Memory Loss

Seldom have I chosen a more poetically appropriate image to illustrate a post. Some may have been accurate as documentation for an event or object, but in terms of metaphor, this one tops everything.

The post's title is also appropriate on several levels, because it describes both a physiological condition associated with age, and a consequence of technological malfunction. Combinations of the two, it seems, can turn into catastrophes of major import to the one who experiences them.

And so, the fog-blanketed Inyos outside of my hometown, photographed on our way out of Owens Valley in the winter of 2014, symbolize aptly the conditions perpetrated by my ageing brain and my lack of expertise in things computer-related. For most of the past twenty years, since I first purchased my web domain (in 1997) and began this blog (in 2007), I've gotten by--flying by the seat of my pants, knowing just what I needed to know to do what needed doing. For the most part, this has worked. I hadn't really had the time while I was still working to learn the skills I needed to design better websites or properly manipulate images, or even understand more about the technical side of what I was doing. I simply winged it, and stayed lucky.

Until this week.  In the process of trying to diminish my download files, I ended up wiping out most of the document files on my Mac.  After my panic had subsided enough, I bought some recovery software (probably not the best one I could have, but it gave me a free download to try it out), and I've managed to recover what seem to be the most important files (after long days of painstakingly opening, sorting, and filing over the last week).  Some are still accessible elsewhere, having been uploaded with webfiles on Owldroppings,  but the short-term stuff (some recent journal entries, budget files, and lists of which ancestors lived with whom every ten years between 1850 and 1930) is gone, like much of my own short-term memory. And so are the e-mail letters I transcribed from my father when I decided to preserve them in case my e-mail account tanked. These I will miss the most.

Only a week or so before this happened, I had mentioned to the Beloved Spouse that I really needed to get an external hard drive to back up my stuff. But, still being something of a procrastinator, I hadn't gotten around to it. Well, now I have. There's a nice, compact little 1T machine plugged into the Mac to aid my Time Machine so that I don't have to go through this again.

In the meantime, I've probably lost my P22 fonts (although I haven't tried to recover graphics and images; the scans are saved so I can do that later), along with stuff I probably don't remember I had. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. I could get the fonts back, even though they're on 3.5" floppies (I've got a USB floppy drive)--except that we recycled them earlier in the summer when we started cleaning out the garage.

I'm getting over it--probably as a side-effect of Black Heart (the ability to forget losses engendered by the frequent up-rootings of life as a military brat). I'll eventually go back over the Ancestry census files I've attached to ancestral names in order to reconstruct the Excel files I built to help sort out familial mysteries (such as which Hannah Scofield is really my grandfather's grandmother). I'll rebuild my new budget template, which will be relatively easy now that it lacks two major expenditures per month (the mortgage and the Jeep having been paid off--although my "red-letter day" account of the events is now gone from my journal), and two fewer paydays. I'll probably wake up in a cold sweat some night not long from now, upon suddenly realizing that something critical is missing and I haven't yet realized it, but I'm hopeful that I've come through the worst of it.

I did manage to recover the stories I've been working on over the years, and both Word and .pdf versions of More News From Nowhere (in case the web version disappears in the EMP). Even the most recent of my "Old Bats In Space" efforts was recovered. Its potential loss may have been my biggest fear because I'd spent a couple of weeks revising it and bringing it up to date, just before the end of July.  Nothing after July 31 seems to have survived at all.

Thus, in an effort to start fresh, I've redesigned my blog template a little--although it's only temporary. I need to work on it more, but thought that the new banner and template might help to cheer me up and get me back into the spirit of things.

That, and I will be taking advantage of Google's archiving tools.  I'm not sure what I'd do if I lost the last 9.5 years of the Farm. The image on the banner, by the way, is another shot from Winter 2014--taken at Uhlmeyer Spring.

What this experience has taught me is that the current mania for simplifying, de-cluttering, and paring down may have serious consequences for those of us who value the past. I'm certainly going to be a great deal more careful about what I toss--and how I go about "deleting.". My children don't know it yet, but they're the ones who will have to do the final sorting, because I'm going to be much more reluctant to diminish the family archives while anyone's still around who might care about them.

Ned Ludd's Bad Rap

Back when I was seriously formulating a dissertation, before I got tired (finally, at about 45 years of age) of being a graduate student, I was trying very hard to be a philosopher of technology. This, to me, provided a focus that made sense of the enormous variety of courses I'd taken (in both the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities) over some (then) 25 years of higher education.

It made sense to me that if one of the things that helped us define ourselves was our use of tools (for everything from hunting and preparing our food to expressing ourselves in art and music), then we ought to be able to examine critically the uses we make of these tools, and to assess their impact not only on ourselves, but on our fellow beings--animal, vegetable, and even mineral. When I first started looking around at the developing fields of technology assessment, environmental ethics (now more broadly characterized as environmental philosophy), and other branches of philosophy (mostly pragmatism and the Continental tradition), I wondered why there wasn't a more coordinated effort to study questions that seemed to be on everyone's minds: what are we doing to ourselves?

Some folks were, in fact, writing about this very question, and I discovered them when I started thinking seriously about what human beings were up to. Continental philosophy had, in fact, produced one of the most enduring critiques in 1954, when Martin Heidegger published his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Even earlier, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and William Morris (among many others) had written about technology in philosophical terms. The idea of questioning technology, I discovered, had been around since the Greeks. I wasn't exactly on to something new.

Nonetheless, pursuing the subject led me deeply into Morris and his work on the technologies of art and design, and on the social and political aspects of active critique. Some folks, it seemed, hadn't just written about this stuff--they went out and tried to whack people on the side of the head to try to get them to think about where all these new machines (steam engines, power looms) were leading us. Hence the notion of sabotage (and the rather odd choice of image to illustrate this post), perhaps related to the development of the Luddite movement during the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, terms like "sabotage" and "Luddite" carry primarily negative connotations these days, but their origins lay in the act of criticizing technologies--not in terrorism or the refusal to immediately adopt every damned toy that comes on the market. My question is this: How much different might the world be today if we actually stopped to think about new tools, and took a bit of time to imagine where they might lead?

I'm absolutely convinced that the manifold problems associated with the internet, for example, would not have arisen if we hadn't all jumped higgeldy piggeldy onto the bandwagon, brandishing our cherished American gospel of individualism and waving our technical superiority, trying to convince the rest of the world that if it wants to join the future, it had better become like us. Only it's not just us--it's the entire West (trying to be like us--or perhaps trying to convince themselves that they were like us before we were). The impact of computer technology alone, from manufacture to use, on the rest of the world has created such rapid and rampant change that nobody has a choice about it any more. Traditional tribal peoples all over the globe are (thanks to Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative) being introduced to the internet, and their children are being seduced by technology in the name of "progress" and "modernity" and the inevitability of globalization. The real crime here is that nobody asked them if they wanted it. We in the West are all for freedom of choice (walk down the supermarket cereal aisle to see where that's led us), but only when it comes to "choosing" which brand of computer to buy--not choosing whether or not to buy them in the first place.

The irony of the market, of course, is that choice exists only in the beginning. The "winning" technology eventually takes over (VHS beats out Betamax; DVDs beat out VHS; Blue Ray beats out HD DVD), and then those of us who bought into the "wrong" technology are left with stacks of obsolete, expensive crap that the conscientious person has to agonize over what to do with, and those who don't give a damn simply dump into the landfill.

I held out on using a cellular telephone for much longer than most (although I did own one briefly, about ten years ago, while my mother was still alive and under my care). It was only my daughter's emergency surgery a couple of months ago, and the ensuing difficulty of trying to contact me, that I finally acquiesced. And I didn't just buy a little pay-as-you-go model as I had originally planned. I bought an iPhone, because this way I could convince myself that I wasn't buying a phone--I was buying a little tiny laptop. In fact, most of what I use it for is checking e-mail, so it doesn't seem quite so much like selling out.

But of course I have sold out. I became a techno-whore when I bought that Commodore 64 back in the eighties and stopped writing my essays out by hand and then typing them on an electric typewriter. I was convinced, like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, and the rest of the Whole Earth crowd on The Well (which I never did join, however) that the internet was going to bind people together and make the world a better place. Our optimism was a bit over-frought, as Lee Siegel has rather succinctly pointed out in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. If only we had thought it through a bit more carefully.

Now, I have to admit that there are things about the internet that I love. I truly enjoy writing this blog, and doing so actually forces me to think more carefully about the world and what's going on in it. It allowed me to publish my book without having to sell myself or pander to the whims of the book trade. I've also made some good friends that I'd never have even come in contact with without the rapid development of internet communication devices and programs. Best of all, I enjoyed a long and lively correspondence with my father in the years before he died, which would certainly never have happened otherwise because I'm so lousy with the phone and so bad at getting around to writing letters.

But this is only one technology, really, as all-encompassing and pervasive as it is. We don't tend to think seriously about the consequences of anything we do: cloning, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, nuclear power (well, that does cause some contemplation, thanks to Chernobyl). Unless we endure some whacking great disaster related to one or all of the above, we're not even likely to discuss potential problems before they're already out of our hands entirely. Anyone who does ask questions is an alarmist, or worse: a Luddite.

In her sort-of utopian novel, Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Leguin describes technology as "morally dangerous." The computers are all located somewhere in a city, most people live in low-impact rural enclaves, and even solar-powered electricity is looked upon with suspicion. As she explains in an appendix on practices, the "arts of the uses of the energies of sun, wind, water, electricity, and the combinations of things to make other things are all practices of exchange. They want vigilance and clarity of mind, a bright imagination, modesty, attention to detail and to implication, strength, and courage" (479). Imagine how different the world would be if we became equally mindful about the technologies we now so thoughtlessly pursue, oblivious as we are to the varieties of potential--not just the prophesied advantages.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I'm still alive and able to wallow in my low-fi Luddism. I'm fully aware that were I to move to the valley in my own utopia, I'd last a couple of years at best, because I'm so dependent on the drugs that mitigate my unfortunate combination of genes (and my sedentary way of life, pounding away at a computer keyboard rather than charging around the garden as I should be doing). But that doesn't mean that it's a useless exercise, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing much more thinking about technological consequences, much more frequently.

To some extent, we are. The back-to-the-land movement that came out of the sixties has become more sophisticated and has begun to focus on permaculture and sustainability. "Green" blogs and websites abound (some are noted in my sidebar entries). People are more interested in the quality of their food, and the market is responding, at least on a small scale. But I did discover, while conducting a bit of background research for this blog, one ominous sign. The U. S. Government office of technology assessment has closed. I'm not sure whether it ever accomplished anything anyway, but if we're officially closing up shop in this regard, it makes one wonder whether Our Guys in Washington have permanently given up thinking about consequences, or whether it's just a temporary blip. It'll be interesting to see what happens after November.

We should not, however, need a government agency to do our thinking for us. We really need to be asking questions ourselves, every time we make a purchase, especially of the latest high-tech gadget. What went into its making? Did any being or environment suffer or die as a result of its manufacture? Will this object (or complex of objects) truly enhance my life? How will it affect my relationships with my family and friends? My ecological footprint? How long will it last? Does it have the potential to cause social or environmental harm? Do I really need it? It wouldn't hurt to treat any technology we adopt as if it were potentially dangerous not only to our physical selves, but to our moral being.

Heidegger himself put it best, at the end of "The Question Concerning Technology": "The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought."

Photo: Panthouse's own clogs (modified), from Wikimedia Commons.
Citation: Ursula K. Leguin, Always Coming Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.