Technology The double-edged sword
AN interesting article I read recently in Medium by Indrajit Samarajiva (whom I paraphrase below in places) resonated in the title about technology and monks and how technology has changed things in the past 20 years, especially if you were involved in this evolution as I was.
When I took out a smartphone at a rugby game in 2002, I was the only one in the whole stadium. I looked weird as hell to spectators, chatting to someone in Australia over 3G. Now everyone has a smartphone even the shoeshine boys and school kids!
Any stadium or marketplace can instantly turn into a festival of flashes. We forget how weird this is. It’s weird.
Going back further a few years, I remember being at the Fiji International Sevens (when we still had them) at the National Stadium and communicating results live on the internet via a dialup modem and clunky laptop from the news box up the top. I could hear the legendary Graham Eden broadcasting live in a radio booth next to me. Now you can watch this 7s rugby action all live globally online through the Walesi App and other paid sites.
2002 is just over 20 years ago, which is roughly a generation. Even my generation, which technically remembers this time, doesn’t really remember. We have offloaded so much of our imagination to these devices that we literally can’t imagine a world without them. But there was. Today someone living that lifestyle would look insane, but that’s really a case of the world going mad more than anything else.
Today the very idea that one could be uncontactable is anathema, but 20 years ago people went to movies and travelled and seemed to survive. As children we spent more time on bikes or just roaming the neighbourhood, climbing trees, picking mangoes, guavas or whatever was in season. I don’t remember any difficulty because we didn’t know what easy was at that time. But now things have become so convenient that it creates its own complications. When you can be reached anywhere, you can never really be anywhere at all. Other locations, friends and family are pulling on you all the time.
You can, of course, drop out of this lifestyle anytime you want - go off grid as the terminology goes. The way time (or evolution) progresses are not necessarily by destroying the old, but layering new things over it. Crocodiles and sharks exist largely in their vestigial niches, and landlines and dumb phones do too. You can still use all these things that were normal just a few generations ago; you just look like a loony. The lifestyle of a normal person from 20 years ago seems positively monk-like today. The lifestyle of someone from 30 years ago seems like a forest-monk. That’s how far our sense of normal has been pushed.
I can still feel it weird because I grew up right on the cusp of that change. As a matter of fact, in Fiji, I could say I was responsible at Telecom Fiji for a lot of those changes from a technical viewpoint. At the time I had a Sony Ericsson P800 in 2002, a proto smartphone (or PDA) with a pop-out stylus and Internet settings that required an hour on the phone to setup. It was slow as crap, the camera was terrible, and it was magical. I could listen to music on the go, take photos of friends at parties, look up hotels on the road. We take it all for granted now, but this was unbelievably strange at the time. I remember leaning on a Sydney street corner during a business trip typing something and people looking and talking about it, like “what’s he doing?” Now it’s completely unremarkable. But it’s still remarkable. If you remember.
I can still remember being hopelessly lost (no Google maps). I remember being completely bored – just imagine if we had a pandemic with lockdowns, no broadband Internet with Netflix!
There would certainly have been more domestic violence and suicides. I remember not being able to answer questions, not being able to scratch every itch that troubled my brain. I remember not being able to talk to someone because they weren’t home. I remember waiting, and planning ahead, and yet I don’t remember these things being inconvenient at all. It’s more that modern conveniences made them inconvenient. You can’t miss what you don’t have, but once you have it, you can’t live without it. They say knowledge is power, but they don’t say over whom. In many ways our conveniences rule over us. So do our smart devices rule over us? Or do they make us dumber and reliant. I am amazed at how kids these days are super smart with typing on touch screens but incredibly bad at spelling and grammar. We can scratch any itch, and yet we’re somehow itchy all the time. These facts aren’t unrelated. They’re causal.
Today the only time I go without connectivity is literally if I go on a meditation retreat or deliberately leave my smartphone at home – which I do when I go to the corner shop for bread and the newspapers (they still exist). At a retreat you have to leave your phones behind or check them in.
It’s a monastic sacrifice today yet this was just how everyone lived not so long ago. Now it’s a deprivation reserved for spiritual retreats or prison! And even in prison you can negotiate for smartphone access. Whenever I’m in this state (without my smartphone) I’m amazed at the sights and sounds I perceive, through the altered state of boredom. And yet I grew up in this state. It’s amazing how we forget where we came from.
A normal person from 20 years ago would look like a monk today. And perhaps in 20 years this scatter-brained state will look idyllic. We’ve spent a long time pursuing the idea that more information, that more connection leads to more understanding, but it doesn’t. Understanding has always been engraved behind our eyelids, slipping in and out of our grasp with every breath. We keep piling on more and more information from every corner of the globe without ever looking at what’s in front of us. It’s actually a case of information overload where our brains actually get distracted and we can sometimes miss the important and the vital. We stray further and further from the monastic to the spastic, thinking we’re getting more enlightened and we’re not.
The phones light up, but the faces in front of them remain dim. Our city and town lights blot out the stars, 24/7 news and Netflix blots out history and time, and buildings blot out nature. We live in a fallen age, thinking we’re rising. We used to be like monks.
As another great commentator observed: “You get old and you realise there are no answers, just stories”.
As always God bless and stay safe in both digital and physical worlds.