Tech and Being Human
Technology takes what it means to be human and blows it up, shrinks it, speeds it up, slows it down, smears it, clarifies it, obscures it – anything, in fact, except for improve or degrade human nature itself. The old political saying that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is partly true. While the presence of a gun does not make people more loving or malevolent, it lowers the bar for aggressive action and impedes some kinds of person to person exchange. Weapons are a good “wake up and smell the coffee!” technology – they open your eyes to what’s changing. Let’s shift to something more friendly – transportation.
Technology changes expectations. Maybe a family on a farm would have a horse for plowing a field, and then pa could hitch the horse up to a wagon to go into town or saddle up for an emergency ride somewhere. Today, with cars, buses, and trains, a “reasonable” distance to travel is much greater than it would have been 100 years ago. Before, if you work in the city, you live in the city; today, yes of course it’s reasonable to live fifty miles away from where you work every day! Don’t you know how insane the rent is over there???
Even though expectations change, you face the same things people faced 100 years ago. When Irish emigrants left for America, I heard somewhere that they had their funerals because they were effectively on a one-way trip. I’ve lived on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from my family, and I’ve been able to go to America for a single weekend then go again for a week-and-a-half visit, a week later. Couldn’t do that every month, but I could do it, if I planned ahead. Family wants to stay connected; more visits are better than fewer visits; fewer visits lead to relationship downgrades (trying not to use the “distancing” metaphor!); and all that takes time and money.
Before, cities were placed along navigable rivers. Now, you choose what job you take based on whether you can drive there. I remember one calculation I made when I was working in a service sector position: it would have taken me 2-3 hours by public transportation to cover the same distance it took me 30-45 minutes to drive because the available public transit connections went way around to where I was going, and driving was straight through. What “rivers” you can navigate now are completely different from what our ancestors dealt with, but it’s all multiples of the same base units: time and effort spent going somewhere.
People talk about computers, smartphones, and the internet as though they change what it means to be human. Not really. Human society (read: software) may have to catch up to include new culturally meaningful artifacts of status and vocational significance (read: new hardware) and contemporary social structures will disappear if modern communication technologies completely disappear (read: minimum hardware requirements). Manners have to catch up to smartphones and you’ll have to go back to discussing politics with whoever you can physically reach if your online forums die.
It’s one thing if you want to argue that technology picks parts out of the human experience and leaves other parts to wither. Before, farmers got a workout just doing their jobs. Now, your paper pushing desk jockeys have to scientifically work out what diet and exercise they need just for basic health. Whatever you take out of an integrated lifestyle has to be worked back into the schedule somehow. Only the rich can really keep up, being able to pay for private helicopter rides to cut through traffic and hire personal trainers, cooks, and cleaners to take care of all the little details. Then again, they still have all the problems that have always plagued the rich, excepting perhaps gout and obesity.
Technology has ways of forcing us to consider anew all the old questions about what it means to be human. It offers new weapons to defend or violate basic humanity. It offers new procedures to treat or torture the human condition. It eases or hinders human thriving. All the old needs are there, and it is through the old needs that humanity is helped or hurt, as it always has been. The good news is that the good old answers still carry over. New remixes on the old melodies might be required and new instruments and modalities be taken into account, but it’s very, very possible not to lose your head over it.
