Notes from the Unwell

...reflections on IT and life...

I wasn’t feeling 100% last week. One of the things I noticed in my weakened state is that screens — like on my phone or computer — hurt my eyes. The display seemed irritating. Granted, in the state I was in, a lot of things seemed irritating. Still, I suspect that modern computers and their associated display screens — whether desktop, laptop, handheld or wearable — really are, on a fundamental level, biologically obnoxious. Even when I’m feeling great, I feel better when I limit my exposure. I often find this hard to do. There are compelling reasons for engaging with these confounded devices.

But of course it’s not just the screens that are the issue, though the light they emit can reportedly cause problems. A person I heard speak on cell phone radiation a few years ago told us that somewhere in the owner’s manuals of these devices is the recommendation to keep the phone at least one inch away from the head while in use. Well, like most folks in the room I didn’t know about that. How many people do?

And these are just a couple of the aspects of the issue. A few years back Mary gave me an account of her takeaways after seeing the movie Screenagers at a local high school. I’m looking right now for a local opportunity to see it myself, but the upshot was: electronic games and social media are negatively affecting children’s social and cognitive development, mental health and brains. These technologies are designed to be addictive. And they work. The Screenagers website links to a news report about the Surgeon General calling for labeling social media much like the hazard labels for cigarettes and alcohol. Mary told me about a school where students put their phones effectively under lock and key when they arrive to the building at the start of the day. She’s heard reports of improvements in student attention and social interactions with this system in place.

Oh, but they’re “smart” devices — everybody calls them that so it must be true — and so I guess that makes us “smart” too, right? Right?

That’s advertising, my friends. Branding, plain and simple. Calling these things “smart” is not an honest use of language by well-intentioned people. These people are selling.

I weaned myself off Facebook years ago but I certainly find myself still getting caught on YouTube often enough, and sometimes I also get caught in the equally insidious scrolling on my favorite news aggregator website. The frightening thing is, sometimes after scrolling for a while, I honestly can’t even clearly recall what I just experienced. At that point I might as well be a junkie staring at my boot in a narcotic stupor. Except, of course, at least a boot is real.

So how’d we get here, we who were raised on color TV and conditioned to stare at flashing light emanating from screens? One thing I recall in a lecture I attended by Joseph Chilton Pearce, who was way ahead of the curve in documenting the harm being done by electronics to human development, is that at a basic level we are mesmerized by artificial light, which the reptilian part of the brain confuses with sunshine. So we are essentially lizards, turtles and crocodiles basking in front of our devices. But like TV before it, the more recent technologies also came wrapped up in a very effective, multi-pronged marketing and socialization package.

Here’s my take: for most of human history exile from one’s tribe meant death. I’m guessing this might connect to a different part of the human brain, but as a biological reality this fact no doubt still exerts considerable power within us. In modern terms, nobody wants to be left behind. My guess is, this is understood with every tech rollout. Remember seeing news reports of people lined up in tents waiting for the latest version of a popular so-called “smart phone” device? Well, that’s one thing. But the more telling thing is how much news coverage these people got. Film crews showed up. Interviews. And that was all in a long train of PR, like the hiring of two top Hollywood actors of the day to star in the movie You’ve Got Mail. That’s how you get the rest of us baboons to follow along and get used to having our most intimate communications being converted by the magical process of digitization into hackable, mineable data. Isn’t that romantic?

Bottom line: our tech mania got promoted. In these and a thousand other ways, it got a big push. Meanwhile, how glitzy and high-tech and modern we are. And look at my stylish phone case!

Plus, well before the advent of what I call “the television that watches us,” we already had regular TV as an early test of the widespread normalization of a brain-rot inducing, bio-physically degenerate and socially corrosive technology. Hailed initially for its potential to democratize information access (sound familiar?), it didn’t take long before the early promise of television was shown to be hollow. And where did it land us? Decades later people were watching things like Friends and Community on TV. Problem is, they aren’t our friends, and that’s not our community.

And please, I’m not saying the IT tech of today is not super useful: road navigation, research queries, transaction payments, reference lookups, convenient online apps and videos like the two-cent fix I found for a washing machine breakdown we had a few years ago. I’ve run an internet-dependent home business for more than 20 years, and I’m publishing on the web right now. So I get it. I use this thing daily. That does not negate the other things I’m saying here. Sometimes I feel like all the useful stuff our devices do for us is just the honey in the trap, or maybe the wine in the cup that disguises the taste of a slow-acting poison. Remember, never is the poisoned cup ALL poison. Just, enough.

I spoke with a chiropractor recently who added yet another dimension to my understanding of this whole thing. I asked her about “text neck,” the name now given to a habitual posture with forward head tilt that changes the alignment of the cervical vertebrae. The chiropractor said that yes, this is real. But she also helped me understand what’s happening to us in a larger and different context, pointing out that during fetal development we are in that same curled-up posture. After we are born, she explained, one of our next big developmental leaps is crawling, which by nature’s design reverses the curves in the neck and lower back, preparing people for upright posture and being grownup humans. So the net effect of posture problems associated with cell phone use is to take people in a direction that runs exactly contrary to human biological development. In summation she added: “And it’s aging people way faster.”

But it’s modern! It’s the future! Join the tribe or be left behind! Still, it feels to me like in many ways we’re accelerating backwards. The irony of the situation is at times truly stunning.

Thing is, again, a lot of it is marketing. Take the media glorification of tech CEOs, for example. Specifically, among all industry leaders, why do the tech CEOs get so much press? Why do we know their names? Why do we even care?

Could it be as simple as media payoffs for positive coverage? Sometimes, quite likely, yes. And then there’s this other pernicious line of nonsense people believe that helps things along: “They’re rich. They must be smart.”

Maybe. But so what? That doesn’t make them worthy of our admiration or praise. Any one of these folks could write a check and fix Flint’s water, for example. They don’t.

Again, I understand that our technologies have their own intrinsic draw. But then I also recall reading in a psychology textbook years ago about rats with electrodes placed in a certain part of their brains, how the rats would press down on levers in their cages that sent a little jolt into the electrode, stimulating this part of their brains, and how these rats would literally drop from exhaustion before they’d stop pressing that lever. Of course, in some ways this experiment is a more a statement about the scientists than the rats, that they would do such a thing to an animal in their care. But then, these scientists probably got paid to do this. That’s the human equivalent of having food pellets dropped into their cages, and one can only guess at the ulterior motives of such funders.

Seems more and more to me that we might categorize this rat experiment as early R&D work for the current era.

Touch a button, get a stimulating little jolt. Touch a button, get a stimulating little jolt. Somehow, this now equates to progress, being part of the tribe.

Oh, but I exaggerate. It’s not like most of us are living in cages that restrict our mobility, or have been implanted with actual electrodes in our brains. Then again, I hear people are working on these things. So I think it’s time to be a little clearer about exactly where our yeses and our hell no’s really are in this so-called “march of progress,” so we can be a little more conscious in our choices and where they might be taking us.

And meanwhile, there’s still an actual sun for us to bask in. Enjoy it.