Too Much for Old Toppies

It was Voice Simulation that did it.

He retired in 2006 at the age of 60, and I quit the rat race in 2010, also at 60. He was an insurance man and I was in construction, and I can say that neither of us was techno phobic or a luddite. In fact, we both welcomed the arrival of computers and the internet, as well as the early cell phones. However, as more and more innovations were introduced to everyday living, it became increasingly difficult to keep up and remain ‘with it.’

Four years younger than my brother, I seem to have coped a bit better than he did, but whenever we were in touch, we almost always got round to talking about our shared frustration in trying to keep abreast of all the changes that were happening.

“Just as you get the hang of something, the bastards go and change it,’ he would say, and I would agree with him. “And there’s all this tech jargon that means nothing to us. My computer froze and they told me I needed more memory. Something about RAM and ROM and a bigger hard drive. Total Greek, so I just told them to do what is necessary. And when I went to collect the PC, you know what this little shit says to me? He says I should delete some of my browsing history, or I might be in trouble with the wife. He showed me how to do it but I was so angry and embarrassed it didn’t sink in.”

We agreed that just about every aspect of modern life has become more of a mission to navigate. When you go to some supermarkets you can no longer pay with cash, and you have to have a credit card and make sure you can remember your PIN and know how to check your balance on your phone, if you have installed the App and know how to access it. And at the bank they don’t want you to come inside and talk to them. You have to stand in a queue outside in the cold and hope you beat load-shedding and your card doesn’t get swallowed, or find that some swine is looking over your shoulder trying to steal your details.

“The kids tell me all this digital stuff makes life easier and frees up time to do other things. They say it’s all designed to be intuitive. Well, it might be intuitive if you have grown up with it and spend your life staring at a screen and swiping and tapping and liking and sharing and taking selfies. It might be intuitive for them, but my intuition tells me this is not a healthy way to live your life.”

On another occasion he said, "Have you noticed how little respect for the elderly young people have nowadays? They look on us with a mixture of pity and contempt. We have nothing to offer them apart from money, if we have any. They don’t value our judgement or opinion because we are out of touch with what is really going on, and Wikipedia and Google are far better and more credible sources of information about the past as well as the present. They consider what we have to say as irrelevant and, what is worse, they resent having to waste time teaching us how to use digital devices, install software and apps, and decipher the unintelligible questions and choices being fired at us every step of the way. They see us as a tiresome nuisance in their busy lives.”

He felt increasingly disempowered and alienated, but although he complained to me, he managed to get on with things without any major mishaps. That was until he was scammed. It was on a Sunday afternoon about three months after his hip replacement. His wife had gone out to see some friends when his phone rang and an official from the bank informed him that his savings account had been hacked and the criminals were in the process of stealing his money. He later said that the woman on the line was very professional and convincing, and had all his personal details in front of her. She said he should immediately transfer his funds into a safe account in order to thwart the attack. Of course, he was thrown into a panic and followed instructions until she assured him that his money was now safe.

When his wife returned, he told her what had happened. Almost immediately, after first letting out a scream, she phoned their son. He contacted the bank’s fraud line and they were able to confirm that the old man’s account had been cleaned out. Nearly a hundred thousand rand gone.

Well, they eventually managed to retrieve his money, but it took more than three months and a great deal of hassling by his family, not to mention the inconvenience and anxiety experienced by all. During the process he was repeatedly reminded of how foolishly gullible he had been to fall for such an obvious scam. Not surprisingly, the incident severely undermined his self-confidence and he became increasingly distrustful and paranoid. He refused to go anywhere near an ATM, leaving it to his wife to draw money for him, and he would only shop where they still accepted cash. As for phone calls, he would jump whenever his mobile rang, fearing having to deal with another scammer, and spam calls put him in a rage.

Then, a month ago, his granddaughter told him about deep fake technology, and that was what tipped him over the edge. She showed him how she was able to manipulate a picture of herself so that she looked like Margot Robbie. When she took a photo of him sitting in his lazy-boy and changed his features into those of King Charles, he was aghast. It was voice simulation, though, that proved to be the last straw. She made a recording of him in conversation and was able to play his voice reading a Philip Larkin poem about how parents fuck their children up. He was shattered, realising that he could no longer trust his senses to distinguish what was real and what was fake.

When I heard he had suffered some sort of breakdown, I tried phoning him. Eventually I got through, and it was like talking to a stranger and not my brother.

“You sound like Ian, but that means nothing.”

“Well,” I said, “ask me a question regarding something that only the two of us would know about.”

After a long pause he said, “When we were kids in Rhodesia, there was a boy next door who could spit through a gap in his front teeth. What was his name?”

“Jesus, Alan! That was more than 60 years ago. I can hardly remember what happened 60 days ago.”

An he hung up on me. I sat thinking for ages and it finally came back to me: Frikkie. The boy’s name was Frikkie Welgemoed. But it was too late.

When I saw him in the psychiatric clinic yesterday, he was sitting in a chair looking straight ahead and not moving a muscle. They had sedated him and his pupils were dilated and he did not respond to me in any way. It was like trying to communicate with a catatonic zombie. I spoke to the psychiatrist treating him and she said they were going to help him with some Electro Convulsive Therapy, which I understood to be what was called shock treatment in the old days.

My wife, who was with me, could see how distressed I was, and when we got home she poured me a stiff brandy and told me to sit on the stoep and calm down and get things into perspective. Just because my brother couldn’t handle reality anymore and had lost his mind, it was no excuse for me to fall apart and become a bigger worry to her than I already was. She confiscated my phone there and then, and told me to forget about all this AI nonsense. Instead, I am to get out in the garden and mow the lawn. And the hedge needs trimming and, and, and. What I need is some physical exercise out in the fresh air away from digital technology and cyberspace and deepfake trickery. I must leave that stuff to the youngsters and accept that I am too old to keep pace with the modern world.

Maybe she is right, but it sounds like admitting defeat and joining the geriatric queue waiting to go from assisted living into high care.

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