Essays From West of 98: Do the Tools Control Us?
Considering the internet, flying cars, and technology's impact on local culture
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What is the purpose of a tool? Should we use the tool or should we allow the tool to use us? Should a tool improve our lives or should it control our lives?
Generally, “technology” is the application of scientific principles to practical purposes. A tool is a device that carries out that practical purpose. They may apply different scientific principles to different purposes, but a hammer and an iPhone are both broadly classified as tools. So, too, is the internet. It was conceived by a broad consortium of scientists1 over the second half of the 20th century to share computer resources, exchange data, and communicate over long distances. Of course, it has exploded beyond a tool of academics and industry alone. Today, the internet infiltrates every aspect of our lives. For many of us, whether unwittingly or not, much of our life and business is conducted online. When is the last time you lived a full day without any influence by the internet whatsoever? It has been a while.
In an essay last year, I shared Wendell Berry’s superb rules for adopting new tools. I will refer you to that essay for the full list, but the rules center around some key questions: does the tool make the job easier? Does the tool make life better? Does the tool negatively impact good things in life, like community, human relationships, and such?2
So, how about that internet…how does it fare by that standard?
“Back to the Future” is one of my all-time favorite movie franchises. I rank this trilogy below only “Road House” and “Smokey and the Bandit” on my list of the most rewatchable films ever made.3 In “Back to the Future Part II,” Doc Brown and Marty McFly travel from 1985 into the futuristic year of 2015. As I watched it again for “research,” I thought about how the filmmakers portrayed the future as a technological utopia of sorts. Technology seems to revamp every little aspect of life and much of it is positive. Marty puts on a new jacket and discovers that clothes automatically adjust to fit your size.4 After he got wet, the jacket automatically dried itself off. Automobiles can hover and fly. In addition to being pretty darn cool, this safely moves traffic overhead, out of the streets and away from pedestrians. Of course, let us not forget the hoverboards. I am annoyed that we are nearly a decade past this movie’s setting, and I still do not have a hoverboard.5
I am no fan of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, but he got it right in 2013 when he said, “we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters” (meaning Twitter, for those of you blissfully free of that wasteland). Now, I would argue that Thiel and his ilk are the ones who are responsible for the conditions that gave us social media instead of flying cars. There is also a real argument that technological utopianism is fundamentally a dead end. No matter the era it was envisioned, from the earliest such literature in the Middle Ages to Back to the Future, technological utopianism never seems to work out like it wtas portrayed. I do not think that is mere failure of imagination.
But to tie in Thiel’s point with the concerns outlined in Wendell Berry’s “The Work of Local Culture,” we expanded on the homogenized culture of television by all of us surfing the same websites together, instead of sitting on the porch and sharing stories. Now, we live in a 24-7-365 relationship with social media. If you are disconnected from social media, whether in whole or in part, I salute you. We are among friends here, so I will admit that I am not there yet. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. As for us, we are amusing ourselves and doom scrolling to oblivion as our society decays: our institutions, our economy, our human relationships, and our local culture. All of it is slowly withering as we spend more time in a virtual world. Where do you spend more time each week, talking to your neighbors in person or liking and commenting on social media posts?
Last week, I wrote that television and its advertisers created a national culture and erased local culture in their wake. Berry describes it thusly: “as the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and education.” Somehow, the internet has made that worse. The influence of television ad men has even been overridden by the mysterious algorithms that decide what we should see, watch, and hear on social media. Is there a human at the controls or is it automated? Who can say? And yet, this is what we are fed on our screens every day.
“Luddite” has long been a pejorative term for people who oppose technology, but I have come to realize how they got a bad rap. If you study the Luddite movement of 19th century England, you see clearly that the Luddites did not oppose technology. They advocated that technology should be used for the prosperity of a whole community. They warned against technology displacing workers with machines and destroying community and human relationships, all in the name of lining the pockets of industrial tycoons. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Wendell Berry’s rules for adopting new tools are a modern application of that wise Luddite vision.
I am not anti-technology or anti-internet. Most of my readers will receive these words through the internet. Unless I am willing to handwrite my essays and mail them to each of you, then I should not decry the internet’s existence. But dadgummit, the internet is a tool and right now, the tool is using and controlling much of our society. That is a problem. It only benefits the plutocrats and oligarchs who benefit from our distraction and addiction. I believe that the internet can benefit our rural communities in many ways. Towns like Stamford have already received wonderful new residents with remote internet-based jobs. They have made our communities better and that would not have happened without it. But we must focus on the flying cars and not the 140 characters, so to speak.
Television homogenized our culture in unsettling ways. The internet does something different. It encourages us to retreat into a virtual world and behave differently. It puts us on edge, both with ourselves and with one another. That is a worldwide phenomenon, not a specific symptom of rural decline, but it only holds that power and causes that harm if we allow it to do so. The internet is a tool. It is not intrinsically different in that regard than a hammer. We do not let hammers rule our lives and adversely influence our human relationships. We need to place the same expectations around the internet.
We can do certain things to build back our local culture and work to overcome these destructive tendencies. I will talk more about that in the future. But for now, let’s ask ourselves on an individual level: will we use the internet to improve our life, or will we let it control us?
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.
The list originated in Berry’s 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” which is one of Berry’s most extraordinary examples of tackling a controversial topic in a convincing manner and absolutely infuriating people in the process.
Also in the second tier with “Back to the Future”, I’ll include “The Hunt for Red October” and “Tombstone.”
It occurs to me that these are truly good ideas that would be championed by the likes of Patagonia, to limit the wasteful destructiveness of fast fashion and buying new pieces every time a person changed sizes. Are you telling me that parents wouldn’t be all over buying clothes that followed their child into new sizes? The impossibility of spending money on nice clothes for growing children was the basis for the entire “Rent-A-Swag” plot line on “Parks and Recreation”!
I’m old enough to remember the 2000-era hype surrounding a revolutionary transportation device that was implied on numerous occasions to be a hoverboard that turned out to be….the Segway scooter. Even if the product was a worthwhile one, I’m not sure it could have overcome the disappointment of not being a hoverboard.