Resistance to change

The first griots who ran across the idea of writing things down probably thought kids would never learn to memorize tens of thousands of words any more.

Well, on the basis of that, Herb got a job with Bell Labs, working half-time and attending school at their expense for his Ph. D. the other half. The half-time for school didn’t last long, as they needed him for various top secret projects. I know he spent a couple of years of working on guided weapons which brought him into contact with companies making sensors for weapons. Many of those happened to be near where I might have been at the time and we saw each other regularly.

To get to the point, he was appointed Project Director of Bell Labs effort to manufacture a TV telephone, allowing for TV projection in conjunction with a telephone call. Skype.

As Project Director he was responsible for developing a way to do it as well as seeing it got done. He stayed with it for quite a while, spent 500 million in ’60s and early ’70s dollars, developed a method and told his bosses that it required too many circuits and would never be worth it.

Bell Labs scrapped the project, wrote off the $500 million, and promoted him. He never did get his Ph. D., being one of those people whose work they were more interested in and who didn’t need the degree.

The last I saw him he had a very expensive rig which hauled around 3 cars he raced, an elegant house in Pennsylvania, a larger garage complete with resident mechanic and a tolerant wife who worshiped him. As for Herb, he was one of those people who was always happy. Liked everyone. Fascinating guy.

(And a great negotiator. He was always happy, and no one wanted to make him unhappy and possibly dislike them. Interesting strategy, but it wasn’t a deliberate strategy. Just Herb.)

I see it as arising from deep within us, and from the forces of history. And I see them as inevitable, and unavoidable.

How much of this is actually bad, and how much is just different?

My kids are snapping messages around the world to friends all the time, but they’re going to parties, raising glasses with friends, doing work with others, and engaging in plenty of face-to-face interaction.

My daughter isn’t watching Ireland on a widescreen, she’s climbing the hills. She saved up for this, and in a few weeks she’ll be in Thailand.

Maybe this is moving forward, not back. Lord knows we elders are rarely the best judges.

Our biological evolution got left in the dust thousands of years ago. Heck, evolving reason into a tribal ape should have been like mixing oil and water. But now we run the planet.

The triumph of homo mayonnaise.?

Today we live isolated from one another in suburban communities or mass urban housing units, we don’t know our neighbors, and the people we do know are far away, and for the most part do not know each other. Communication is with impersonal devices which neither require nor allow intimate human contact and which force us to edit and control our information transfer. We know the people at work or at school, but we see them only for brief periods and under contrived and artificial circumstances. And our kinship groups are small, growing smaller every day, and are scattered over immense distances. The extended family has disappeared, and the nuclear family is either fractured, or dipersed. Human institutions have, by necessity, been replaced by commercial and governmental ones, and social and cultural relationships have become subordinate to them.

People increasingly hang out with people of their own age, social and economic class, folks of similar educational and professional roles. This is particularly true of the young, who can no longer interact effectively except with people who are just like them. That’s why they need those goddam phones and social media, because they are isolated from all genuine social contact. THe only people they know are their friends, and they are never there.

Human beings are not able to function healthily in this social environment, and although we are extremely adaptable creatures with flexible cultures, our social universe is changing so fast due to technology that it is unlikely biological or social evolution can respond to these changes fast enough.

And I don’t think the anwser to this attenuation of social contact is yet more social media or snazzy com devices. They will not fix the problem, they are causing it, and they will not allow us to engage in biologically meaningul interaction, they are just a shabby substitute for it.

I think we’re headed for trouble. We’re all exiles in our own country, strangers in a strange land, time travelers stranded Up the Line.

I spent the first thirty years of my life living in a phenomenally rich social environment. It was extremely rewarding. But after I “grew up” and “settled down” I gradually became socially impoverished. If I were to lose my wife, I would be adrift, lost, truly alone. Desolation row.

http://vimeo.com/11222889

What’s wrong with this picture?

Addendum: It occurs to me that the mesmerizing TV screens in “Fahrenheit 451″ turned out to be a lot smaller than expected. I’m the last one in my family without a smartphone.

I read speculative fiction, I studied science. I always had nostalgia for the future and felt I was prepared by both temperament and education to deal with it.

But now that its here, I’m having second thoughts. I have a very bad feeling about where technology is taking us, and its not about some robot dystopia or techno-tyranny, either. I just see us as becoming addicted to overly expensive and unnecessary capabilities, and we fail to see the price we pay in complexity and vulnerability for a little convenience and novelty. TV telephony doesn’t impress me all that much, I’m using the phone less and less anyway, mostly I just get somebody’s voice mail. I’ll gladly trade the occasional video for a real human voice on the line.

I’m starting to see tech not as science working on our behalf, but as the bureaucratization and commodification of science. We don’t seem to be responding to human needs or even scientific curiosity as much as we are to commercial opportunity. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but mayby it can be carried too far.

As the Bard puts it, “Our swords have become too massy for our strengths.” I feel about technology the way TB feels about government; it has a life of its own and is getting out of our control.

I’ll be the first to admit these fears are mostly emotional, not logical, but I still can’t shake them. I’ve lived long enough to learn to trust my instincts.