Good Tech OpEd: Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
Date: November 10, 2005 8:25:47 AM EST
To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () g2-forward org>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Good Tech OpEd: Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die
By Tony Long

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/ 
0,1282,68742,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 10, 2005 PT

Say you live in Greenwich, Connecticut, during, oh, the early 1850s.  
Your
older brother left home a few years back to try his luck in the  
California
gold fields. Like the vast majority of those who risked everything to go
west, he came up empty. Now he's stranded, working in some dive on  
the San
Francisco waterfront, pulling steam beer for the other would-be  
millionaires
nursing their dashed dreams.

You take quill to parchment (OK, you have paper, but it's pitted with  
wood
pulp) and write him a letter.

The Pony Express doesn't yet exist (the first rider won't set off  
from St.
Joseph, Missouri, until April 1860), and telegraph won't be  
functional until
late 1861, so your letter will go the usual way: by sailing ship  
around the
Horn. Assuming it doesn't run into heavy seas or founder off Tierra del
Fuego, the vessel should arrive in San Francisco Bay about three months
after weighing anchor at Mystic. It's the cutting-edge technology of its
day.

Today, sitting at home in Greenwich, you can dispatch an e-mail to your
bartender brother out west that he'll be able to read within minutes of
mixing the day's last cosmopolitan. Or you can call him and leave a  
message.
Heck, if you guys use text messaging, you'll be chatting almost
instantaneously.

On balance, any of those are probably a better alternative to the  
clipper
ship. Hey, if I miss my brother it's kind of nice to be able to get  
hold of
him -- now.

But that's the point. My expectations have been raised to this  
ridiculous
level by technology running amok through my heretofore-bucolic  
existence. I
used to be a laid-back guy. Now I'm impatient. I chafe. I get  
irritable when
my gratification isn't instantaneous. And it isn't just me. The whole  
world
is bitchier these days.

I'm old enough to remember when waiting a few days for a letter to  
arrive
was standard operating procedure, even in the bare-knuckles business  
world.
I recall a time without answering machines, when you just had to keep
calling back on your rotary phone until someone picked up. (Which had  
the
unintended benefit of allowing you to reconsider whether the original  
call
was even worth making in the first place.) The world moved at a more
leisurely pace and, humanistically speaking, we were all the better  
for it.

Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster
than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be able to
withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't meant to  
flail
away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel. The boys in corporate  
don't
want you to hear this because the more they can suck out of you, the  
lower
their costs and the higher their profit margin. And profit is god, after
all. (Genuflect here, if you must.)

But what's good for them isn't necessarily good for you, no matter  
how much
filthy lucre they throw your way.

Civilization took a definite nose dive when the merchant princes grew
ascendant at the expense of the artists and thinkers; when the notion of
liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to "I've got mine; screw you" (an
attitude that existed in Voltaire's day, too, you might recall, with
unfortunate results for the blue bloods). In the Big Picture, the  
dead white
guys -- Rousseau, Thoreau, Mill -- cared a lot more about your well- 
being
than the live ones like Gates or Jobs or Ellison ever will.

But stock-market capitalism is today's coin of the realm, consumerism  
its
handmaiden, and technology is the great enabler. You think technology
benefits you because it gives you an easier row to hoe? Bollocks. The  
ease
it provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made you a slave to  
things you
don't even need but suddenly can't live without. So you rot in a cubicle
trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out  
walking in
a meadow or wooing a lover or writing a song.

Utopian claptrap, you sneer. So you put nose to grindstone, your life  
ebbing
as you accumulate ... what?

Look around. Our collective humanity is dying a little more every day.
Technology is killing life on the street -- the public commons, if you
please. Chat rooms, text messaging, IM are all, technically, forms of
communication. But when they replace yakking over the back fence, or  
sitting
huggermugger at the bar or simply walking with a friend -- as they  
have for
an increasing number of people in "advanced" societies -- then  
meaningful
human contact is lost. Ease of use is small compensation.

The street suffers in other ways, too. Where you used to buy books  
from your
local bookseller, you now give your money (by credit card, with usurious
interest rates) to Amazon.com. Where you used to have a garage sale,  
you now
flog your detritus on craigslist. Almost anything you used to buy from a
butcher or druggist or florist you can now get online. Handy as hell,  
to be
sure, and nothing touched by human hands. But little shops lose  
business and
close, to be replaced, if at all, by cookie-cutter chain stores  
selling One
Size Fits All. The corporations have got you right where they want you.

Is this the world you want to inhabit? Really? I live near San Francisco
Bay. When I think about all this, I miss the canvas sail and the wind
whistling through the shrouds.

Tony Long is copy chief of Wired News. He is, by his own admission, a
hopeless romantic.



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