Good Tech, Bad Tech

There’s a very familiar piece in today’s Guardian about the decision of a chap who’s decided to give up modern tech and taken himself off into the woods, not only because his use of tech doesn’t of doesn’t make him happy but also because it “destroys…our relationship with the natural world…places…people”.

Now I’m a strong believer that we lose our connection with nature  at our peril (interesting conference call with my chums at a well-known NGO today on this same subject): a number of studies seem to support my own personal experience that being in the woods or on the water makes us happier. I’m sure you feel the same, whether your experience is in the garden, the park, at the top of the mountain or the bottom of the ocean. And this is something we really should value more in the way we design and live our lives.

And, as I’ve written many times before the connective technologies of our age are particularly disruptive to how we behave and how we feel because they’re rooted in our fundamentally social minds: they allow us to be even more engaged with others than we were before, for good and ill. It can be very noisy in the hyperconnected crowd and it’s hard not to find yourself caught up in a filter bubble and a distorted view of reality (Post Factual Politics, being just one example). The mediated nature of these interactions also make it seem OK to say and do things that most of us would never say to someone face-to-face (the vile hate storms of women on twitter for example).

I’m also strongly against the blind Silicon Valley mantra that Tech Will (somehow) Save Us – it won’t. This is trope is all too common in our political and business culture: if only we had AI/neuroscience/bigdata/nanotech etc, then things would be ok. There’s a famous example in the follow up to Freakonomics (“Superfreakanomics”, natch). The entire book is pulled together by a golden thread of solving the issues of climate change by changing people’s behaviour. Time and again, ideas are suggested and time and time again they are dropped. In the end, all that’s left is a cracking tech-y solution: silver salts in the clouds to reflect light and heat differently. In the mode of a Hollywood Blockbuster or Valley VC pitch, tech comes riding in to save the day, to remake the “broken things”. Tech won’t save us; it’s people and their tech that might.

Whether  you grip your Tech-specs tightly or fling them across the room, it’s easy to forget that humanity is fundamentally a tech species – not a Dalek or a Cyberman or some other scary sci-fi cyborg species that the Guardian piece conjures up. Part of our amazing – and frankly, unlikely – success is thanks to our ability to develop technologies of all sorts and pass them on. Homo Faber (Maker) meets Homo Mimicus (Copycat), if you like.

The development and diffusion of wood, stone and then metal tools to cut down trees, to hunt the woods for food, to till the soil for crops, the domestication of animals, plants and naturally occurring phenomena like fire and running water – all of these are technologies. It’s just we don’t like to think of them as such; we’d much rather prefer to imagine some gentler, more authentic pre-technological time, some prehistorical natural state – The Olden Days with Olden Ways, maybe – as a counterpoint to all this nasty tech that we’ve created.

Why is some (older, less digital, less shiny) tech good and acceptable and some not so? Why are metal tools ok but not electronically powered metal tools?  Do you have to smelt them yourself? Do you have to mine the ore and dig the coal? Make your kiln? Do you have to work any of these things out for yourself? Or are you allowed to learn from the inventions and the practices of others?

The mindset is seductive – what the Germans call Sehnsucht nach Vergangenheit. It’s an easy escape route from the challenges we face (such as how to avoid the downsides of the technologies we have invented or how badly people re behaving); I’m sure it makes one feel better but this “escape to the woods” is just that. A running away; an avoidance.

It may have helped Thoreau, Tolstoy and Stifter, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gaugin, Dylan, Van Morrison and Bon Iver to make art from their isolation. But even they used tech borrowed from other people – materials and practices.