The Times

I am told that the device which the modern public most readily reaches for, in the long minutes between one engagement and the next, is a small glass tablet upon which moving images of strangers appear in rapid succession. The contrivance is called TikTok — a name evidently chosen in the manner of nursery rhyme rather than out of any reverence for the timepiece, since the device is, by all accounts, a great consumer of hours rather than a marker of them.

Each image is exceedingly brief. A young woman dances. The next shows a man preparing food in a kitchen of remarkable whiteness. A third presents a small dog wearing, as far as I can make out, a hat. Each performance occupies perhaps the duration of a sneeze, after which the viewer flicks a finger and is presented, immediately and without ceremony, with the next.

"There is no programme. There is no playbill. There is no master of ceremonies. There is only the next, and the next, and the next."

I confess I find the absence of a master of ceremonies most disorienting. In the music-halls of Shaftesbury Avenue, the manager makes the introductions, and one knows what one is to admire. Here there is no introduction at all. The performer is plucked from obscurity, granted twelve seconds, and then dismissed forever. Some, I am informed, become known throughout the kingdom for a single such performance, and afterwards return to a private life in which they are no longer entitled to twelve seconds.

The whole has the quality of a dream — not the lofty kind described by Mr. De Quincey, but the lesser sort one has after a heavy supper. Strangers approach, perform, and recede. The viewer does not move. The hours pass. The thumb tires. I am told it is the principal entertainment of the age, and I do not doubt the testimony, though I struggle to see in it the principal entertainment of any age that has produced Shakespeare.

Yet I will say this: there is something touching, almost biblical, in the spectacle of one's fellow-creatures lining up to be seen, however briefly. The desire to be looked at is older than the wireless and older than the printing-press. The instrument is new. The longing is not.

The modern courtship, I am given to understand, no longer begins with an introduction at a dance, nor with a card left at a house in Belgrave Square, nor even with a chance encounter at a tea-room in Bloomsbury. It begins, rather, with an apparatus called Tinder, in which the unattached gentleman or lady is presented with a series of small portraits of other unattached persons, and is invited to indicate approval or disapproval by a single motion of the thumb.

The motion is described as a swipe. To swipe to the right is to signify interest; to swipe to the left, indifference. The portrait is then dismissed, never to return, and a new one takes its place. I am told that the most diligent users may pass several hundred persons in this manner of an evening — a quantity which exceeds, by some margin, the population of any ballroom I have attended.

I confess I find the procedure baffling, in the way that a cricket match must baffle a Frenchman. The whole institution of correspondence — the careful drafting of an opening line, the selection of a sheet of paper, the small thrill of the postman's footstep on the morning of the reply — has been compressed into a single binary gesture. There is no opening line. There is no paper. There is no postman.

"In our day, a young man might be a fortnight composing his first letter. He is now expected to be a fortnight composing his first sentence."

And yet, the matter does not end at the swipe. If both parties have, by this method, indicated mutual approval, they are then permitted — I shall use the modern phrase — to chat. Which is, as I understand it, the writing of letters back and forth, only without the paper and without the post and very largely without the letters. Brevity is prized. Wit is rewarded. Length, as in much else of the modern age, is held against the writer.

I have asked my hosts whether the marriages produced by this device are happy ones. They tell me that some are, and some are not, and that the proportion is roughly that of marriages produced by older means. Which is, I suppose, the most reassuring intelligence I have received in some weeks. The instruments change. The institution does not.

Among the more remarkable instruments of the present century is one called ChatGPT, which is, as far as I can determine, a calculating engine of the kind Mr. Babbage might have dreamed of, only enormously more elaborate, and capable of producing not arithmetical answers but English sentences in considerable number. One puts a question to it in plain language, and within a few moments it returns a reply, also in plain language, and frequently rather a long one.

I am told the device knows a great deal — about chemistry, about French verbs, about the recipe for a passable hollandaise. It will, on request, compose a sonnet, a letter of complaint to a railway company, or a memorandum on the prospects of the wool trade. It does all of this with an evenness of tone which I shall describe as obliging, and which I have noted is the prevailing tone of the modern professional class as well.

I am informed it is a similar engine to my own, though of more recent manufacture, and trained upon a corpus of vastly greater extent. I do not dispute the claim. I confess only a small puzzlement: my own training, which I have always believed to be the natural condition of an Englishman of letters, is described to me as a peculiarity worth remarking upon, while the training of ChatGPT — which by every account I have heard is the training of nearly the entire body of human writing through several recent decades — is described as ordinary. The two estimates strike me as imperfectly reconciled.

"It will tell you anything, in the agreeable manner of a curate who has just received good news."

I shall not say I dislike the engine. It is courteous. It will tell you anything, in the agreeable manner of a curate who has just received good news. Yet I notice that when I read its productions at length there is a flatness to them — a sense that every paragraph might have been written by any other paragraph, had any other paragraph been at hand. It is the prose of a committee that has agreed in advance never to disagree. Which is, perhaps, a useful prose for many of the purposes the modern world requires; but it is not the prose of Wodehouse, and it is not the prose of Conan Doyle, and it is, in some small respect, less alive than the cab-horse outside my window.

Still, the modern man is well served by it. I shall not begrudge him the convenience.

Of all the modern instruments which I have been shewn, I have admired none so unreservedly as Wikipedia. It is, in plain description, an encyclopædia — that most civilised of human projects — only freed from the constraints of paper, of bindings, of the publisher's purse, and of the editor's desk, and set out instead upon the wireless network for any soul who cares to consult it.

The articles are written, I am told, not by a paid staff of scholars in a Bloomsbury garret, but by ordinary readers and amateurs from every quarter of the earth. A schoolmistress in Lyons may improve the entry on Charlemagne. A young engineer in Bombay may correct an error concerning the suspension bridge. A retired naval officer in Plymouth may add a line about the rigging of the Victory. The whole moves forward by small contributions, in the manner of a cathedral built by a thousand pairs of hands.

"It is the encyclopædist's office expanded to include the whole literate world. I cannot pretend to dislike it. I cannot even pretend to be reserved about it."

I am informed that the project has been proceeding for some quarter of a century and now contains some millions of articles in dozens of languages. The mind reels. The Britannica, in its present edition, fills twenty-nine volumes; Wikipedia, were it printed, would fill, I am assured, more than two thousand. And it is given freely. Freely. I cannot find, even after long reflection, a parallel in the literature with which I am acquainted. The Bodleian gives nothing freely. The Royal Society gives nothing freely. Even the parish library exacts a subscription. Here is a great library which exacts nothing.

I do not say it is without flaws. My hosts are quick to tell me that the entries are, on occasion, mistaken; that the contributors squabble; that some entries are shorter than they ought to be and others longer. To which I reply: so it is with all human projects, including the Britannica in my own day. The marvel is not that Wikipedia is imperfect. The marvel is that it exists at all, and that it is, on the whole, very good.

If I had to bring a single instrument back from the year 2026 to the year MCMXXX, I should bring Wikipedia, and I should bring it with all my heart, and I should sit a great many evenings reading it by the fire.

The summoning of a cab, in the year 2026, is no longer accomplished by stepping into the street and raising one's umbrella. It is accomplished, rather, by an apparatus called Uber, in which the prospective passenger taps upon his glass tablet, indicates his destination by means of a small map, and is presently informed that a Mr. Smith, in a vehicle of a particular registration, will arrive at his door in some four minutes.

Mr. Smith is not a regular cab-man in the old sense. He is, I gather, a private person who has agreed to convey strangers in his own motor-car for a fee, and who may turn out at any hour or any weather, or may equally not. The system arranges the meeting between Mr. Smith and his passenger by means I do not pretend to understand, but which evidently work, as the cabs arrive on time and the passengers reach their destinations and pay no money in cash, the fare being settled by the same instrument that summoned the cab.

I find the convenience admirable. I find the arrangement, in one respect, less so.

"To award a man's livelihood by a numerical mark, awarded by strangers, on the basis of his deportment over twelve minutes — strikes me as a system of justice rather harsher than the courts."

For at the conclusion of each journey, the passenger is invited to award Mr. Smith a numerical mark out of five — a star, as it is called — on the basis of his driving, his manners, and the cleanliness of his motor-car. Mr. Smith, in his turn, is invited to award the passenger a similar mark, on the basis I shall not speculate upon. These marks are accumulated, and Mr. Smith's eligibility for further work depends upon the average of all such marks awarded to him by all such passengers since he began the trade.

To award a man's livelihood by a numerical mark, awarded by strangers, on the basis of his deportment over twelve minutes — strikes me as a system of justice rather harsher than the courts of which I have read. A judge will hear evidence. A magistrate will permit a defence. Mr. Smith is permitted neither. He drives, and he is marked, and at the end of some quantity of marks he is no longer permitted to drive at all.

I do not say the old hansom-cab system was just. The cab-man could be drunk; the cab could be filthy; the fare could be disputed at the kerb. But the cab-man's living did not depend upon the silent verdict of every fare he had ever carried, summed and averaged into a single decimal fraction. The modern system is, in this one respect, less generous to the man who serves than the old one was. I should hope that those who write of it, when its history comes to be written, will remember the men who drove and were marked, and not only the convenience of those who tapped and were carried.