81. For Grandma Kim, Who Justly Asks Why Her Post-Singularity World Has To Be So Complicated (왜 이렇게 얼마나 복잡 해야지?)

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context again. There’s a point to it, I promise. Dedicated to Grandma Kim on the occasion of her 86th birthday.)

 

You've been through so much. You escaped North Korea, survived the Korean War and the loss of your father - my great-grandfather - and got married terribly young. You uprooted completely in pursuit of more stability and better education for my mother and her sibings, showing them all the best schools in the nation. You ran a department store for decades, mostly on your own; I will never forget the days I spent at 5 W 32nd Street when it was still yours. 

You're canny and willing, even wanting, to learn, even in your old age; you're a good deal smarter and more alive than more people are at your age. The ESL courses you took for years, ending up with a much better grasp of English, are evidence enough of that. You've got grit to you, persistence, as well, even now - more so, again, than most people do in their late 80s. And you have a taste for novelty even now - you're not held back by a rejection of the new in full generality. You certainly love Dubai chocolate and missals livestreamed right from the Vatican and from Seoul, even though neither one existed when you were younger. Why, then, did the systems of modern life so often drive you to remark "왜 이렇게 얼마나 복잡 해야지?". That is - "why does this have to be so complicated?".

Indeed, you live in a world grown strange and incomprehensible to you; a world where so many of your assumptions about how the world works are routinely violated. Yours is now a world where the constraints you once took for granted - material scarcity, the difficulty of long-distance communication, the need to look for informal back doors in systems, the very rhythm and tenor of interpersonal interactions - are all different now; no longer present, but neither are they completely relaxed. And thus now, despite the embarrassingly rich material culture all around you, you so often lived as if still under those now-vanished constraints, washing your laundry by hand piece by piece, and doing without rather than asking for help, at least at the start, and by custom. At least I managed to get you to stop doing that so much. If I ever made you feel like a  bother, I promise you that you were not one, and if you ever felt stupid because modern systems overwhelmed you with their needless complications, that's a fact about them, not you.

It's not your fault. Maybe you won't believe that, because "design thinking" and "two-factor authentication" and "affordances" and "self-advocacy" and "nines of uptime"  and "skeuomorphism" and "not packing a dishwasher to the gills" are all varyingly alien concepts to you. But the friction, the complexity, the unreasonable expectations that you encounter on a daily basis and ran into near-constantly when trying to deal with your ESL courses were never a commentary on your intelligence or will, but rather the brute fact that whoever coded the app for the terrible, terrible web portals you repeatedly grappled with just didn't think that anyone like you would ever be using it and didn't really care about what happened they did. They must have made a lot of assumptions about anyone using such a website; about what users already knew or had already experienced. But any such programmer should already know about the sheer number of falsehoods programmers famously believe about names; what could possibly have been their excuse? I think about video games a lot, in this context; about how many games fail to add a (skippable) tutorial to teach the absolute basics that arose by historical accident and are thus not derivable: WASD and mouse-look and the fact that you can crouch. How many people who might have enjoyed such games get turned away, humiliated that they couldn't even start to play?

There's a specific kind of caretaking that was asked of me here and that I was generally even happy to provide: the caretaking of serving as an intercessory interface, of being an intermediating layer between the things that you want and a complicated world that's moved on from you. It's the sort of thing you only really get in a multigenerational family, especially an immigrant family; one which spans whole eras of human development in just a few deceptively short generations. Such a family is one that has, itself, lived through a Singularity, that has experienced a sudden and irreversible phase change in economic and industrial systems. Such caretaking as was my province was that of being the interface - of being not just the first roots that my maternal family tried to set down, but the bridge, the explainer, the perennial teacher, the cushioning layer between a frustraingly, confusingly illegible world, and you; of being the interpreter and executor of your desires, as best I can, because you know that you cannot.

It's not even like you can't learn modern systems at all. You do just fine with your iPad, calling friends across the world, from Dubai to Seoul, and attending meetings of your charity organization - though even then, the absolute mess that is Zoom conferencing has made your life harder on numerous occasions, and I can only imagine that the story is worse yet for some of your friends. You figured out subways just fine in the 80s, and your experience with the Korean immigrant community's well-regarded gypsy cabs meant you handled rideshares with aplomb... but only as long as I was around to call the car and to pick the destinations for you, even if I was doing it from back in the apartment.

And those taut material constraints that no longer truly exist, still exist for you to a fair extent, because all of that abundance is gated behind the complexity (both needless and unavoidable); that the two-day shipping and the rideshares and the ESL classes and charity meetings by video chat all came with added complexity that you never asked for and don't know how to navigate, especially given constant UI changes; the god-awful undergraduate web portals and the confusion of phone apps and the consumer dark-patterns and the user-hostility of Zoom certainly didn't help matters. Illegibility comes with an emotional weight, the classic UIUX/design-theory tragic pattern of a user encountering a system not set up with their thriving in mind blaming herself for the system she wrestles with.

And the pace of change is only increasing. Even you can tell that much. And I have to wonder what will become of me in another 50 years, if the world even makes it to that point? What new systems will have arisen by that point, what new contrivances and user-hostile systems will have sprung up in that time? If I live through a reasonably nice Singularity of my own - one which is by no means an existential calamity, but is also not quite a perfectly eudaimonic one - what strange new systems corresponding to nothing I'd ever seen in the ancient days of the early 21st century will I then find myself frustratedly trying to interface with, crying out for myself "왜 이렇게 얼마나 복잡 해야지?"?