I don’t profess to be a great lingual mind; I’ve never created a novel alphabet, won a spelling bee, or decoded an ancient scribe. But as a generally literate person, it could not have come as more of a shocking blow when I attempted to spell a word while texting my friend, only to be told that there were “no replacements found”.
What does that even mean?!
Technology has come so far. We’ve landed a man on the moon, we’ve somewhat successfully cloned a sheep, but when I type ‘aqcuiantance’ into iMessenger, that’s so fucking impenetrable that this software can’t even begin to venture a guess as to what I might be trying to communicate?
In an age of instant communication, we should be able to understand each other better than ever before, yet somehow the opposite seems to be true. Some would argue this is due to ever more fractioned media, discord-sowing algorithms, and the general alienation of late-stage capitalism, but I have to disagree. The main issue seems to be that my so-called smartphone thinks that I’m obsessed with saying “ducking” and is tracking all of my movements and data yet can’t make sense of me typing “bearuaracy”.
Am I crazy to think we could be trying a little harder here?
Gaslighting, quiet-quitting, emotional abuse: these buzzwords all share something in common. Specifically, these are all things my phone is doing to me when it claims that I have spelled a word so catastrophically wrong that the most sophisticated technology in the world can’t makes heads or tails of it. I mean really?
Where the fuck does my phone get off? Does it think it’s some sort of genius? If it’s so smart, then how come it always autocorrects “its” to “it’s” even when I’m not trying to use the fucking contraction?? It seems the whole Apple enterprise is dead set on making me out to be a damn fool, presumably so that my self-esteem will sink so low that I finally download one of those therapy apps Instagram won’t stop hawking at me.
At the end of the day, my self-worth is in shambles, but I know none of this is my fault. Aufeederzane, bitch!
