Rebellion

I'm not an enthusiast of new technologies. I find it hard to adapt and only use what seems strictly necessary or that makes my life easier. I'm not proud of it. Going against progress, generally speaking, seems to have no positive aspects.

However, it seems undeniable to me that some technological changes are taking us in the opposite direction and causing us to abandon the values I was raised with, which, until relatively recently, were considered indisputably good. I'll give a few examples, assuming the risk of being labeled as backward.

I think that phone chats are useful on some occasions, but they've robbed us of contact—perhaps less frequent, but certainly deeper—with acquaintances, friends, and family. We no longer call someone we miss to chat for a while and find out how they're doing, because short messages are more efficient and save us the ritual of good manners and cordiality. Good news, and bad news, are communicated with a brief phrase and answered with concise expressions of joy or condolence, and sometimes with these emoticons that limit our expression to unbearable extremes.

People of younger generations—and mine too!—use Tinder and similar apps to meet new people, with the intention, secret or not, of falling in love. Usually, the process is a path full of frustrations, deceptions, and disappointments, which, moreover, rarely ends well. People participate in a kind of casting call where they expose themselves and where they also choose candidates based on a photograph and, at most, a couple of sentences that should allow them to intuit some character traits. Lies run rampant in these first impressions, of course.

What has become of those infatuations that progressed slowly, through increasingly intimate conversations, and which, consequently, established a foundation solid enough for love to have a chance of flourishing?

The latest and most extreme "perversion" is ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence that, I confess, I have refused to use with the childish attitude of a little girl determined not to accept change. In a meeting with a group of people who have to brainstorm a project, creativity, the exchange of ideas, negotiation—everything is swept away by that technological mind that saves effort, but also aborts any kind of reasoning or intellectual endeavor.

Those my age—the boomers— We have stumbled forward, feeling more useless than we are, towards these technological changes. We struggle to know if we are being deceived or manipulated, and we advance fearfully, groping in the dark, knowing ourselves to be bereft of the necessary skills, in this new world that rejects us.

When I hear someone my age assert, with more faith than knowledge, that artificial intelligence will never be able to replace the work of creators, I admit that I find it very difficult to fight against skepticism.

Having reached this point, being able to immerse myself—as I am doing now—in a novel like What Maisie KnewHenry James's *LaBreu*, for the first time in Catalan thanks to Ferran Ràfols's translation, seems to me a tiny but fantastic act of rebellion.