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The Fight Against Screendom
Can we turn the tide? I am hopeful. But hope is fluff until we take a hard look.
Our track record as a species in the fight against technological changes that have yielded disturbing weed along with its promise of exponential gains isn’t encouraging.
Because we are sold visions of wondrous gains and unparalleled goodness, so we clamber aboard the bandwagon, chugging along, until we notice the weeds. By then, we have all fitted ourselves to the pace on the bandwagon and dislodged from our former ways of life.
This makes any ‘battle byte’ sound like impractical idealism and romanticizing the past (it can be), and a back-pedaling which feels regressive — rather anathema in our human pursuit of progress (which we assume to mean a mixture of enlightenment and advancement in human well-being).
But a quick look at our world makes it clear that our trajectory hasn’t been hunky-dory — the good we seek is always mixed with shades of grimness and grief.
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I doubt that using a washing machine today makes me a wiser, better human than my mom who had to hard-knuckle it with her wooden washboard. It has given me more time on the one hand, but it has also committed me to spending time to study and select machines, detergents, and other accessories (laundry nets, softeners, green…