my lifetime where this cycle continues and leads to even poorer quality consumer goods because of private equity buyouts, and even vaster economic disparity. I’m not that old, though on the internet I feel like Gandalf trying to explain the last 1,000 years to Merry and Pippin. These declines range from the innocuous like beloved brands Toys R’ Us, Joann’s Fabrics, Doc Marten, Coleman, Pyrex, The North Face, Craftsman tools, etc. to genuinely concerning things like Boeing (nbd), veterinarian clinics, senior care facilities, and privatized prisons. All of this either costs as much as they used to for a lesser product, or (more often) costs much, much more for rapidly declining service.
In general, and in keeping with what I’ve been writing about a lot in this space lately, it just makes me want to sever myself from these conveniences more and more. Part of the whole “back to the 90s” ethos of Log Cabin Sundays is definitely nostalgia-based. But it’s also just because I can remember things. And some of those things were just better then.
I saw a social media post calling out someone at a national park for hiking in jeans and skate shoes. They said it was dangerous and potentially created more work for park staff responding to search and rescue. The irresponsibility was that they weren’t wearing “technical” hiking gear. If you hiked at all in the 80s or 90s you probably hiked in jeans and low-tops. I still do sometimes. If you were a prospector in the 1800s Levis were an absolute game changer and I have a hard time thinking that the modern hiking influencer puts in as many miles in as many conditions as they did. Just because your pants aren’t plastic doesn’t mean you aren’t prepared enough for a very curated NPS experience. As a field biologist, I wore almost exclusively carharrt and arborwear canvas or denim because any hiking brand gear would fall apart in a week of Alaskan bushwhacking or crashing through brush in the oil fields.
The way gear companies talk about advancements in ski and snowboard technology, it’s ridiculous to even use last year’s models. We know it’s because they have stockholders who will get pissed if sales aren’t always higher, but still fall for it. As a teen I briefly sold snowboards, and they would bring us to clinics to tell us all the buzzwords that made this year’s stuff the best in history. They would sometimes openly admit that some of it was completely made up. 30 years later that stuff is unimaginably obsolete, but for reasons I would be hard-pressed to articulate without the brand telling me why. One would think that using that crappy gear skiing 30 years ago was garbage and everyone froze, broke all their bones, and/or died. Sure there are incremental improvements in things, but it’s wild to think that we didn’t have fun because our tools weren’t technical enough. I remember having fun. In fact it would be hard to find someone who is older than 16 who thinks that skiing, if anything, hasn’t gotten almost infinitely worse (private equity strikes again).
My best-sounding record in my collection is The Cars, self-titled. And not a remastered version, an original pressing. It sounds incredible. Neil Young’s Harvest does, too. We continue to innovate and improve audio technology and the result is consistently crappier than it was in the 1970s and I guess we just live with that? Most turntable fans advise that you look for a vintage record player over buying a new one. One of the best camping stoves you can buy can only be found second-hand and has remained more or less unchanged since World War 2. For my money, few modern movies have surpassed–let alone matched–the look and feel of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and two of them have Imperator Furiosa in them).
Yes, some things are cooler now. I would be hard-pressed to log cabin it up year-round because I like Playstation games too much. I’m grateful that people with kidney disease live longer. Smart phones have advanced to the point of being near-perfect devices that do everything I could ever imagine a pocket computer doing, though I wish future innovations would be focused on making their manufacturing even remotely defensible ethically. Alternate energy sources are reducing the demand for oil worldwide, many species that were critically imperiled are making comebacks–often assisted by technological advances–and the chance of surviving cancer has doubled since Neil Young’s Harvest came out.
Are they that much cooler, though? Is the voice in our heads saying we need to upgrade this or that coming from ourselves, really, or are they coming from marketers desperate to stay relevant? A year ago I would have been asking this from the standpoint of just plain money saving, and that’s always relevant and especially now in a time of skyrocketing cost of living and stagnating wages. But there’s a bigger part of it, and that’s that every bit of news we read can be traced to businesses and capital.
I don’t want to spoil Babel any more than I have, but it’s always been this way. The money we spend on stuff is ending up funding war and genocide, it just is. This can be written off by the phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” which often is used as a rejoinder that our dollars can’t be spent ethically so unless we overthrow the system, there’s not much you can do. So do whatever. But we can also just… not consume. That’s always an option. If our stuff works well now, and the stuff being sold will work worse, we can just not buy it. We can buy used, borrow from friends and family, or rent something that we’d only use a few times a year. Chances are there is someone in your community who fixes broken goods for less than the cost of a replacement. When you do need something new, consider independent companies who haven’t cut corners, or find someone local. If getting things made well costs more, save up for it. That’s what our parents and grandparents did. And a lot of those things they bought still hold up today.
Maybe when considering our perfect little log cabin we not only imagine what technology isn’t present, but also what things. When I think of my grandparent’s cabin, it’s full of older things. Nothing in there was made before the 70s, but it’s all comfortable and solidly made. Heavy wool blankets, mismatched coffee mugs, big cast iron dutch ovens. A clock you can hear ticking because there isn’t a constant noise of a tv. Some things you miss when you first get there, then after a few days you wonder why you needed anything else.
Speaking of log cabins, in my imaginary one I listened to only two records: Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American and Gorillaz, Demon Dayz. And to be fair to audio engineers, they both sound quite good. Especially Demon Dayz.