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Touch by Courtney Maum
Published in May of 2017.
There is an idea vibrating around my digital learning cabal that we may be on the wrong side of history.
The theory, whispered about at our academic gatherings and soirees, is that future of elite education is tech-free.
Can you imagine an inverse relationship between the exclusivity (and cost) of an education and the amount of technology incorporated into the experience?
Can you close your eyes and see a four year residential experience where the most intensive tech permitted on campus is a whiteboard?
What would say to an institution of higher learning that bans screens and keyboards, and instead insists on primacy of paper and pens?
If these ideas strikes you as implausible, then I recommend that you read Courtney Maum’s new satrical novel Touch.
Touch takes place in a near alternative future, one where Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft has been replaced by a single tech giant called Mammoth. The action of Touch revolves around Mammoth’s hiring of Sloane Jacobsen, a famous trend forecaster, to help the company plan its annual tech-conference built around a celebration of voluntary childlessness.
As you might imagine, things start to go wrong in Jacobsen’s consulting engagement when she starts to predict that the future of technology is a rejection of technology. The trend that Jacobsen starts to envision is one of consumers making active choices to cleanse themselves of technologies - in order to prioritize interpersonal connections and face-to-face time with friends and family.
There is much else that happens in Touch beyond the comedy that ensues when a mega-tech corporation finds itself being undermined from within by an emerging anti-tech consultant. Most of what happens is pretty funny. (The descriptions of how a tech company would design a range of technology products for anti-child consumers are priceless. The subplot involving Jacobsen’s French neo-sensualist Zentai suit wearing, anti-penatrative sex believing, former boyfriend Roman is alone worth the price of admission.
Could a similar satire of techno narcissism and screen culture be situated within academia, rather than inside the tech industry?
How might us card carrying members of the edtech industrial complex react to prognostications that tomorrow’s educational consumers will insist on analog only degrees?
Could it be that the laggards on the Roger’s Technology Adoption Curve are in reality the harbingers of a future high-status / non-digital academia?
The irony of reading Touch by listening to the audiobook version through the Audible app on my iPhone is not lost on me. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and was able to do so by excluding human interaction by virtue of being plugged into the solitude of my earbuds.
What other novels that satirize our technological culture would you recommend?
Do you think that the future of elite education might be technology free?
What are you reading?
