A World Then
I’ve always wondered: what's so hard about using that new e-commerce store like Amazon, or that new food delivery app like Talabat? To recontextualize this question, I just wanna throw back to the reason I entered this major in the first place. My mother, who grew up generations before me, after using her smartphone (that is an iPhone) for years once in a while always asks me how to use new apps. At one point when I came back home, she just said:
“Yeah, I waited an entire year just so that you can help me with this app.”
After reviewing a glimpse of machine technology history, one thing came to my mind: the world was living in analog for as long as centuries, molding cultures, values, and norms, until suddenly these things called "machines" emerged one sunny day and tumbled those normals like a falling house of cards. As a creature born when these inventions are the normals, my mind is shaped to behave and interact with them. But as someone who got to know it in the middle of their lives, it probably feels like meeting a new colleague that you have to spend working with for the rest of your life.
To emphasize, machines had to become the norms as the world progresses. This necessity confused many, and discourses are still very much active in (many if not all) fields.
iPhone(s) vs. Tupperware
What’s even more confusing is how fragile this machine is. It is an object built with a very focused intention, mostly a tool for specific tasks, and inadaptable
willingly unless built to be so. Until it does more: which brings us to smartphones. In the span of less than a century, we were able to send humans to space with giant non-organic brain computers (machines to calculate) and compresses multiple of these machines into a singular object. Imagine having to adapt to stages of these technologies? Oh, the irony! Yet despite being an apex of every machines that precedes it, we see newer smartphones being released every single year. That as a cherry on top, we have found a way to generate commodity out of this confusion: the digital culture.
… Far from being accidental, discarding and obsolescence are in fact internal to contemporary media technologies… The logic of new media does not only mean the replacement of old media by new media but that digital culture is loaded with the assumption and expectation of a short-term forthcoming obsolescence. There is always a better laptop or mobile phone on the horizon: new media always become old. (Hertz and Parikka, p.142)
Think about Tupperware, and how its durability outlived its profitability. The scary thing about this culture that nudges towards “advancement and growth” is that it drives people to always chase newer, better, robust-er things. In place of convenience, these machines exchange our understanding of it. How many of us (consumer) nowadays truly understand the intricacies of every device, technology, and machines that we interact with everyday?
… The inner workings of consumer electronics and information technologies are increasingly concealed as a result of the development of newer generations of technologies, a feature that is characteristic of recent decades of technological culture. (p. 147)
Tracing back at the encounter with my mother, I simply only know how to operate the smartphone. But do I understand how is a smartphone? No better than her. With so many new things coming up every year, it drowns our minds a lot. At one point, I started asking “Are human minds built for this? Should we even develop this machine at all?” To which I answer with:
When all known logic and reasoning is supressed, art becomes the last line of defense before insanity.
A World Without
To recap: I am not saying technological advancement is bad, nor should I say we need to stop it. Machines are like any other tools, it can be used to sow plants or reap souls. Every once a while, it’s great to stay put, even taking a step back to think about it. We should be able to live without them, and live with them. But we should be really careful with things, especially those that are incomprehensible to us (yet). I believe this approach aligns with Oliver’s via Critical Engineering:
The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat. The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision.
Why are we glued to new devices? What differs of today’s vs. slower machines from five decades ago? What can be different such that we are not fully reliant on machinery and rather ourselves? I think these are some very interesting questions to explore, and I’m curious how far we can discuss it in class.