http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68742,00.html?tw=rss.TEK
Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die By Tony Long
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/
0,1282,68742,00.html
02:00 AM Nov. 10, 2005 PT
Say you live in Greenwich, Connecticut, during, oh, the early 1850s.
Your older brother left home a few years back to try his luck in the
California gold fields. Like the vast majority of those who risked
everything to go west, he came up empty. Now he's stranded, working
in some dive on the San Francisco waterfront, pulling steam beer for
the other would-be millionaires nursing their dashed dreams.
You take quill to parchment (OK, you have paper, but it's pitted with
wood pulp) and write him a letter.
The Pony Express doesn't yet exist (the first rider won't set off
from St. Joseph, Missouri, until April 1860), and telegraph won't be
functional until late 1861, so your letter will go the usual way: by
sailing ship around the Horn. Assuming it doesn't run into heavy seas
or founder off Tierra del Fuego, the vessel should arrive in San
Francisco Bay about three months after weighing anchor at Mystic.
It's the cutting-edge technology of its day.
Today, sitting at home in Greenwich, you can dispatch an e-mail to
your bartender brother out west that he'll be able to read within
minutes of mixing the day's last cosmopolitan. Or you can call him
and leave a message. Heck, if you guys use text messaging, you'll be
chatting almost instantaneously.
On balance, any of those are probably a better alternative to the
clipper ship. Hey, if I miss my brother it's kind of nice to be able
to get hold of him -- now.
But that's the point. My expectations have been raised to this
ridiculous level by technology running amok through my heretofore-
bucolic existence. I used to be a laid-back guy. Now I'm impatient. I
chafe. I get irritable when my gratification isn't instantaneous. And
it isn't just me. The whole world is bitchier these days.
I'm old enough to remember when waiting a few days for a letter to
arrive was standard operating procedure, even in the bare-knuckles
business world. I recall a time without answering machines, when you
just had to keep calling back on your rotary phone until someone
picked up. (Which had the unintended benefit of allowing you to
reconsider whether the original call was even worth making in the
first place.) The world moved at a more leisurely pace and,
humanistically speaking, we were all the better for it.
Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times
faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be
able to withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't
meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel. The
boys in corporate don't want you to hear this because the more they
can suck out of you, the lower their costs and the higher their
profit margin. And profit is god, after all. (Genuflect here, if you
must.)
But what's good for them isn't necessarily good for you, no matter
how much filthy lucre they throw your way.
Civilization took a definite nose dive when the merchant princes grew
ascendant at the expense of the artists and thinkers; when the notion
of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to "I've got mine; screw
you" (an attitude that existed in Voltaire's day, too, you might
recall, with unfortunate results for the blue bloods). In the Big
Picture, the dead white guys -- Rousseau, Thoreau, Mill -- cared a
lot more about your well-being than the live ones like Gates or Jobs
or Ellison ever will.
But stock-market capitalism is today's coin of the realm, consumerism
its handmaiden, and technology is the great enabler. You think
technology benefits you because it gives you an easier row to hoe?
Bollocks. The ease it provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made
you a slave to things you don't even need but suddenly can't live
without. So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the
stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or wooing a lover
or writing a song.
Utopian claptrap, you sneer. So you put nose to grindstone, your life
ebbing as you accumulate ... what?
Look around. Our collective humanity is dying a little more every
day. Technology is killing life on the street -- the public commons,
if you please. Chat rooms, text messaging, IM are all, technically,
forms of communication. But when they replace yakking over the back
fence, or sitting huggermugger at the bar or simply walking with a
friend -- as they have for an increasing number of people in
"advanced" societies -- then meaningful human contact is lost. Ease
of use is small compensation.
The street suffers in other ways, too. Where you used to buy books
from your local bookseller, you now give your money (by credit card,
with usurious interest rates) to Amazon.com. Where you used to have a
garage sale, you now flog your detritus on craigslist. Almost
anything you used to buy from a butcher or druggist or florist you
can now get online. Handy as hell, to be sure, and nothing touched by
human hands. But little shops lose business and close, to be
replaced, if at all, by cookie-cutter chain stores selling One Size
Fits All. The corporations have got you right where they want you.
Is this the world you want to inhabit? Really? I live near San
Francisco Bay. When I think about all this, I miss the canvas sail
and the wind whistling through the shrouds.
Tony Long is copy chief of Wired News. He is, by his own admission, a
hopeless romantic.
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