On age and adaptation
maybe it's time to change the narrative
“He looks good, right?” I say to my spouse Janyce as we drink coffee together. I’m pointing to a picture of Peter Gabriel that I just googled on my computer. Bald head, white mustache and goatee, but same piercing youthful eyes.
“He does look good,” she says, now getting up and starting to walk around the bedroom, grabbing my empty cup from me. Our dog Swirl is looking out the window, her snout pushing the curtain aside to let in the Sunday morning light.
The other day, while on my long drive back from the gym, I heard Gabriel’s new song on the radio, and I blasted it through my car speakers. I didn’t think he was making music anymore. But it was him. Unmistakable. He’s an aging rocker and I was thrilled to hear his new song. More than thrilled, I was surprised. I’ve been getting so used to losing my generation’s musical artists every year, one by one. David Bowie in 2016, Tom Petty in 2017, and David Crosby just a few months ago.
When I got back home to my computer, I looked up the word Panopticom. Gabriel takes liberties with the spelling here, changing the “n” to an “m.” The word Panopticon actually means a round prison in which all cells are visible from the centre point. But it’s more currently used to convey the ideas of surveillance, capitalism, and our rapidly transforming technological culture.
In an official press statement, Gabriel said that the song, “is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom. We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.”
What is going on?
I shared in an email to a colleague the other day commiserating about a disconcerting ChatGPT discussion we were all having in a prior meeting.
“I’m speechless about AI and all its implications for writing,” I said. “I’ve agonized over writing my entire life. And I’m always fighting against this tendency (at midlife) to look backwards to a simpler, better time… you know, ugh, what a cliché.”
I’m old enough to remember the first switch from analog to digital. Us “third shifters” at the Middlesex News would stand at a wooden drafting table, slicing the paper that was waxed on the back with an exacto knife, sticking the strips down on a grid board to fit the jigsaw puzzle of classified ads around the larger paid ads. The newsroom sent us all to classes in a rush to learn how to use a desktop computer, how to use email, and introduced us to new software for the digitized production of a then still paper newspaper, and ultimately for the new world of publishing in general. I was in my 30s so I learned the changes easily. But now I think this second wave of digitization, this time of acceleration, feels different.
Technology is racing ahead so fast that many can’t keep up and artificial intelligence feels a little bit like the genie let out of the bottle. Still, one of my biggest worries is an idea I keep hoping will prove to have no real merit after all, despite it’s nagging insistence in my brain. It’s the narrative that says that the ability to adapt naturally declines with age, and time is fast running out for those of us who feel that we haven’t yet begun to say what we still hope to say, to make what we still hope to make.
Gabriel, at 73, did something genius here. He went back to a recognizable sound and then he adapted and moved forward. The song is visionary, and despite its sometimes bleak lyrics, it feels weirdly hopeful to me. He said in a 2022 interview with Michael Bonner in Uncut Magazine, “If I have the stamina, I may just keep going.”
Panopticom
Let’s find out what’s going on
Panopticom
Let’s see where clues are leading
Panopticom
Won't you show us what's going on?
Panopticom
So how much is real?