Technology is not the enemy...
'they' are
Last night I launched into a speech to my husband about how the society we are living in is toxic. I listed out the chemicals in the environment, our water, our food, pharmaceuticals, processed food, and then moved onto our way of life, mainly in cities. I was feeling extremely certain of myself, as if I was experiencing a revelation. I was not. This is not a novel thought, lots of people from psychologists to alternative therapists, and eco-warriors have been positing a version of this notion for years and I have been mulling this idea on and off for most of my adult life. However, at exactly the moment I finished my diatribe, not only did I realise it was wholly unoriginal, I also understood that in some way the idea itself was toxic. Here’s why.
It is a seductive idea. Even before the evidence of a full-scale assault on natural rights, democracy, and bodily autonomy became undeniable three years ago there were peeks and insights into the general inhumanity of the way we are expected to live: the lack of individuality of the cubicle work life; working life in general for many, encapsulated in the book Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber, 2018); the bleak grittiness of urban life; the exhausting impossibility for women of ‘having it all’; the failure of the welfare state to replace the care and nurturing provided by extended families for the young, the elderly, and the disabled; the gradual and then rapid replacement of values like honesty, courage, integrity, contribution to society, with an insatiable desire for material things, to be unpacked for social media, and then shoved in the bottom of a wardrobe and forgotten; the replacement of value in being a decent human being with the pride of visiting every Instagrammable location on the planet (e.g. ‘The World’s Most Instagrammable Places’ Lissa Poirot, farandwide.com).
Whereas the individual sufferings have been documented: the unwed mother of The L-Shaped Room (novel 1960 Lynne Reid Banks, film 1962 Bryan Forbes), Woman in a Dressing Gown (film 1957 J. Lee Thompson), the suffering of working class men in plays like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; and the sufferings of groups taken up in movements such as feminism, the labour movement, gay rights, civil rights and so on there has been little to no acknowledgement of the fact that we are all being subjected to a form of society that has become less and less human-oriented as the decades have gone by.
Socialists will blame this on capitalism, the priority given to money and markets over people, the industrial revolution, but this analysis usually stops at the working classes. The middle-classes, in this scenario, are the enemy, taking advantage of the way in which capital exploits the blue-collar worker. However, it has been clear for any who want to see that at least since the financial crash of 2008 if not the recession of the 90s or even the seventies, that the middle-classes have been as squeezed and exploited as industrial workers, and with the added insult that they are expected to think of themselves as privileged professionals and aspire to things that are increasingly financially out of reach: owning their own home; university education for their children; financial security in old age; an inheritance to pass on. Inexorably the technocratic grindstone has been wearing western populations down, so slowly that many did not notice that it was grinding away wages, quality of life, the meaningfulness of work, and, as it became harder to make a living wage, family life, and then mental health, and now physical health.
In many ways modern society is spiritually toxic to us as human beings, organisms, and as such, part of the natural world around us. We have been taken from natural environments, with natural rhythms, to factories with the constant noise of machinery, offices with no natural light and the ambient buzz of hundreds of computers, printers, routers. Our homes are, for the most part, ranged along noisy roads, and surrounded by other homes in which there is always the buzz-saw whir and hammer-blow of loft and basement conversions.
Yet all this is not to say we should revert back to some kind of primeval, pastoral past in which we rise with the sun, toil in the fields, and die perhaps with the satisfaction of having a set of silver-plated spoons to pass to our children. It is too easy to fall into the pastoral trap. This is the trap held out to us by the proponents of fifteen-minute cities where cycling and walking will be the main mode of transport and our fifteen-minute neighbourhood will, they promise, revive the village communities of the past. There is even something of this regressive pastoralism in the exhortations to save water by not flushing toilets, or save electricity by washing clothes less and not using tumble-driers. The pastoralist turn is one also that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the disasters of Russian and Chinese communism. We do not want, all of us rank amateurs, to turn to the land to produce our own food. As life-long, and multi-generational farmers will tell us, it is a hard life and even the most experienced struggle to be successful. No, we can not turn back the clock to a romanticised past. We would quickly miss our modern conveniences and our societies would become much poorer. However, many of us feel that what ‘progress’ is offering us, AI-assisted governments and bureaucracies, facial recognition cameras everywhere, programmable digital currency, fifteen-minute gulags, the Metaverse, is not going to bring us anything good.
So to return to where I began, I realised as I was confidently laying out my argument for how the world was now toxic to human beings, forever chemicals in the soil and water, 5G radiation, noise-pollution, blue light from our screens, genetically modified crops, pesticides, herbicides, vaccinations for food animals, and heaven knows what other nightmares, that I was playing into their hands. I had fallen into another fear narrative and one, like most of them, that is meant to instil a sense of hopelessness.
There are many extremely well-meaning people who campaign about, and communicate, the dangers of toxins in childhood vaccines, antidepressants, and environmental pollutants, to name a few, and also endeavour to give us ways to fight these negative elements in our environment. Still more lay it out as further proof that we are already living in a dystopian nightmare. For that matter it would be possible to argue we have been living in that nightmare since the seventies, or the forties, or, even, since the industrial revolution. Mary Shelley in her novel of 1818 is already contemplating the nightmare of science run amok. It is easy to fall into a trap of despair and to feel that we are already living the dystopian nightmare but that belief is destructive.
It might be better to shake off our pastoral idyll. Perhaps there has never been a time when human beings have lived in a pristine natural environment. There are toxins naturally occurring in the earth, some areas of the earth’s crust have high levels of naturally occurring background radiation. Similarly the earth was subject to great volcanic disturbances, shooting toxic gases and ash into the air that would damage the health of any creatures close enough to breathe it. Also it can not being ignored that however untouched the natural environment around us may have been thousands of years ago, life was likely to have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ due to severe weather and predators. It is important for all of us, and especially the most fanatical environmentalists, to remember nature is harsh and unforgiving, a world without technology, is cold, exhausting, and very hazardous.
So we need to square the circle somehow. Technology, scientific expertise, can work to the good of humanity and support the development and self-realisation of individuals, it’s just not being used that way.
Science has become something people do in labs, with high-tech equipment. Medicine is now almost exclusively some chemical that comes in a vial and was developed by ‘the science’ in a lab and purchased at an exorbitant price by some sprawling health bureaucracy. Self-realisation is being able to ‘transcend’ the biological reality of your body. But science could be an endeavour where the most money is spent on investigating ways to prevent disease, or studying the energy fields of life-forms, and the mycelium and intricate interplay of organisms in the soil, the stomachs of ruminants, the human biome.
Technology could be used by, for example, water companies (in the UK currently in some trouble for secret sewage releases) to make sure there are never any sewage leaks, and that contaminants never find their way into tap water. Similarly chemical companies could develop technology to ensure that toxic chemicals never leach into the environment. Environmental agencies could develop cutting-edge technologies to test for such chemical leaks and hold offenders accountable. Research and development could be focussed towards finding alternatives to forever chemicals and developing methods for removing such chemicals from the environment. (If all these technologies exist then we must find the will to make companies and environmental agencies actually use them).
Already, quiet road-surfacing materials have been developed to reduce traffic noise, but they are rarely used because they are very expensive, yet local and national governments waste vast amounts of money on pointless projects. What benefit to societies and productivity, if all roads were covered with noise-reducing surfaces? Reduced ambient noise is likely to result in less stress, better sleep, more time spent in gardens. The cost of an apparently extravagant measure might be completely off-set by increased productivity, and improved mental health resulting in reduced state healthcare costs. This would be technology used to make life more humane, not more robotic, futuristic, and alienating.
There is, of course, a difference between what is healthful, and what is often initially sold to us as convenient. There is no denying automatic toll-charging for roads facilitated by number plate recognition cameras is convenient, but it can also be used for surveillance, and enforcing movement restrictions, so it is not a benign or even a neutral technology.
Similarly facial recognition to pay for goods, or to help with crime prevention, is promoted as convenient but also entails a dangerous level of surveillance and invasion of privacy. In those circumstances convenience offered by technology must be sacrificed for freedom. However the reduction of facial recognition cameras and even surveillance cameras on the street could, and should, result in benefits for society, because this should be accompanied by an increased number of traditional police officers (well-trained and vetted), walking their beat, getting to know their communities, offering support, making people feel safe and secure but in a human way on a human scale, not through alienating surveillance technologies.
As for paying with your face, we need to get a grip! What’s so hard about pulling out a card or a wad of notes? In fact paying with cash would also be beneficial because it is well-known that people are more aware of what they spend and find it easier to budget and stay within their means if they use cash, so more cash use, less debt, less stress, healthier, happier population!
We are constantly being told that we must embrace progress, and then we are told exactly what that progress is: facial recognition technology everywhere, ‘wearables’, fifteen minute cities, Central Bank Digital Currencies, mRNA vaccinations, for everything, eating bugs, eating ‘lab-grown’ meat, transcending our ‘meat sacks’ with cosmetic surgery, hormones, so we can become an avatar of ourselves, which will be more suited to the ‘matrix’ real life will have become. This is not the future. This is not even a road. It’s a dead end.
Do you feel better after thirty minutes of weeding your vegetable patch or thirty minutes of online shopping? Do you get more pleasure from buying the latest, must-have bag than from picking strawberries you’ve grown yourself? It’s not just about whether you like an experience or an item, it’s also about how deep or multifaceted that experience is. You might enjoy eating a takeaway, but if you cook onion bhajis, a curry and chapatis yourself, you enjoy the taste and the satisfaction of having made the food yourself, and, if you’re ‘switched on’, knowing exactly what ingredients went into it, and that it is healthier for you. If you made that meal with one or more family members, all of you worked together in the kitchen, co-operating, communicating, problem-solving. The making of the meal itself was enjoyable and deep: everybody gained some knowledge and satisfaction from helping make that meal. Anybody can order a takeaway not everybody can cook.
This is our future. Not some kind of pastoral idyll that turns into a hell of failed harvest, cold hearths and starvation, but a life that is filled with real experiences, real food, learning actual skills (not just how to apply filters on Snapchat) and having human interactions. Technology that works with the wonderful complexity of nature not against it or in denial of it. In order to achieve that future we have to say no to the sterile technologies of control, and instead direct ourselves and our societies towards the complex and rich technologies that can enhance the healthfulness and humanness of life in modern societies.
