Planned Obsolescence

Still happily at work revising and reliving the account of my trip around the world in 1978-79 and was struck by this entry arriving in Bangkok after 5 months in India. Little did I imagine how much worse things would get. 

 

April 12— how extraordinary! Air-conditioned van, 2-laned smooth-road trafficked lighted freeway, gas stations, neon signs, lighted billboards, thirty color TV sets all turned on in the store window, liquor stores, electric doors— how utterly amazing to re-enter the world you’ve known for 27 years as if you had landed on the moon, seeing the things you’ve accepted as part of life as absolutely weird and somewhat unreal. Little did I realize how happily far away from it all India was for us, how we had eased into a whole other way of life. Alongside the feeling of estrangement was one of recognition and familiarity and I’m sure we will quickly re-adjust. But it is with more than a twinge of regret that we’ll return to a life of red lights and traffic jams, roads in neat squares, paved sidewalks, excessive lights at night blinding the stars, stores overflowing with useless item after useless item, advertisements on billboards and restaurants where people leave food on their plates. India helped me see that while technology makes life faster and more comfortable, extending the human body and mind, it can also drain us of our personal power, do work for us that causes our capacities to atrophy. Electric doors, moving sidewalks, escalators, power tools weaken the muscles, calculators, computers drain the intellect, TV kills the imagination, machine-weaving, drum machines, Cuisinarts diminish the intelligence of the hands, computer banks weaken our social selves. All based on some absurd notion of paradise as a life of leisure in a body that has forgotten how to function. As Gary Snyder says, we live in a country trying to get out of work. Alongside the way technological affluence makes everything so readily and easily available and affordable so that we never know the hunger that makes food delicious, the silence that makes music special. We just stuff ourselves fuller and fuller, dulling the senses and putting the mind and heart to sleep. Already I’m struck by the contrast of the city Thais with the rural Indians, dazzled by bright lights, choked by exhaust, surrounded by gadgets and toys, a mere shadow of a fully functioning human being. Of course, this is over-generalized and premature, just a back-door way to appreciate five months spent with people freed from this kind of disconnected and disjointed ghostly life. 

 

So almost 50 years ago I was complaining about outsourcing the work of the hand, the intelligence of the mind, the artistic imagination, the social self, never dreaming how much worse it would get. Here’s what someone posted on Facebook yesterday: 

 

“Technology was always supposed to remove friction.

 

Faster. Easier. Smarter. More convenient.

 

What actually happened is we removed one human being from the process, added four apps, three passwords, a QR code, facial recognition, a security question asking for the maiden name of your pet hamster in 1987 and a chatbox called Chloe who keeps telling you she “understands how frustrating this might be.”

 

Amen, brother. The post goes on with the details of how damn complicated it is now to do the simplest things. Park a car. Order lunch. Cancel a subscription. Make a payment. Talk to your bank. You know the list. 

 

And so we continue with our planned obsolescence of our humanity, giving away the elegance and intelligence of the hand, heart and head to machine after machine.  Can we press pause—without being sent a code— and re-consider?