Donald Trump says that “everything is computer” – does he have a point?
- Text by Emma Garland
- Illustrations by Liam Johnstone
Huck’s March dispatch — As AI creeps increasingly into our daily lives and our attention spans are lost to social media content, newsletter columnist Emma Garland unpicks the US President’s eyebrow-raising turn of phrase at a White House car show.
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Donald Trump is, to use his own parlance, scum and garbage. We don’t need to revisit the mountain of qualifying evidence, suffice to say his administration is currently preparing to revoke the temporary legal status of over half a million migrants who arrived in the United States from Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti under a Biden-era humanitarian parole programme. Grim.
Unfortunately, the man also has a profound grasp of the English language. Whether he’s referring to terrorist sympathisers as “the haters and losers” or an iPad as “the flat one,” Donald Trump has a unique gift for boiling complex ideas down to startlingly succinct terms, like Heraclitus with a combover and an emergency button for Diet Coke. He dished out yet another timeless philosophical musing, possibly one of his best, at the start of this month. With AI trampling through every aspect of life, from music streaming to warfare, and the global tech industry throwing billions at whitepapers explaining “multi-modal generative AI systems” or exploring “the intricate landscape of AI-related liabilities,” Trump summarised our relationship with technology in three simple words. During a car show outside the White House (a sentence we will have to deal with another time), he hopped behind the wheel of a Tesla, reached into the primordial soup of the human experience, and remarked, “Everything is computer!”
- Read next: The digital artists fighting back against AI
And he’s right. Everything is computer. The fear that technology is eating the world at such an alarming rate that you will wake up one day and find it completely unrecognisable to the one you were born into: that’s computer. The frustration that you can’t make a reservation or pay for parking without giving your life story away to an obtuse third party app: that’s also computer. The reason why you feel constantly tired and alienated no matter how much “mindfulness” you practise, or experience a dark, sickly feeling in the back of your head after zoning out on TikTok for too long: oh you know that’s computer. “Everything is computer!”, then, encompasses the full spectrum of emotions flooding into these uncharted waters we find ourselves navigating. The awe, the horror, the excitement, the trepidation, the overwhelming ambivalence. Computer is good, yes, but computer is also bad.
“The fear that technology is eating the world at such an alarming rate that you will wake up one day and find it completely unrecognisable to the one you were born into: that’s computer.” Emma Garland
It’s hard to get a sense of where things are going re: “computer” when the industries move fast, and the headlines about them move even faster. A quick scan of the news now, as I write this, throws up pages and pages of stories: AI Is on the Brink of Transforming How Advertising Works at Its Core (Morningstar). Netflix’s Reed Hastings Donates $50 Million to Fund AI Research for the Humanities at Bowdoin College (Variety). There’s an AI physio seeing patients in the UK. Can it fix my back? (BBC). The Quantum Apocalypse is Coming. Be Very Afraid (WIRED). Most people probably won’t get to grips with the changes barrelling down the pipeline until it’s too late and we’re already entrenched in a system of fully automated luxury labour, where there are giant WeWork-sized server rooms full of computers writing TV shows and making adverts and we, the people, get paid less than minimum wage to clean the floors and stuff.
Just kidding! Everything is going to be fine, probably, maybe! Ironically the lesson in all this is that AI could never come up with a phrase as beautiful and brilliant and utterly stupid as “everything is computer.” He uses it incorrectly as an adjective for one but the fact that he uses the word “computer” at all is actually quite anachronistic and gives the statement a sort of endearing, old timey feel, which is one reason why it has travelled as far as it has – because it reminds us of the past. A time before AI customer service bots and cars without door handles and all the rest of it.
- Read next: Why did 2024 feel so unreal?
This observation has been made in the past, too, in very similar language by a character at the end of 1989 comedy/sci-fi Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Winging his way through an oral history report in front of the whole school, a blonde jock in a Letterman jacket says: “Everything is different, but the same. Things are more moderner than before. Bigger, and yet smaller. It’s computers…” He trails off here because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying, but the pause adds a prophetic weight to his words. They linger in the air for a few seconds, balancing on a highwire between stupidity and visionary, charged with a collective naivety and anticipation and desire for reasoning, connection, answers… It’s computers… And then he goes: “SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!!!!” Same as it ever was.
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Emma Garland is a freelance writer and former digital editor of Huck. Follow her on Bluesky.
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