• The Modern Myth of New and Improved

   Modernism. Modern. The word derives from Latin and means "just now". So modern could be thought of as a synonym for "new". Both words, modern and new, seem to carry a connotation of "good" - though for no apparent reason.

   In popular culture we've made a vague connection between "modern" and "progress". We also think of progress as being good, some kind of improvement, though the word does not necessarily imply that.

   Modern...progress...new...improved...such commonly used words.
   We seem to live by an unquestioned myth of ongoing newness and improvement, in which those 2 words are nearly synonymous. We strive to "new and improve" everything. The extent of this can be seen walking through nearly any retail store. Hundreds of items are marked "new and improved". Even plain old dish soap gets, inexplicably, new and improved. But it doesn't stop there. The myth of new and improved has permeated all aspects of life: If our friends become boring or unfulfilling we can get "new and improved" friends. We refer to work as the "job market" where we can acquire new and improved "careers". There are increasingly popular, legal, psychoactive drugs - various neurotransmitter re-uptake inhibitors - that we can take to alter brain chemistry, in hopes that it might be possible to "new and improve" even the very nature of experience.

   Leading the mythical march of newness and improvement is technology. For a long time we've been looking to technology to ease suffering, provide convenience and generally make our lives better. But what is "better", really?

   Perhaps this whole way of thinking should be looked at.

• Scrutinizing the Willy-Nilly Fruits of Technology

   Consider some common technological "improvements": The automatic door, the microwave oven, and the portable music player. The automatic door can be helpful to physically disabled people but it also helps to eliminate human interaction in public places. The microwave oven can "zap" our food into an edible state almost instantly, but that convenience also tends to discourage the habit of cooking a full, proper meal of fresh food. Music is a powerful art form, but now that we can hear it constantly on our portable players, music often serves as little more than a soundtrack for pointless daydreaming and emotional thumbsucking. Further, it increases social alienation as we separate ourselves, via headphones, from the public environment.

   We go to the mall to buy something new and improved. We walk through the automatic doors, ignoring the people around us as we listen to our personal music selection.... and all the while yearning for some kind of fulfilling human contact, some kind of genuineness in our experience.

   The point being made here may seem rather abstract and philosophical, but it relates very much to the quality of our daily lives, now and in the future. Thanks to computer technology, we're on the verge of instituting mechanical and computerized automation in a multitude of ways that have never before been seen. Yet there is very little discussion about whether we truly want or need all of these new technologies, or whether such automations necessarily improve our quality of life. If we do want these new technologies, how should they be implemented? And what is quality of life, anyway? Can it be measured in terms of pleasure, comfort and convenience?

   When technology is discussed a polarization often develops, with technophiles talking in favor of technology while technophobes talk against it. But technophilia and technophobia are essentially the same thing: an irrational reaction with no basis in fact or experience; a taking of sides without reflection. Technology is just tools - it isn't good or bad. The effects of technology depend upon how those tools are used, how they relate to our lives as humans. Perhaps it's time, after decades of being wowed dizzy by the pace of scientific breakthroughs, that we try to get our bearings and figure out how to better relate those breakthroughs to our lives.

   We can produce a robot to pour our coffee, which might be quite entertaining. But what is the real value in that? We can computerize our homes to the extent that the temperature, background music and many other environmental variables are just to our liking. Is that an improvement? Or is it some sort of intensive care unit for a people addicted to constant comfort and entertainment? Some "cutting edge" scientists even speculate that we may eventually be able to "download ourselves" onto advanced computer chips and thereby live forever. But what about life today...now? And what exactly would be the self that we might download? Aren't those questions more important than the question of how to make the alleged Methuselah chip?

• The Meaning of Life

   In order to address the issue of how to use technology well, we need to have a view or model of what's meaningful in human life, which may be difficult in these times. Religion has traditionally addressed the issue of meaning, but it rarely does any longer, as the fast advances of science have appeared to render the spiritual less relevant. In connection with religion's waning, a gap has developed and we find ourselves living in an atmosphere of nihilistic relativism, with no clear agreement about what is meaningful.

  The modern myth of newness and improvement is not up to the task of exploring meaning. It relates only to the narrow realm of material/technological progress. It's a myth of advancement through technology, lacking human meaning or context; a naive myth that equates techno-pizzazz with improvement and defines meaning through the Artless, witless eye of science: life gets reduced to biology; psychology gets reduced to brain chemistry; sociology gets reduced to sociobiology; culture gets reduced to incidental style; improvement is defined in terms of technological sophistication.

   The peoples of modernity seem to be having various reactions to the ontological question mark, the gap in meaning, that has come with our high-speed technological success.

   Many people have turned to fundamentalism of various sorts, hoping to hold to one mythology or tradition in the face of change. This reaction recognizes the importance of meaning in human life but tries to institutionalize meaning out of fear. We can no longer afford fundamentalism as a guiding light in a world of constantly changing forms and parameters.

   At the other end of the spectrum, some people have yielded to the seductive cleverness of nihilism, creating philosophies such as deconstructionism, which questions the existence or validity of meaning by "deconstructing" it. Yet while such philosophies may arise out of an honest recognition of existential impalpability, they also contain a very basic materialist assumption, a sly ambition to maintain, in some form, the same solidity of meaning they set out to reject. The deconstructionist must presume the existence of the forest of materialist reality in order to question the existence of each tree. That is, he or she has partially seen through the false concreteness of mono-paradigmatic perception, but still tries to fashion some sort of concrete reference point from that insight - a bit of solid ground built on nil-ity itself! The nihilist philosophies achieve a certain sophistication and swank but are fundamentally sterile.

   And for most of us in the mainstream of modernity, for lack of a comprehensive paradigm of meaning, daily life takes on an undefined quality. It's the modern life of the consumer, seeking meaning at the material level; seeking something new and improved to put things right:

   We might try to buy meaning in the form of material goods or educational workshops. We might try to "self-improve" our way to a more meaningful life, with a higher status job or a new lover who's a "better catch" than the last one. We might seek meaning in other cultures, attempting to opt into a perceived authentic culture in hopes of making it our own (as people in third-world countries find a new industry in selling their "genuine" culture to the Moderns in the form of Shamanism tours and whatnot). Or we might just stake our hopes on further technological progress, perhaps looking forward to the glorious arrival of the so-called "Information Age". But the Information Age is just more of the same dilemma, positing information itself, information divorced from meaning, as...well...meaningful.

   So the pre-eminence of science, and the changes it has wrought in our lives, have created a kind of spiritual gap. Science provides practical tools but it provides no answers about the meaning of life and, more to the point, leaves no room for the question.
   While it may be difficult to resolve our "crisis of meaning", we are still producing the future from our current living. We will have to live in that future, so it seems wise to give it some thought. Such reflection may be crucial at this point because computerization is rapidly changing the landscape of our world and thereby changing our lives in unplanned ways. For example....

• An Automated Society...

   Walk into a locally-owned pharmacy or hardware store. Ask for an item they don't have. The clerk will probably tell you whether they carry that item and, if not, whether it can be ordered. He or she may have advice about another item that better suits your needs.

   Now walk into any pharmacy or hardware chain store. Ask for an item that you don't see on the shelf. The response will probably be, "Whatever is out there is what we have". Ask if the item can be ordered. The answer will probably be something like, "The order comes in Tuesday".

   The reason for this? The chain outlet is a computerized store. Sales are recorded at the cash register. That information is then fed to a software program that calculates what should go on the next stock order. If an item does not sell well the program will discontinue stocking it. The clerks in most chain stores must serve the computer. They are not allowed to change the stock order. They don't even know what's on the order. These clerks are also not allowed to use personal judgment.

   A computerized store requires people who act like computers in order to function smoothly. The computer program will stock whatever is bought by the store's "customer base", but the program is unaware of individual customers. There is no option for special orders and it's likely that you won't find replacement parts in 6 months for the item that you buy today.

   Computer technology has produced this wonder of efficiency for us. And what is the result?

   On the personal level, clerks are dispirited by the requirement to work at a dehumanizing job. Customers are dispirited by their encounters with automaton-like clerks. And ironically, despite our addiction to the fantasy of "choice", choice is actually disappearing, as each retail store reduces inventory to the same limited selection of the most profitable items. The computerized store may be a financial success, at least in the short term. But is that so important? Can such a computerized store really be regarded as an improvement?

   This kind of computerization is becoming increasingly popular on a large scale, particularly in the form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), also sometimes known as Customer Resource Management. These are some interesting terms. Customers as resources? That term reeks of the same depravity evoked by calling people "consumers". Customer relationship management? Interestingly, that phrase means just the opposite: CRM involves using computer software tools to increase business without needing to have relationships with one's customers.

   The shopping cards showing up in supermarkets and pharmacies are an example of CRM. Cards are issued with smarmy names like "We Care", or "Super Care", or some similar name that the marketing team thought would lend a sense of personalness. Customers sign up for the CRM card by providing marketing information and they (allegedly) get discounts in return. The store computer then gets a chance to link individuals with purchasing patterns. That information can be sold for profit to advertisers and can also be used to computerize what's left of the relationship between the store owners and their customers: The CRM database can be used in creating that infamous stock order described above.

   So no one is minding the modern store. A corporation buys computers and software to run their stores, which often helps to maintain sales figures, which keeps the shareholders happy. Yet nearly all personal relationship has been eliminated between the customers, corporate employees and shareholders. All are subservient to the dictates and limitations of the computer.
   And the store no longer has a defined function in the community. It stocks items not because local people need them, but rather because those are the items that the software has calculated to be most profitable.

   Somehow we've ended up serving the machines that we produced to serve us.

• ...At What Cost?

   And there is also a more insidious result from this kind of computerization: In the example above, neither the company employees, nor the customers, nor the shareholders feel a need to apply their normal moral standards to each other, such as they might with friends and family, because there are no personal relationships involved. So shareholders can support a company that exploits its employees and lies to its customers. By the same token, customers can feel free to cheat the store whenever the opportunity arises. And managers can hire or fire at will with no regard for the people involved. Managers may fire devoted workers merely on the chance that a machine replacement will be more economical.

• Back to the Question of Meaning

   If we have no defining view of what is important and meaningful in human life then we have no defining view for the application of technology. As the widespread use of computerization proliferates, we become increasingly efficient at carrying out our daily activities. The machine of society works better and better. Daily chores become easier to execute. Meanwhile, the people of society are increasingly numbed in a depersonalized existence, devoid of meaning. Our lives become increasingly dictated by the machines that manage them as we hurry, vaguely befuddled, into a new and improved future.