SFGAte Columnist Mark Morford has an interesting piece today about the way we take technology completely for granted. Here’s an excerpt:
Is there not some sort of danger attached to this? To our collective forgetting, to our historical inability to remember to be deliriously, stupidly impressed and daunted by even our most modest creations, to say nothing of nature’s? Of course there is.
Put it this way: My generation never knew life before television or microwaves or the Hitachi Magic Wand. The next never knew life before cellphones and GPS and social networking and the fact that, thanks to those selfsame technologies, your last bong hit or ranty celebrity meltdown could very well be seen and heard by millions. The generation after them… who the hell knows?
What we do know is, we just keep stacking, faster and faster and more and more deliriously, while paying less and less attention to what sort of energy we’re toying with. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say we simply can’t pay sufficient attention, given the nearly unfathomable speed of modern progress. Advancement tops advancement in an increasingly insane quest for new ways to tell each other we’re overwhelmed and lonely and seeking something to fill the Void, so I might as well just Twitter about the fact that I’m overwhelmed and lonely and sitting here drenched in ennui and jadedness and what-are-you-wearing. Go figure.
To paraphrase a renowned philosopher, we just keep making the pie higher. This is the nature of us. It is, in turns, both wonderful and terrifying.
It seems there are only two real options, two end results of our civilization’s grand experiment. Either the stack becomes so high — with our sense of wonder and integrity rising right along with it — that it finally lifts us off the ground and transports us to some new realm of understanding and evolution, or it ultimately topples over, crashes and mauls everything that came before, because we just didn’t care enough to stop and smell the astonishment.
You have but to remember: How many ancient, advanced civilizations have collapsed under the weight of their own unchecked growth, their own technological advances, their own inability to stay nimble and attuned to the crushing marvel of it all? Answer: all of them.
