Tag Archives: Technology

Wisdom in the Past Tense

I’ve been reminiscing quite a bit lately about a time, a little over a decade ago, in which I’m convinced the world was a better place. Certainly our life as a family was in a better place, at least, but that isn’t the overall theme of this post. We were living in a different state, then, and had made close friends with a couple several years older than we were. I miss that relationship more than I can express today, as we enter a difficult period of life (perhaps more on that in a later post), because, whatever we went through in those days, this couple had experienced at some level. Job changes, moves, the birth of our first child, the loss of grandparents…they had experienced these life events, and were there to give us support, encouragement, and wisdom. We could learn how to walk through those events because of their experiences before us.

Historically, human beings have looked to people older than them for wisdom. Wisdom is an interesting thing. There’s an entire genre of Biblical writing dedicated to it, and we all crave it, even though we may call it by a different name. In the same way that the knowledge that you are not alone gives strength, the knowledge that someone else has experienced what you are experiencing (not in the abstract, but someone with whom you are actually close) and can give relevant advice is so life-giving. Even if that person gives no advice and is just present with you as you walk through a point in life, the awareness of their experience causes their presence to give you strength.

“Respect your elders” used to be the advice given to children, and gray hair was seen as a sign of honor.

Culturally and, I think, Biblically, there is a responsibility that comes with being that elder. There is, or at least should be, a social contract of sorts that says you will be present in the lives of your younger friends, that you will endeavor to give the best advice that you can when called upon, and to eschew the giving of advice on a area in which you don’t have experience. Getting older isn’t just getting discounts and free meals…you’ve lived through some stuff, and now you have a responsibility to assist others who are living through the same stuff after you.

In academia, this showed up in subtle ways. Older sources are respected, weighed more heavily. Newer research must stand up against rigorous review in order to contradict what has been known for some time. This places greater checks and balances against error or…dare I say this?….fake news. Today, though, in most disciplines, this is not the case. In technology specifically, newer is always better, older is always bad. That shiny new idea is to be revered simply because someone was able to do it, never bothering to ask whether or not it might be a good idea. Respecting the wisdom of elders here is almost impossible, because the elders are expected to abandon their experience in favor of the shiny new idea. The hive mind demands it. Old is bad. In with the new.

Which leads me to entertain the idea: what if we’ve created a world in which it’s impossible to trust in the wisdom of our elders?

What if we’ve created a world in which it’s impossible to trust in the wisdom of our elders?

What if we’ve ensured that nothing will function “the old way”, or at least not well (think of out-dated software)? What if we’ve altered the world so irrevocably that we’ve created enough black swan events that the wisdom of our elders doesn’t…even can’t…apply? Think about this dystopia for a moment. Events that can so drastically change society that there is no going back can, I would argue, invalidate certain specific wisdom by definition. Experiencing something like this once every few generations is recoverable. In my lifetime alone, though, I’ve seen so many….the invention of the Internet, the normalization of hate that followed the election of the first Black president of the U.S., the social upheaval during the Covid pandemic, artificial intelligence…each of which has shifted our culture in dramatic ways, ways from which it will not return. So many of these events in such a short period of time could cause some wisdom to just not apply any longer, and all of these events are events of our own creation.

I’m no longer young. I’ve gone through a lot of things in my life, and have things left to live through. As one gets older, though, there’s a certain comfort that experience brings. When moving to a new area, starting a new job or a new career, embarking on a new life journey, there is comfort and direction found in the ability to assume that, because certain things tend to go a certain way, those certain things are or are not good ideas in a given scenario. If we’ve managed to make our existence so unpredictable by our constant disruptions that we can longer count on this experience, then we may well have invalidated the wisdom of many who have gone before us. The hive mind wins. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

That is perhaps the most dystopian future that I can imagine, one that can’t be salvaged short of Divine intervention.

Image attribution: Thomas Hawk under Creative Commons.

Dehumanizing by Distance

A long time ago, I read an article (which I lament not bookmarking, because I can never find it now) that discussed a study regarding how drivers viewed other drivers as compared to how they viewed pedestrians. The findings of the study were basically that drivers viewed pedestrians as more human, and thus afforded them more forgiveness and lenience if the pedestrian made a decision that the driver viewed as stupid. Conversely, other drivers were viewed as less human, more likely to receive the driver’s anger and contempt. The thought process was that, when we’re locked away inside of metal vehicles, we have difficulty seeing each other as fellow human beings, and are more likely to become enraged and even violent with each other.

That study stayed with me, because I think that it’s onto something. It’s easy to feel hatred toward someone with whom we can’t relate or find common ground, and distance simply makes it psychologically more difficult to relate or find the common ground. When we have metal walls between each other, we become less than human in each others’ perspectives.

It turns out that it’s not just physical barriers that accomplish this dehumanization. The pandemic showed us this, I think, as we desperately turned to video screens to maintain some level of human contact, while realizing how poor a substitute it was for keeping in touch with our loved ones. The distance, the resolving of a person that we know into pixels, somehow alters our perspective of that person. If it’s someone that we don’t know, exponentially more so.

This is what I thought about when I read this article about the expansion of the use of drones in the war in Ukraine. This war, which, like most wars is completely senseless, has been the first wide-scale use of drone technology in full scale combat. Soldiers are taking other soldiers’ lives without ever being in shooting distance. They simply watch on a video screen as they pilot an airborne weapon from miles away, applying a video-game style of lethal force with real-world consequences.

Theologically and philosophically, I’m a pacifist. As all human beings are created in God’s image (even when they’re driving the other car), I don’t see God leaving open the option of taking another life. I see that principle as being as old as the Ten Commandments. This is why I see armed combat as wrong, because inherent in the action is the presupposition that the life of the person on the other side is somehow worth less than one’s own. The soldier from the other side is not another father, sister, or loved one. They are the other. They are the enemy.

We are currently seeing the largest war in Europe since World War II, and, like many wars, it’s simply about a dictator’s power grab. While I am forced to recognize the reality that armed conflict is necessary at times in order for a government to defend the citizens of its country, I think that a war fought by remote control is worse than the savagery of trench warfare. It is cold, and calculating, Human lives are eliminated with no opportunity to surrender or yield. Were a miracle like the Christmas Truce ever to be in the inclination of either side, it would be impossible to realize through a television monitor as one pressed the button that took more lives.

Lives that aren’t seen as lives. Just pieces being removed from the game board.

As I consider this through the lens of Advent, I ache for the time when our swords are beat into plowshares. Then, at least, we will be beyond the point of constantly trying to kill each other. In the meantime, let us pray that this war ends soon.

Priorities, Remixed

I had planned to go to a movie today, but I didn’t.

Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

The movie was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. While about half of Marvel’s phase 4 has been underwhelming, I’m excited about this film. I was looking forward to seeing it tonight, but I didn’t, for a variety of reasons. I’ve travelled quite a bit in the last week. We had an annual Ikea run on Saturday (what used to be an annual event), and spent the night setting up new furniture. Our 6-year-old randomly decided to set an alarm clock, which went off at 0-dark-thirty after I’d been up really late anyway, and I was just wicked tired. I decided to help with dinner instead. All good reasons to skip a movie that I can easily catch later.

This film has already been in theatres for a week as a I write this. So the fact that a Marvel movie has been playing that long without me in an audience, and then I postponed it likely another week….well, if you know me at all, you’ll appreciate the paradigm shift.

There was a time when Marvel film releases were on my calendar and planned for weeks or months in advance. We were in the theatre on opening weekend. If there was a scheduling conflict, the other thing was shifted. Child care was booked and confirmed. Think of it as the Superbowl, but for geeks, often followed promptly by a review of the movie on this very blog. That really hasn’t been the case lately. It’s part of a post-Covid mental shift for me. As with many, I’ve just re-prioritized things. I still really want to see this movie, but I’m also really happy that I took the afternoon and had a relaxed dinner with my family.

When Black Widow opened in theatres during the pandemic, I was still very uneasy about venturing back into that environment. I waited three weeks to see that film, and only then during a sparsely attended matinee. This for one of my all-time favorite characters. I never saw Spider-Man: No Way Home in the theatre due to the virus…I (im)patiently awaited it’s Blu-Ray release. And now Wakanda Forever. Which, as much as I want to see, I’m honestly just questioning if I want to make it to a theatre, less now because of concerns over the virus, but more because there are just so many other priorities, things that would have been shifted three years ago in favor of the movie, but that are now reasons why the movie hasn’t happened.

I love the experience of going to a movie. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call myself a movie lover, but the experience feels similar enough to attending live theatre that I’ve always enjoyed it. Now that I’m on the other side of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, however, I find myself thinking, can I just wait until this is streaming somewhere?

I fully intend to see Wakanda forever in the theatre (and wow, is it difficult to avoid spoilers for this long). I’ll probably post a review here when I do. I miss that buzz of seeing some of my favorite characters come to life on the big screen, the excitement of being there as soon as it is available, but other things have taken its place. I guess that, no matter how much I wanted…and I think that many of us did…the end of the pandemic to bring things full circle to exactly the way they were before, it’s simply not the case. Different things have changed for all of us, and won’t be the same. I question how much longer movie theatres will survive, and that is a thing that has shifted for me. My movie-going habits won’t be the same.

Interestingly, life still goes on, and I’m even the better for it.

Everything in Moderation

Last week I listened to a great conversation over at FLOSS Weekly regarding social media, conversations, and moderation. In case you don’t read the news often…or social media…in which case this might not interest you but I digress…there’s a been a bit of a stir around Twitter lately. The short version is that it’s about to become a privately held company controlled by an eccentric person with a lot of money who isn’t interested in curtailing anyone’s free speech.

Go ahead, I’ll let you catch up…

So, yes, regardless of how you feel about this…and my feelings are mixed…I think we all can agree that Twitter is about to become a very different neighborhood.

Like most of you, I’ve used social media for a long time. I would even have called myself a power user at one point, although I’ve stepped back from a lot of platforms, including deleting Facebook. Twitter has been the one that I’ve generally held onto, although lately I’ve been staying with the sites that were mainstays back in the day….Reddit, Digg, and so forth…because Twitter is beginning to become a platform for people to scream at each other, as well as making really frustrating and isolating decisions about how it can be used.

On the podcast, there was discussion about how, if Twitter is the public square for conversation in America, what moderation is necessary and appropriate? In short: is Musk’s vision of reducing moderation a pipe dream? The panel talks about how Reddit is heavily moderated, and, as a result, new users are often moderated out and leave. This poses the question, is that level of moderation a good thing?

Some level of governance is necessary for social discourse. However, the idea that the right kind of governance…taking the form of content moderation…can resolve the noisy echo chamber that Twitter has become is faulty at its premise, because it’s trying to fix a cultural problem with technology. We can’t moderate how people feel about each other, even if we can how they interact with each other.

The problem with Twitter, or any other social network, isn’t that there aren’t correct rules. The problem is that it gives everyone a platform to speak, but no one knows how to have civil discourse. To the contrary, it’s become fashionable to not be civil. As the panelists point out, when moderation reaches its extreme and people are banned from a network, they just create a parallel network. These are just echo chambers.

The problem is cultural. The problem is that we view anyone who disagrees with our perspective as “other,” as a hostile. The problem is that no dissenting views are tolerated in our so-called public spheres. The problem is that America’s version of discourse is to scream louder than the other person so that no one can hear them.

Let me say again, a functioning community must have some rules. Classrooms, faith communities, neighborhood gatherings, all have some level of expectations of behavior, if nothing else. If Twitter is indeed our public square, then I also have to wonder if the scope of the rules is different. If so, however, then I think that it has to be pubic and democratic, not private. There needs to be expectations of how to behave, but this will be useless if those engaging don’t care about those expectations.

Of all social networks, Twitter still doesn’t know what it is. It has grown into something unintentional, and can’t facilitate the conversations of a culture un-educated in civility. We can try to fix this with moderation all we like, but those efforts will fail. The problem lies much, much deeper than the platform which gives it voice, and trying to use more technology to resolve this will not be effective.

This is a problem that our tools cannot fix.

Image attribution: Pete Simon under Creative Commons.

I’ll Never Let You Go – The Grief of Losing a Dog

Just before I was in high school, my family got a dog. He was a small dog, and I’m honestly not entirely sure of his breed except to say that there was Chihuahua in there somewhere. We got him as a puppy, and this was at a fairly formative time in my life…I was old enough to take on a lot of the responsibility of him. He grew up through my high school years, faithfully waiting for me every afternoon when I disembarked from my ridiculously long bus ride. I made up funny voices for him to try to verbalize the expressive facial expressions that we came to know and love. I picked on him like a little brother. In college, I would come home on weekends and he was always there to greet me, faithful as ever.

When that dog died, it was a gut punch. If you’ve lost a pet, you know…there’s a grief process on par with losing a family member. I felt it for a while. Even though I didn’t live there any longer, it felt like a betrayal when my parents got a new dog. How could my old friend ever be replaced? It hurt that they tried.

This has come up a few times lately as our children are…passionately….expressing their desire for us to own a dog. I haven’t owned one since we lost that beloved friend. I don’t want to go through that loss again. The grief is not trivial.

Still, to go to the extremely expensive…and, I would argue, unethical…lengths of cloning a pet would be foreign to me. When I read this column about the industry that has grown up around this practice…yes, you read that correctly…I was more than a bit amazed. And, quite troubled, as well. What disturbes me is not so much the cost of doing this business, but rather the underlying assumptions that creep in through the writer’s descriptions.

If you read the column, you’ll notice that the writer feels the need to point out that cloning a pet is like resetting a phone…similar model, but new data. The comparison is to a cloned animal not having the memory or experiences of the original. I find it disturbing that our accepted cultural analogies to living things have become operating systems. I sort of get it…we are created as creators, and the lens through which we see our world is that which we have built…but there is inherent in this a disrespect for the living thing.

I’m not immune to this. Several years ago, we went through a weekend with no power after a nasty ice storm in North Carolina. When we left to stay with friends who still had power, our daughter’s betta fish didn’t survive the 40-degree nights. She was young at the time, too young, we decided, to have that conversation. So, as she hadn’t noticed when we returned, I made a late-night run to a pet store to insist to the mystified employee that I needed a betta that was a very exact color and appearance. They had one, and when my wife texted to check on my progress, I replied that I was inbound with the “Mark II.”

The source of this flippant disrespect for the living world around us can be found in abundance in the wording of the column. The process of a surrogate pet having the cloned pet is described not as a miraculous event of life continuing (even though it has been meddled with), but in purely scientific terminology. The new cat is an “embryo.” The focus is on the DNA of cells from the original animal, as though the animal is nothing more.

In his analysis of C.S. Lewis’ thought, Joe Rigney coins the expression “scientific reductionism.” He is using it to encapsulate one of Lewis’ central thoughts in the Abolition of Man. His definition is the audacity to believe that if we know all of the facts about a thing, that we know the essence of the thing (my paraphrase). That’s what I find at work here. Even though the subject of the column recognizes that her cloned cat is not the same as her first pet, there is a presumption that we have the right to artificially create a Frankenstein animal because of our grief process, because the animal has no substance other than its DNA. Essentially, in this view, the animal is no greater than the sum of its parts.

This reductionism is a fatally flawed premise. While mostly just gallows humor when we think about it in relation to pets, it becomes significantly more dystopian when framed in terms of humanity. Because, at its core, it requires the rejection of the recognition that humanity is more than just chemicals and electrons. There is no more value in life than that. When there is no more value in life, then war is acceptable. Murder of the unborn is acceptable. Mucking around with processes in our bodies that we don’t understand is acceptable.

Despite all of the science fiction through the decades that has warned us of exactly this issue.

Sometimes, when I stop to remember, and especially when I visit my parents today, I still miss that dog. Naively, I sometimes wish that he could have lived forever. I would never presume, however, to have a hand in re-creating his life, because I didn’t create it to begin with.

We’re playing God. And we’re enormously under-qualified.

Image attribution: Shadowgate under Creative Commons.