One might expect someone like Dylan, immersed as he has always been in folk songs, old standards and American history, to lament the corrupting influence of new technologies. And he offers some quotes along these lines. For example:
Everything has become too smooth and painless… The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could rain blood, and we would ignore it, cool as cucumbers. Everything is too easy. A simple tap of the ring finger, the middle finger, a little click, it’s enough and we’re there.
Or again:
Technology is like witchcraft, it is a magic show, it evokes spirits, it is an extension of our body, like the wheel is an extension of our foot. But this could be the final nail in the coffin of civilization; we just don’t know.
But Dylan’s view is more nuanced than these quotes might suggest. Even though technology could doom our civilization, Dylan reminds us that it gave we our civilization, that is, “science and technology built the Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Colosseum, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, rockets, jet planes, airplanes , automobiles, atomic bombs, weapons of mass destruction.”
Ultimately, technology is a tool that can either decimate or boost human creativity.
Keyboards and joysticks can be like millstones around your neck, or they can support players; in one or the other, it’s you who judges. Creativity is a mysterious thing. He visits whoever he wants, when he wants, and I think that, and that alone, gets to the heart of the matter…
(Technology) can hinder creativity, or it can lend a hand and be an assistant. Creative power can be slowed down or prevented by everyday life, ordinary life, life in the squirrel cage. A data processing machine or software can help you get out of this situation, overcome the obstacle, but you have to get up early.
Get up early
I thought about these quotes during the recent Christmas and New Year holidays, which I largely spent coughing on the couch with a kind of respiratory absurdity. One of the benefits of this forced isolation is that it has given me ample time to think about my own goals for 2025 and how technology might help or hinder them. (Another was that I was able to re-watch the first four Die Hard films on Hulu; the fourth was “dog-ass” enough that I couldn’t bring myself to watch the final, rotund entry in the series.)