Technical Difficulties

My old 'puter was pretty much shitting the bed so I had to replace it. This required transferring its contents to the new machine, which ended up taking pretty much all day -- well, 3 1/2 hours plus commuting time with a tech support guy --  and then the rest of the afternoon restoring my logins, downloading cloud applications, and figuring out the new OS and whatnot. That got me thinking about the hassles connected with all the technology that's supposed to save us time and effort and amplify our powers. 

Somebody -- one of those radical environmentalist types like Murray Bookchin or E.F. Schumacher -- oh wait, it was Andre Gorz -- figured out that with the time it takes to earn the money to buy a car, maintain it, insure it etc., plus fight through the city traffic, occasionally get stranded when the car breaks down, and what not, you're actually going about 4 miles and hour, and we already know a way to go 4 miles and hour. Well, maybe, and I agree that people who live in cities with decent mass transit are probably better off without a car. My sister lives in Manhattan, and she doesn't have one.

On the other hand, she needs to rent a car to visit our mother or otherwise get out of the city, and I am in city traffic a small fraction of the time. Without a car I couldn't go shopping, go to work, go to the doctor, or pretty much do anything else. Back in the old days, I would have needed at least one horse, and of course they require feeding and breeding and veterinary care. In fact, unlike cars, you have to feed them even when you aren't using them. 

Regarding the computer, back in the day college professors in most disciplines for the most part had secretaries (always women). They would write out their deep thoughts on yellow legal pads, the secretary would type them up, the Big Professor would edit the typescript with a red pen, and the secretary would retype it. To generate a graph or other figure, writers would use the Art Department where somebody with drafting equipment and stencils and what not would create it by hand. 

Those sorts of jobs are mostly gone. I expect I'm considerably more productive,with the help of on-line databases of publications and word processing and graphics software, and no secretary. A long time ago, I had to physically go to the library and use huge books called citation indexes, and look up the material in the bibliographies of paper I'd already found, and if our library didn't subscribe to the journal they'd need to get it for me on inter-library loan which would take a week . . . 

 

Technologies quickly become necessities. I can't function without electricity so I had to buy a standby generator because the power out here in the boondocks goes out all the time. I need two vehicles, a passenger car and a pickup truck, and of course a computer and a cell phone and an Internet connection. That means I need to make what used to be a lot of money, which I can do only because I have all that crap. Leaving aside pollution and climate change and all that, technology changes society in highly unpredictable ways, and in particular it creates winners and losers, changes the rewards to knowledge and skill, affects inequality and social structure, so yeah, maybe it makes us better off, at least for the time being. We're living more than twice as long as we used to, for starters, and most people would find that nothing to sneeze at. But we need to think long and hard about this.