Technology is a sugar high

I reckon it’s time for me to wring up my rant against .. technology, which has been brewing up for some time.
Of course, we are at the dawn of electronic technology and we’re on a roller coaster that’s so dang exciting; we just want to see how fast it can roll us and thrill us and turn us upside down and mess with our minds. Where will it take us next? What is the newest gadget? Can I afford the newest gadget? Will it make me cooler than my friends? How sad it all is, really. We’re so much dead-in-the-center of it that we can’t see the .. dead-end of it, which I plan to spell out in a minute.
At this point in our ride, we’re just ooohing and ahhhhing at all the little gadgets, and using them to amuse us, above anything substantial. Cellphones with certain apps like GPS do make our lives easier, but there is a curious road that’s running parallel to this journey which to me is a real problem: all the things that technology brings which really waste (and waste and waste) our time away, the hours fiddling with silly apps that give us nothing but living in a virtual playpen where we fool ourselves that we’re interacting with others, but is really separating us, in an all-too REAL way, from interacting with people in the REAL world, in the real outdoors.
I catch myself getting glassy-eyed at the sparkle factor of it all, and shake my skull furiously to back away from the spell. For instance, I’ve set up this blog although I don’t feel the need to dump my opinions on anybody, but that is the main point of having a blog. I plan to use it to test out my short and not-so-short stories, but I could easily comment on all sorts of topics, but I’m too aware that the Internet is overwhelmed by bloggers with big opinions and big egos. I see, I sense the appeal, the cheap notoriety, but luckily I’m old enough to know that it won’t make me happy or bring me the kind of attention I need, which would be attention for my art, rather than my opinions. And I can only get my art done if I can shake myself away from the trance of the Internutz.
So I’ve learned to step back and say, “Why are we doing this? What do we really want technology to do for us, and why do we rely on it to transform our lives, do we expect technology to somehow live our lives for us or take all the work out of life?” I think some people really look forward to this without considering (or caring) that it will surely turn our brains into mush.
One reason we’re so entranced is because it’s all so very new, very flashy, very… sparkly. We imagine that technology will make our lives SO much easier, all the way to the point where we won’t have to leave the safety of our houses to have adventures, not to mention adventures that will be somehow an enhancement (or three) beyond reality. Some people really believe that, and really look forward to living a virtual reality. I say, look to the warning of “Wall-E”, where humans turn into useless blobs who are near helpless. Is that a future worth living? I know it’s just a cartoon, but you know, there’s a serious observation there…
I could go on and on with warnings, and some serious sci-fi writers have written scarier warnings that I can list here, but at least admit that we want technology to take the risk and the plain-ness out of life, and hopefully then you’ll see that you’re running towards a light show: a wonderful, dazzling holographic 3-D light show, that when the houselights go on, will reveal an empty room.
Take two or three good minutes here and really grasp how insane we must be if we spend hours of our lives trying to set up virtual worlds and virtual avatars of ourselves. The insanity became startlingly clear back in (can you believe) 1989 when ‘Sim-City’ was released (I didn’t catch wind of it until mid-90′s). It was an instant wake-up call and I thought, “Oh my gosh, there are some people who’d really rather set up a virtual world than go out into the real one!”
That was the moment that I understood that some of us are insane. That is NOT real living, and we need to get outside in double proportion to what we’re wasting ‘on-line’. Life is not meant to be a contrived scam faked by nimble typists, ruining your eyes before a glowing screen. We were not put here to live so many hours interacting so shallowly. We were given, hopefully, 80 or 90 years to see every corner of this sphere, greet people and learn from them in person, to improve the world for your children, add your wisdom to human evolution, and maybe add your arms-width to a chain that will reach out to other worlds, if we really understand our purpose here.
Technology can assist humanity move forward, in important ways, but right now, we’re just so many silly moths gleefully knocking ourselves into a shiny light bulb just so we can see imaginary stars form.
I post this now because I have to confess my mild affliction: I have set up a sizeable “Tiki Farm” on a game application via Facebook, and I detest myself at being suckered into continuing it. There are SO many other things I should be doing, such as REAL writing, and I’m getting pissed at myself. Now I’m swearing to myself that I’ll just get to the 35th level, get the biggest dwelling, and pack it all in. It’s exactly like video games: do you complete a game and be content that you reached the end or do you just go off in search of the next title? How braindead can I become?… Is there a point where you should learn a lesson from all the hours wasted? Let me revisit the dictionary for the word: “futile”.
–Since I see all this as a dizzying rollercoaster with no brakes, I have to entertain the notion of: where we it all be when I check out from this amusement park? So if I get to imagine what the typical (if not practical or sensible) application of all this will be by 2052, here is my guess…
It’ll be whittled down to a visor or a pair of glasses where you sign on by retina scan, fingerprint and voice recognition, and all your menus will be accessed by the glasses following your eye movements, and recognizing your selections by reading brain waves, so there’s no clicking with your hands at all. Everything’ll be on there. Your music, your TV shows, YouTube showing other people doing real things, photos of your life before you gave it up to sit behind the goggles. Anything you need to type or text will just take vocal dictation from you, with the ability to filter out extraneous noise. So there we’ll all be, logged in behind sunglasses, ignoring each other and never paying attention to the pretty outdoors. Except for old codgers like me who will be in the park trying to paint a scene of a beachside sunset, putting much effort into imagining what it looks like without all the techo-deadbeats lounging around. There’s a serious goal of mine: to not die while I’m in some virtual scene, but rather with real life around me. Call me old-fashioned and romantic, but I’d be embarrassed if that was on my final report card: he died while on a virtual cruise ship. God give me strength to choose the real world 80%-or-more of the time.

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