I don't think anyone would disagree with the notion that all technology, be it digital, is bad. As we say, any thing in the world is not bad, if you use it right. Heck, as National Rifle Association (NRA) of America says, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Undoubtedly, they are correct to an extent. After all people were being killed before the invention of gun powder or guns.
Any technology, be it the phone in your hand, or that tablet in your lap, or that laptop on your desk, or those video game boxes attached to your giant TV, or the latest gadgets in your car, or even those kitchen & household machines, are not bad, in themselves, but ultimately their usage defines their "villainous" ability. Their "unintended consequences" are ultimately dependent on the user.
For instance, a common complaint from parents, & healthcare professionals, is that childhood diabetes is increasing all over the world, because children are not spending time outdoors, but are always engrossed in their smartphones & video game boxes. True. But the problem is not to ban that tech, but to take children out to park & spend time with them outside of the house. That's the responsibility of the parents. However, parents themselves are busy spending time on those tech marvels, like sticking their smartphones on their faces 20 hours a day. Due to spending so much time engrossed in their phones, they don't have any time left for their loved ones, to enjoy life (instead of watching & showing off how their lives are, to others), or to do healthy activities themselves, like sleeping 6-8 hours at night.
That's the problem at a micro level. Let's take an example at a macro level; digital technology creating (or will be creating) mass unemployment at a national, or even an international, level. People study & spend a significant portion of their lives in a specific profession or industry. Then, they get the shock of their lives when they are laid off because their skills are not in demand anymore, because digital tech is replacing their skills. In these kinds of situations, governments & industry need to step in & jointly take control.
It's true that nobody can control the march of technology but the damaging effects, or the "unintended consequences" can be controlled, or perhaps, mitigated to some extent. For example, all those people who are laid off should be retrained at the expense of the government, & those companies, which have disrupted the industry through their technology, should also financially contribute in the retraining of those people. Those people can also be hired by those same companies, after their retraining. Because, those people are a financial, economic, & social burden on the governments and society, but they can be tax-paying, productive part of the citizenry, who would pay back the cost of their retraining, to the government, in the form of taxes. Governments can also look ahead in the future & see what professions should be promoted through educational institutes & the educational pipeline (schools, colleges, & universities) & connect the educational side (the supply of labour) with the industry (the demand of labour), so the public has an idea as to what should be studied now to earn its fruits later on.
Technology, in itself, is never bad. As the author says in the opinion piece that its "unintended consequences" can also never be predicted beforehand. But technology's bad consequences are often the bad practices of users. Users need to keep in mind how to properly use that technology, & how that technology is affecting others; be it their loved ones, their social circle, their professional circle, or their community at large, or even themselves.
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Technology is unruly. New innovations bring with them a host of unintended consequences, ranging from the troubling to the downright depressing. Social media makes us lonely. Too much screen-time makes teenagers fall behind their peers. And at the more feeble end of the spectrum, many of us have walked into an obstacle while texting. Whatever glorious vision animates the moguls of Silicon Valley, it surely can’t be this.
We’re much better at designing complex systems than we are at predicting their behaviour, argues the writer Edward Tenner. Even though unintended consequences are inevitable, Tenner thinks they can be powerful catalysts for progress. But even the notion of an “intended consequence” is problematic when it comes to tech. Evgeny Morazov points out that we tend to confuse the positive consequences of information technology with intended ones, downplaying the significance of other natural, but rather less noble, upshots like pornography, surveillance and authoritarian control.
Free time is a case in point. Technology makes us more productive, but it’s also accused of unreasonably extending the domain of work. So does tech liberate us, or enslave us? And what does it really “intend” to do?
Tech and ‘free time’: a confusing picture
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the most pressing concern of the man of the future would be “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him.” It hasn’t quite turned out that way - but Keynes wasn’t entirely off the mark. When we consider the lot of the average labourer of the past, our complaints about work-life balance start to sound pretty peevish. And the rise of technology really has, it seems, given us more free time than ever. So why do we still feel harried?
It’s worth noting that modern leisure is just as tech-saturated as work. Americans who subscribe to Netflix spend more time on the site than they do eating and having sex combined, TDG research found. The average Briton spends 1 hour 20 minutes every day monitoring four social media accounts, according to research from the Global Web Index. But all this screen-time makes us uneasy. To co-opt David Foster Wallace’s description of attitudes to television in the 1990s, there’s a “weird hate-need-fear-6-hrs-daily gestalt” about the whole thing.
But technology doesn’t just offer us escape. It promises to transfigure our bodies, our minds and our very souls by making us fitter, happier, and more productive - but it does it by insinuating that we’re, well, a bit suboptimal as we are. “There’s an app for that” comes with a whispered aside: “You know you’re doing it wrong, right?”
Everyone’s a bit of a Luddite
Criticisms of tech can sound shrill, but it’s not antediluvian to notice the impossible desires technology breeds. Our devices present us with simulacra of beautiful, fit, fulfilled people pursuing their dreams and falling in love, and none of them are browsing the web at 11pm on a Saturday night - unlike us. We click and swipe our woebegone way through a vibrant world where nobody who is anybody spends their free time in front of a glowing screen, painfully aware that our only access to that world is through that very glowing screen.
But we’re no fools. We know that nothing on the web as it seems. We long to detach ourselves from the whole circus for once and for all - and so we turn once again to the internet to research digital detoxes and vent our tech-related spleen. The web has a way of dancing around us, knowingly and self-referentially and maddeningly deflecting every attempt we make to express our unease.
Is ‘free time’ a misnomer?
But prying our free time from the clutches of technology isn’t necessarily the answer. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that “free time” is an artificial concept – and it’s anything but free. For Adorno, free time is the very propogation of work: it is “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour”.
Today’s tech-saturated leisure trade – to say nothing of the trillion-dollar behemoth that is the “wellness industry” – is an integral part of a world in which we are treated as consumers first and citizens second. Talk of reclaiming free time is missing the point. What we need is control of the time we already have.
But in yet another twist, this is just what Paul Mason thinks information technology might allow us to do. For Mason, the “sharing economy” contains within it the glimmer of a genuine alternative – a post-capitalist society structured around liberty instead of economics. If Mason is right, tech might free us from the need for “free time” entirely. But how does this complex narrative fit into the storybook of “unintended consequences”?
The myth of ‘unintended consequences’
Well, it doesn’t. Unintended consequences are a myth, because anticipating the effects of even the simplest innovation is a fool’s errand. Forget about information technology, or calculus, or Linear B: even the toaster would be a challenge.
Tech innovators frequently profess aspirations to improve the lot of mankind. Such aspirations are admirable, but we shouldn’t forget that there’s one rather more concrete intention they share: to make money. They’re vendors, we’re consumers: it’s as simple as that. Still, it’s a huge leap from there to the claim that tech is, in Foster Wallace’s words, a “diabolical corrupter of personal agency and community gumption”.
But even if tech companies aren’t really trying to enslave us, or to make us feel inadequate, that doesn’t mean that the current situation is a case of good intentions gone awry. There’s no more reason to think that tech is intrinsically good, but occasionally getting it wrong, than there is to think that it’s a remarkably successful villain.
We love to praise tech, and we love to condemn it. We equate it with chaos, power, love, hate; with democracy, with tyranny, with progress and regress - we laud it as our salvation, while lamenting it as our scourge. Like any technology that has come before it, digital technology is all of these things. But it’s essentially none of them.
