Technology

They don't make 'em like they used to.

I wonder if you need a special license to have a cemetery in your basement. Don’t worry. I haven’t gone all John Wayne Gacy. (Though, with Wayne as my middle name, my life of crime is somewhat of an inevitability.) No, the corpses in my cellar are more of the high tech variety. Over the last two years, I have lost a dazzling array of electronics to the gremlins of modern technology.

Let’s run down the inventory: two laptops, two printers, three DSL modems, two wireless routers, two DVD recorders, two DVD players, a TV, several hard drives, a DirecTV dual tuner TiVO, a PowerMac and a garage door opener. Some were taken out by lightning, some just died. Now, I’m not saying I’m cursed when it comes to electronics, but you might want to think twice before getting too close with your new pacemaker.

I don’t want to become the cranky old guy who talks about how “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” but the fact remains. Visiting my grandmother recently, I was reminded of this. You see, my late grandfather never threw out a TV. If one were beyond repair, he’d simply remove the guts from its wooden cabinet and add some shelves. He didn’t so much lose a TV as gain a rather unsightly curio.

Today, our electronics require special furniture. Back then, electronics were furniture. Maybe I should borrow one of those hollow TV carcasses from my grandmother to use as entertainment center. It’s ironic, self-referential and retro all at once — how thoroughly post-modern of me.

What to do with a dearly departed DVD player? Most are made of thin metal or plastic and therefore of no use as boat anchors. Despite the trend toward miniaturization, they’re still too big to work as paperweights. I suppose I could join forces with the other victims of engineered obsolescence, pile them up with all the recently retired VCRs and antiquated (three-year-old) computers, lash them together with the cords we once used on our phones, weight them down with those 36-inch TVs that were all the rage 10 years ago and create one heck of a manmade reef. Nah. That would require actually talking to people.

A few years back, my wife and I would occasionally get a hankering for a milkshake. Inevitably, we would go from restaurant to restaurant and get the same response, “I’m sorry. The shake machine is broken.” We would joke that milkshake machine manufacturers must have the worst quality control in the world. We could laugh because it was just a milkshake. With consumer electronics however, we’re talking life and death. We simply can’t live without our entertainment. Is there anything more vital to a good, old-fashioned, red blooded American than his thoughtless diversions?

It’s enough to make one wish for a simpler time – a time when all a man needed to get by was a solid club with which to bash his prey, a time when entertainment could be found in the flickering light of that new-fangled miracle called fire and when the height of engineering was the wheel. That’s right. I want to be a caveman.

“The medicine men and tribal chiefs will always be valued higher than the story tellers.” – Kris Wheeler

You would never hear a caveman complain that his fire keeps crashing unexpectedly, or that his “directory tree” had rotted, causing him to lose several years worth of archived smoke signals. Rarely would he need to take his wheel down to the local shade tree and try to describe the cat-like screaming it would make every time he turned left on cold mornings.

I know I’m idealizing prehistory. Historical context wouldn’t likely change the nature of my personality. I’d still be drawn toward the telling of tales. As Kris Wheeler (publisher of this magazine) reminded me, “the medicine men and tribal chiefs will always be valued higher than the story tellers.”

(We should pause here to note that I’m not making this stuff up. I actually have conversations in real life about topics like my desire to be a caveman. Your estimation of me probably just shifted from “mildly clever” to “potentially insane,” but no matter.)

I suppose a caveman could get outsourced or outmoded as easily as you or I. Imagine a dialogue between a cave painter and the tribal chief who’s trying to fire him: “Muck, I want you to know you’ve been a real asset to the tribe.”

“Thank you, sir. If you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about a concept I’ve been developing. It’s sort of a Mastadon Hunt meets Ritual Sacrifice with a touch of the romance of Herd of Bison.”

“These will be finger paintings, then?”

“Yes sir. Of course.”

The chief sighs. “Muck, I’m afraid we’re going to have to go in a different direction.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Our studies show that audiences aren’t reacting to finger paintings anymore. We’ve got this young kid coming up who’s really amazing with a brush.”

“A brush! You’re turning me out for a brush hack? Sir, the brush is just a fad. It’ll never last. And do you have any idea what brushes are going to do to your production budget?” Finger painting is the past and the future of cave paintings.”

“Actually, he has a notion to start painting on hides. So people can take the paintings with them. It’s very revolutionary stuff.”

“Take the paintings with them? Who would want to do that? Paintings are a communal experience. In fact, I’m working on a new large-format process. Some people are calling it the ‘mural,’ but I prefer “Cavema-scope!”

“I’m sorry, Muck. We’ve already signed him to a three picture deal.”

I mentioned to my wife my idealized vision of life in prehistoric times, hoping to lure her into a simpler lifestyle. I gave her the pitch about the fire, the smoke signals and the wheel. I explained to her all of the inconveniences of modern life that cavemen needn’t endure. She smiled and replied matter-of-factly, “no, they only had to worry about not being eaten.” Touché.

In the latest installment of the Terminator franchise, one of the more effective scenes involves a character beginning to question exactly what he is: man or machine? It’s an oft-repeated theme in modern sci-fi films, from the stubborn denial and eventual morose resignation of the replicant Rachel in Blade Runner (and of Deckard in the director’s cut) to the revelation of the fabled “Final Five” cylons in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. At times, our collective pop culture imagination revels in the possibilities of augmenting our humanity with technology, as it did in the classic 70s TV series The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. At the opposite extreme is the dystopian view of The Matrix, wherein humanity is reduced to nothing more than a biological power plant. Whether we’re talking about genetically and biologically engineered machines or humans who have been enhanced with technological wonders, the line we fear to cross is the one where we become, as Ben Kenobi described Darth Vader in Star Wars, “more machine now than man; twisted and evil.”

For those who follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you know that in recent weeks, my family has been dealing with the sudden loss of my father-in-law. The last time I lost someone this close to me was when my grandfather passed away when I was a freshman in college. Our current situation only serves to remind me how much technology has changed our daily lives in the last 21 years.

Two decades ago, I spent a fall Saturday morning out with friends exploring a series of bluffs, overhangs and caverns in rural Tuscaloosa county. (The Tide must’ve been off that week or playing an away game. Otherwise, I would’ve been firmly planted amidst the throng in Bryant-Denny Stadium.) When I got back to my dorm, the phone rang almost immediately. It was my father. “Where have you been?” He didn’t sound irritated, but uncharacteristically broken. He told me my maternal grandfather had died that morning, and he was on his way to come get me. Although I had my own car, he didn’t want me to drive four hours on the old country roads of west Alabama while dealing with my grief.

Unlike today, he couldn’t reach me sooner, because none but the wealthy (or the faux riche) had cell phones. (I recall complaining to my then girlfriend about how everyone with phone in their car made sure to hold it with their left hand when talking — so everyone outside the car could see it.) My father’s call was typical of how everyone in the extended family learned of my grandfather’s death; through a daisy chain of phone calls from one family member to another. I’m sure that in the early 20th century, there were some old timers who found it sacrilege to share such painful and personal information via the “talking telegraph.” But until recently, attaching ourselves to an analog voice network was the best way to share any news — no matter how small — with a select audience.

When my wife’s father passed away, I hesitated briefly before posting about his death on both my Twitter and Facebook accounts. “Is this really appropriate?” I wondered. I knew there were some family members who would log onto Facebook, expecting to update everyone on which microwave lunch was on tap for that day, to look at their friends’ photo albums of yard weeds or to take a quiz that finally answers that burning question “which Major Dad character are you?” Instead, they would find themselves confronted by the dark specter of human mortality and the loss of a beloved family member.

The fact remains I can keep up with many of these same family members more easily through online means than via telephone. In fact, for most of them, I have neither telephone numbers nor e-mail addresses. So the question of appropriateness is moot when you realize the best way to spread news to our families and friends is in the cloud. I did try to reach a half-dozen of the closest family members via phone. I only got through to two. The others in that group learned the news from their siblings or children… who learned it from Facebook.

A New York Times article from 1960 is thought to be the first printed reference to the term cyborg. (That is, according to Wikipedia, that all-knowing and ever-so-reliable font of digital information.) The article states that…

“a cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one. “

Based on that earliest definition, simply relying upon the internet to spread information, much in the same way early generations of man relied upon carrier pigeons or smoke signals, does not constitute a cyborg. But what happens when our emotional responses become inextricably entangled with technology? It’s exactly this type of “man-machine system” that inspired the writing of this post.

You see, since my father-in-law died, we’ve been through all of the usual funereal business that should’ve driven home the reality of his death. My wife went the funeral home to view her father’s body prior to him being prepped for the visitation. We saw him again at the visitation and the funeral. For some reason, though, those experiences weren’t sufficient to convince us, emotionally at least, of the reality of his death. (It should be noted that, as followers of Christ, we believed his body to be merely an empty vessel at that point and that his spirit had moved on. As to where his spirit went, I’ll save a theological discussion of the concepts of sleep, heaven and the New Earth for another day… when I understand them myself.) Though my wife could view his lifeless body many times and remain strong, she couldn’t bring herself to delete his contact info from her mobile phone. THAT made it too real for her.

Likewise, she admitted that the hardest aspect of his death for her to grasp was the impossibility of simply picking up the phone to call him. For me, the realities hit hard and fast every time I type something about his death. Needless to say, writing this has been difficult. We have also discussed some of the things we’ll miss most about him, including watching Alabama football games on TV with him and his annoying PC service calls to our house. No matter how many times we told him “if you were using a Mac, we could help you,” he kept trying. Salesmen. Gotta love their persistence.

The need to perceive reality through the lens of technological advances is not new in my life. As a professional director and amateur photographer, no family vacation, birthday party or holiday is fully “experienced” unless I view it through the literal lens of some form of camera. In fact, one of my methods of dealing with the grief of our recent loss has been to immerse myself in still photography (and then upload those photos into the cloud, of course.) The few times I have attempted to go “lensless” on a vacation, I felt as if the experience were somehow hollow and meaningless, more fleeting than vapor. Memory is certainly a factor in that perception. I literally can’t remember those moments as vividly if viewed au naturale. And it doesn’t matter if I review the photos later; it’s as if the simple act of using a camera to capture those moments embeds the memories more deeply. Review them over and over again, and they become indelible.

I have innumerable memories of my childhood prior to age four, but I realized sometime ago that many of those are not memories of the events themselves, but memories of watching home movies of those events on my dad’s old 8mm projector. There was a time when I could recall the phone numbers of all my friends and family right off the top of my head. These days, I can only remember a handful. Why should I? They’re all right there in my contacts list on the computer and my phone.

If our emotional responses and our memories become so completely interwoven with technology, does that constitute cyborg? Going back to the Times’ definition, the creation of a “man-machine system” isn’t enough. That system must exist to help the being “live in an environment different than the normal one.” Do our current technological addictions fit the bill? I’m not sure they help us to live in our physical environment any better. In fact, one could argue that, with type II diabetes and obesity on the rise, technological advances have only served to make us less suited to the physical world we inhabit. However, what we have created is a an alternate “environment” comprised entirely of information. That environment governs almost every aspect of our daily lives in developed nations, from the creation and acquisition of wealth to controlling the flow of our food supply. One shudders to think what might happen if all the doomsayers are right about Y2K. Oh, wait…

The movie site Slashfilm recently spurred an online discussion inspired by the lackluster performance of Terminator: Salvation regarding whether the conceit of man-versus-scary-machine is no longer scary. There are many interesting (and some puerile) opinions on both sides of the argument. Personally, I believe the question itself to be self-reflexive: the very conversation itself could never have taken place if not for extremely powerful computers instantaneously connecting users from around the world, creating a man-machine system as it were. We’re no longer scared of machines, because our relationship with them is growing increasingly symbiotic. Perhaps the half of the man-machine system we should fear most is man.

To wit, one final note: last year I was in the Birmingham airport headed who knows where. As I was passing through security I noticed a young man, probably no more than 25, who had been pulled aside by TSA agents for a more thorough screening. They weren’t searching his bags for tweezers or saline solution. They were asking him to remove his leg for a closer inspection. Based upon his age and appearance, I surmised that he had most likely lost his biological leg in war. The artificial leg was one of those really high tech, articulated jobs. Though he handled it with good humor, I was incensed. Here’s a kid who gave up a piece of his humanity ostensibly to protect our country against terrorism, and the bureaucratic drones of the TSA were treating him as if he were a terrorist himself. (These are the same geniuses who totally missed a Gerber multi-tool I had left in my camera bag a few months earlier.) So I ask you, who was more machine: the forgiving young man with the robotic leg, or the security worker who blindly followed protocol (programming) without using any wisdom or discretion?