I will not debate your point about the present failing to fulfill the promises of the past, but you are wrong about the popularity and persistence of the “great big beautiful tomorrow” song. I could go downstairs to either of my teenage son’s rooms right now, and have them sing the song to me. I bet they know each and every word. They might even be able to do most of the between song dialog from the attraction as well.
From the article “It took labor unions hundreds of years to get workers nights and weekends off; smartphones have taken them away in less than a decade.”
I think this is confusing working-class (largely industrial) hourly jobs that tended to be unionized with salaried middle-class jobs. Expecting salaried people to do work on non-work times is far older than smartphones or email. Certainly I remember my father coming home from work with a briefcase of paperwork that he needed to get done after supper or on the weekends. Salaried people are paid to get a job done; not on how many hours they take to do it.
A Gallup poll released this month found that employees who check email outside of work are 25 percent more likely to say they experienced a lot of stress yesterday, yet by about the same margin, they are likely to describe themselves as “thriving.”
I wonder if this is because we’ve been duped into believing that “pressure is a privilege”. I get that some people enjoy and thrive on (or at least think they do) pressure, but we can’t all be adrenaline junkies.
And many people I know respond to bad news from their employers (no raises this year, extra work, etc.) with “Well at least I have a job!” If overwork is as lethal as the studies suggest that’s a self-destructive mindset.
I’d like to add another sigh at the idea that GPS is destroying our sense of direction. This is a poor way of describing the actual result, that it provides an alternative to forming a mental map. So some people who couldn’t do that that now get around fine, and others who could now don’t feel the need to bother any more. Is that really such a loss?
It reminds me a lot of the old claim that writing was ruining people’s ability to remember things – somewhat true, and yet missing why we care about memory in the first place. Heck, I’ll go further and say it’s the same; if our concern is truly about people learning to find their way by visual landmarks, written maps were already a problem and GPS is just an upgrade.
As far as overwork, viruses, harassment and so on, that’s trickier because it actually is a case of technology being helpful. It just happens it’s been set up on behalf of people who want help stealing our time, money, and esteem. Like others said, the concern should be setting it up on behalf of the rest of us instead.
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The defense of opportunism as a virtue in conjunction with your sexist assumption that capitalists are males leads me to believe you are one of those Objectivists.
Opportunism is synonymous with predation. Let’s even assume that every economic transaction in a perfect capitalist system is fair: the mechanisms that ensure that fairness are necessarily the things that make technology frustrating for people.
Aimee Mann wrote this in the 80’s about the 30’s World’s Fair. It is even more poignant now.
Fifty Years After The Fair Lyrics
Fifty years after the fair
The picture I have is so clear
Underneath the clouds in the air
Rose the tyrlon and the perisphere
And that for me was the finest of scenes
That perfect world across the river in queens
Fifty years after the fair
I drink from a different cup
But it does no good to compare
'cause nothing ever measures up
I guess just for a second we thought
That all good things would rise to the top
But how beautiful it was - ‘tomorrow’
We’ll never have a day of sorrow
We got through the '30’s, but our belts were tight
We conceived of a future with no hope in sight
We’ve got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
Fifty years after the fair
I live in tomorrow town
Even on a wing and a prayer
The future never came around
It hurts to even think of those days
The damage we do
By the hopes that we raise
But how beautiful it was - ‘tomorrow’
We’ll never have a day of sorrow
We got through the '30’s, but our belts were tight
We conceived of a future with no hope in sight
We’ve got decades ahead of us to get it right
I swear - fifty years after the fair
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So, wait, what is this article about?
It starts out trying to point out how we don’t have the leisure that advancing technology was promised us.
It then goes on to talk about how people rage at technology, and then how technology eats away our brains. It turns into a pretty typical anti-technology “OMG you’re using a new tool, it’s going to make you less human” screed.
There are very valuable and important points to be made about the culture of overwork in the USA. But that’s largely a culture thing, not a necessary result of tecnology. And those points get completely obfuscated and lost in the articles need to list everything bad that you can find about the Internet and the rest of technology.
Anything new is going to have bad stuff with it. Name anything new that has come along in the history of humankind, and you can easily find some ills that came along with it that, when listed, would make you think, OMG, this destroyed our humanity. (Consider, for example, agriculture. Losing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle meant we all worked harder, became less free to move about, started living in dirty and disease-filled conditions, and became tied to the land and eventually under the heel of Feudalism. OMG, agriculture is terrible!) But, what about the good that it’s brought? Does the good outweigh the ills? That takes more thought than mindless boosterism or, like this article, a litany of complaints. (A lot of good things have come out of civilization, which was made possible by agriculture, at least in the historical development of this planet. Are they worth the bad that the change from the hunter/gatherer to agricultural lifestyle gave us? I say absolutely yes, but I grew up in this culture, so I’m biased. But, still, listing all the bad that agriculture gave us without mentioning that civilziation has some awesome in it too is a distortion of reality.)
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We had some adventures with GPS last year trying to find a small country club for a meeting. Instead of looking through the soda straw of the GPS, I finally just pulled out the map and the location was well marked on the map. Knowing which side of town was enough to get us there rather than suffering through a dozen turn-by-turn instructions.
Also, GPS still randomly tells the driver to make U-turns. In one case, the driver of our rental car got into a fender bender because of conflicting commands from the GPS. GPS also tells people to take forest service roads and other routes that are only passable in good weather. This results in multiple deaths every year, especially in the Pacific northwest.
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So let me get this straight. Your assumption that my use of the pronoun I was taught was proper to use for genderless references (I quite often speak and write traditional proper English) grants you mind-reading powers and makes it reasonable for you to attack me personally and assign me a role in some Ayn Randian melodrama that exists in your head?
And you believe that my statement equating capitalist economic activity with opportunism is a “defense of opportunism as a virtue”? I think you should look up the word opportunism.
For someone who is nitpicky about pronouns you sure are laissez-faire with the nouns. This leads me to believe you have purple hair and live on mars. You must be one of those trollies.
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Your rebuttal of my assertion that Capitalism is the underlying pathology that creates many of the negative symptoms identified in our modern tech-filled lives contains a very cartoonish Goofus and Gallant characterization: The fair-minded capitalist who does not wish to unnecessarily impede people versus the coniving greedy person.
You invoked the word “opportunist” to support this distinction. The first sense of the word “opportunistic” refers to diseases that take advantage of compromised immune systems. “Opportunism” is defined as “1. the policy or practice, as in politics, business, or one’s personal affairs, of adapting actions, decisions, etc., to expediency or effectiveness regardless of the sacrifice of ethical principles.”
That was your word, not mine. I contend that you have merely identified two sides of the same coin.
You see things only from your own tall hobby-horse, and mischaracterize the views of others to avoid accepting criticism of your limited vision. Not much of a conversation to be had here.
I think I will go have some dinner. Have a good night.
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The lack of leisure time is not due to technology which has increased productivity of humans dramatically. Its that the Plutocratic Kleptocracy has stolen those productivity gains and turned most of the population into Corporate Serfs.
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There’s a difference, for most people, between defense and definition.
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DH insisted on getting a GPS for the car when we visited Orlando. While it made longer trips easier, we stayed only 8 miles from the Disney complex, and if you made a wrong turn getting there, heaven help you. We overshot an exit for Disney World once, and the GPS (sounding increasingly crabby ‘recalculating!’) took us all the way around the park, through service lots and unpaved access roads, before depositing us at the inaccessible back wall of The Magic Kingdom and declaring “You have reached your destination!”
Why would you bring a designated hitter to Orlando?
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