A
key element for the development and promotion of the economies of modern
industrial countries today is technological innovation. Companies try to grab market share from one
another by coming up with new improvements in their products or else entirely
new products that appeal to customers.
In my articles, I have discussed how the technology embedded in these
products can have harmful effects on humans.
But the question is does all technological change have a harmful side to
it.
One
approach to take is to examine the purposes for which products are
produced. I explored this a little bit
previously, but I want to make a more thorough examination in this article.
The
first purpose on my list would be to make things easier. I have already discussed how making life
processes more and more frictionless puts people into increasing layers of an
experiential vacuum and eventually makes them feel like they are in a living
death. We are at a point in our history
where the average person doesn’t need more labor-saving gadgets. If anything, we have to find a way of putting
more organic friction back into daily life activity.
A
second purpose would be to make work more efficient. There is an overlap here sometimes with
machines that make tasks easier, but not always. Power tools are not frictionless and produce
a lot of recoil to the human body as well as noise, foul smells and material
waste products. Another aspect of many
efficient machines is that they produce a lot of work with a minimal need for
human workers. Many complex machines and
robots are replacing more and more human workers. In my article about 3-D printers, I discussed
a machine that really has the potential to eliminate practically all human
workers in many areas of production. So
more and more workers in modern industrial societies are going to have
difficulty finding work as a result of technological efficiency. These workers are being put in an economic
vacuum.
A
third purpose is to make life more sanitary.
Modern public bathrooms are filled with sensors. Sensors that activate soap dispensers, water
faucets, hand dryers, towel dispensers and toilets. You don’t have to touch anything and contract
all the germs from people who don’t wash their hands. But as has been pointed out, the more we try
to put ourselves in an environment free from bacteria, the less likely we are
to develop good natural immunities. So
when we are exposed to pathological bacteria, we are more likely to get sick,
to get infected. These sensor machines
put us in an experiential vacuum, a bubble, as far as bacteria are concerned.
A
fourth purpose is to pull us out of experiential vacuums with entertaining
tension pockets, with kicks. Loud modern
pop music with its electronic instrumentation, strobe lights, amusement park
rides, race cars, and motorcycles all fit into this category. Overstimulation from these kicks causes
people to psychologically defend themselves by becoming hardened and jaded and,
in the end, more lifeless.
A
fifth purpose is to create substitute worlds to pull people away from the
sensory distortion in modern technological living environments. Here I am talking about the worlds of
screens: movie, television, video game, computer, smartphone. I have discussed in a previous article how
these screen worlds represent attempts to create balanced configurations of
infinite continuous stimuli from a vacuum and defined discrete stimuli from
clusters of figures. Ones and zeroes,
pixels of discrete stimuli grouped together in configurations of figures against
backdrops of the infinite continuous stimuli of vacuums. Such screen worlds represent uneasy sensory
balances that still create a sensory distortion that isolates a person from the
organic connections he needs with a primary experience world. Screen worlds do not provide a real answer to
the absence of grounding in modern technological living environments.
All
of these purposes have as their ultimate result the creation of products that
generate sensory distortion. Products
that put humans into some kind of experiential vacuum and products that create
purposeful static, purposeful tension pockets to pull people out of the base
numbness produced in modern technological society. These are all products that contribute to the
pathological side effects of understimulation and overstimulation and
ultimately also contribute to robotization.
They are all products that I would use in a measured limited way. Frankly, I would probably eliminate the
sensors for bathroom devices completely if I could.
I
will now review some purposes where innovation leads to technological products
that directly or indirectly increase grounding.
First, there are the products that increase health and that promote
life. These two purposes do not always
seem to fully go together. There are
drugs that keep sick people alive, even though these people are, even with
drugs, still incapable of living a vibrant healthy life. Nevertheless, if life means existence in some
kind of grounding and death means existence in a total vacuum, most people
would probably support technological innovation that affirms the experience of
life, at least in most situations. The
fact that modern technological products may also contribute to overpopulation
is another story. There are no easy
postures to take with regard to the purpose of prolonging life, even though on
the level of dealing with individual people, we would all feel a desire to
support it.
Another
purpose of technological innovation is dealing with all the waste products
created by modern technology. These
waste products poison the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil in
which we grow our food. Technology that
breaks down waste products so they can be reabsorbed in nature is a technology
that strengthens organic grounding for humans and ends up fighting sensory
distortion.
Another
purpose of technological innovation is space travel. For many people who have read science fiction
novels, seen science fiction movies and television programs and followed all
the manned space flights to the moon and to the space station, space travel
seems like something very exotic and very exciting. But space travel has the potential to be much
more than just an adventure for humanity.
It could ultimately find new viable living environments on other planets
where people could go and live. This, of
course, is a very long-term project, but one has to start at some point. Other planets could provide new environments
of organic grounding, where people from an overcrowded planet could go to find healthy
living space. Furthermore, if we do not
do enough to restore what we poison, we might just end up destroying our
planet, and then the human race will definitely need other planets, if it wants
to survive. So space travel could prove
to be a very positive form of technological innovation in terms of giving
people new sources of organic grounding.
There
is a pattern to my comments here. Given
the fact that we are all experiencing to a great extent the deleterious effects
of sensory distortion in modern technological living environments, those
technological innovations that lead to our further immersion into experiential
vacuums or experiential tension pockets should be looked on with skepticism and
used with a certain restraint when possible or not at all. On the other hand, those technological
innovations that lead either to a renewed grounding in ourselves or in our
external world, or else lead to our discovering totally new sources of
grounding, should be looked on more favorably and used more affirmatively. For sure, we are going to need some sources
of modern technology to deal in different ways with the damage created by other
sources of modern technology.
© 2013 Laurence Mesirow
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