Change: It happens all the time both inside and out. If we’re lucky, it happens when we’re ready.
Since the dawn of earthly life, we’ve had to change many times to get where we are as a species.
Early sea creatures developed jet propulsion, when free floating made them vulnerable to newly arrived predators. New predators and changes in food supply are examples of “change or die” stimuli.
Later on, about 385 million years ago, a fish with stubby fins hobbles onto land to munch on something. I doubt Stubby thought it through, or consulted its buddies first. But you can bet they followed if Stubby discovered a new food source. You can also can bet if they kept at it for 10 million years or so, they might become the first tetrapods, losing some of their long term water adaptations in the process
These changes, despite their trade-offs, are mostly survival based. It’s safe to assume they were necessary and were tested organically over a long period of time, so to label them “good”, “bad”, or “so-so” is irrelevant.
In the modern west, when we talk about changes, they’re usually about optimization rather than survival. Moving to Portland Vs. Manhattan. Using Chrome Vs. Firefox. The consequence of the wrong decision may be less happiness, rather than death.
Unlike our briny ancestors, our changes are often pre-planned, fast-paced, tech-oriented and geared toward solving convenience and efficiency problems rather than survival ones.
These changes, rather than being survival driven, are deliberate and profit-driven. A great new technology will ultimately spread across the land, but not at the speed capitalism demands.
Hence, we have a whole bunch of “broadcasting and convincing” professions to ensure money and product change hands as quickly and often as possible. Broadly, we call it marketing but it has hundreds of branches working together to ensure its constant understanding and molding of your buying behavior.
Their implied message is “You need this, but just don’t know it yet. We’re going to show you what your life is now, and what it could be with our help.”
These convincing industries need to exist, cause for the most part, the newer changes have made limited improvements to quality of life. Some, I would argue, have even made it worse.
So are people expressing resistance to the bad, or just elevating the good?
Mostly the latter, and little of the former. Either because marketing works so well, or due to a blind spot in human nature, it’s easy to talk about the good parts of change and very hard to talk about the bad.
I believe it’s time to start asking harder questions, and break through the postmodern fog claiming all change is inevitable, welcome and good.
Granted- “Good” and “Bad” are childish, simplistic labels. Most technologies manage to be both.
However, I believe there are qualities that we can call bad qualities in an objective fashion, or close.
So as a starting point for a complex topic, here goes a valiant first attempt:
What makes a technology good?
- It facilitates experience, not just distraction.
- It facilitates improved personal expression.
- It facilitates more joy than unhappiness.
- It facilitates natural curiosity.
- It facilitates real life actions and interactions, not just virtual and AI driven ones.
- It facilitates commerce, and creates meaningful occupation for people.
- It facilitates quality time, not just free time.
What makes a technology bad?
- It solves a problem most people don’t see as a problem.
- It adds convenience, but cancels it out with new inconvenience.
- It attacks central aspects of our humanity, like sense of community or purpose without substitute.
- It’s majorly addictive, creating pain/pleasure dichotomies and dependency (especially when targeting kids) that hurt well-being.
- It preys on lowest impulses, like vanity, greed or dissociation.
- It engages in non-consensual intimate data collection, storage and worse, sale to advertisers.
- It needs to make life actively worse for one group of people to make it better for another.
- It stifles and kills worthy upstarts with predatory tactics.
Technology defines life in this era. We might as well learn where to be flexible, and where to be firm.
Things are about to get interesting around here. Hang tight.