5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

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5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 02, 2010 9:37 am

5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on February 2, 2010


http://www.alternet.org/story/145485/


"It's not technology we have to worry about, it's the humans," Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, editors of the academic technology and culture journal CTheory, once argued to AlterNet, in an article about the Pentagon's plan to fund packs of man-hunting robots. "Why blame technology? It generally does what it is coded to do. It's the human sentient understanding of how to take cruel advantage of human weakness that's the problem."

Indeed, humans are exceptional when it comes to using technology to prey upon weaknesses, in themselves, their cultures and their markets. But even when technological solutions arise for navigating problems as mundane as they are obstructive, there tends to be some variation of consequence. Let's just call it "techno-blowback." As developmental biologist and cyborg theorist Donna Haraway once famously explained, "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism." We can't take technology out of our humanity any more than we can take humanity, and its dangerous games, out of our technology. So we walk the tightrope between both, trying not to fall as we steadily transform a cyborg future in which we may no longer be able to distinguish them anymore.

Below are five examples of that problematic merge, from least offensive to least humane, analyzing how everything from handy gadgets to user-friendly weaponry have changed the way we work, play and police.

iPods and iTunes: At first glance, Apple's proprietary digital media player and application couldn't come soon enough. Portable music players choking on clunky cassettes were driving us all crazy, especially since the music industry had steadily moved away from vinyl and tape to digital, although it decided to encode it all on wasteful compact discs. Apple's iPod and iTunes changed that game forever, taking material goods out of the equation and providing in their place a seamless way to integrate music into our lives. Of course, it also killed the industry as we know it, according to some.

"Apple has destroyed the music business -- in terms of pricing -- and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side," NBC CEO Jeff Zucker complained in 2007. "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content. They did not want to share what they were making."

Complaints about Apple's exclusivity continue to this day, enhancing the argument that its revolutionary innovations in digital music entertainment and distribution have padded its earnings reports rather than change the music industry for the better. And it's also had arguable ancillary effects, from killing off the album to degrading sonic quality. "Apple has taken a detour down the convenience highway,” rocker Neil Young said in 2008. “Quality has taken a complete backseat -- if it even gets in the car at all."

On its way to redefining the rules of music ownership and sales, Apple has also dominated the discussion of what users can put on their iPods and iTunes, including how many people they can share songs with. Along the way, it has deleveraged the cultural power of music and its market, leading to increased piracy and less cash for everyone, especially the bloated major labels who fed like vampires on their harder-working artists for generations. For all its innovations, it's arguable that we are still stuck with a music industry that is a technological upgrade of its former self, but still diminished. The fact that the music industry utterly deserved obsolescence is irony icing on the technology cake.

"iTunes is essentially the record store model ported to the Internet, with no other major innovation other than to sell songs individually rather than as albums," Eliot Van Buskirk, music business columnist (and one of my colleagues) at Wired.com, explained to AlterNet. "Other companies tried to sell music online way before Apple did, but it took Steve Jobs' charm -- and the fact that the labels saw the then-Mac-only iTunes store as a test bed for rollout to the wider market -- to convince them to sell songs online. That was iTunes' crowning achievement, and it continues to pay somewhat well for major and indie labels alike, and even unsigned bands, through thin middleman services like TuneCore."

But at what expense? Digital distribution has unmasked how easy it really is to share art and commerce, but it has also made it easier to avoid paying those who create both with increasing impunity. And while the world is full of well-meaning consumers who want to fully support the creators they admire, digital distribution innovations, from iTunes to the BitTorrent protocol, nevertheless excel at preying upon market weaknesses for that art and commerce. It's a price we have to pay for a leveled playing field.

"ITunes pushed the industry forward, big-time," Van Buskirk said. "Before that, there was no way for indie bands to sell their songs to a worldwide audience of music fans alongside the majors' stuff -- never mind one that let them keep about 70 percent of their sales revenue without going through a label, the way iTunes does. iTunes also led to less material waste, because music files don't need packaging. But if iTunes has failed in any regard, it has failed to provide a real discovery engine for fans. Luckily, the entire Internet handles that pretty well."

Mobile Phones: Speaking of Apple, the iPhone is a recent, brilliant iteration of the mobile phone, one that has mashed communication, networking, gaming and commercial functions as seamlessly as the iPod and iTunes merged digital musical consumption and production. Unfortunately, it has also caused more than its share of car crashes, pedestrian accidents, "sexting" scandals and maybe even cancer. Wonderful.

“This meeting is probably the most important meeting in the history of the Department of Transportation,” secretary Ray LaHood explained late last year, after President Obama banned federal employees from texting while driving. "Distracted driving is dangerous and unacceptable."

That move was summarily followed up in recent events, where states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and many more banned texting and talking while driving, by not just citizens but also interstate truckers. These laws have escalated atop mounting evidence from the American Automotive Association and others that drivers who text are 20 times more likely to crash than those who don't. Add to that statistics indicating that drivers look at their phones instead of the road for more than four of every six seconds they're texting, and that around 80 percent of crashes are caused by distracted drivers, and you have a recipe for disaster.

To make matters worse, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded its investigation into a deadly California train crash that left 25 dead and 135 injured with a damning finding: Metrolink engineer Robert Sanchez's "egregious" texting was to blame. Taken together with the failure of an already existing Metrolink policy forbidding cell phones in control cabins, the NTSB summarily called for installment of surveillance cameras in all of its trains. Which, in turn, angered the Engineers and Trainmen union, which claimed the cameras wouldn't help and were an invasion of privacy. (More on this techno-blowback below.)

But that's just drivers. Pedestrians are increasingly becoming crash fodder too. In 2008, more than 1,000 distracted walkers massaging their phones entered America's emergency rooms, after variously tripping, falling or walking into everything from poles to cars. That doubled the tally from 2007, which itself doubled the tally from 2006, and so on. And the numbers should be higher.

“It’s the tip of the iceberg,’’ Ohio State professor Jack L. Nasar said in a study, co-authored by graduate student Derek Troyer, on the tragicomic trend. Why? The majority of those afflicted are younger, and most of their mishaps don't end in a hospital visit. Given the trend's performance in the last few years, it's reasonable to expect a runaway rate for future accidents, by foot, car, train or, God help us all, plane. But that's just the benevolent kind of disaster that could happen.

According to the National Cancer Institute, "Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between cellular telephone use and the risk of developing malignant and benign brain tumors, but results from long-term studies are still limited....However, some, but not all, long-term studies have suggested slightly increased risks for certain types of brain tumors."

Its cautious language is warranted, given that there have been no direct links established between mobile phone usage and cancer. But that didn't stop the World Health Organization from promising to end its decade-long, much-anticipated Interphone investigation with a warning that there is a "significantly increased risk” of some brain tumors for mobile phones users who have held gadgets sending out heavy doses of radiofrequency waves directly into their heads for 10 years or more. It's far from a sure thing, but it's closer to scary than it is to conspiracy, especially since mobile phones have been in heavy commercial use since the '80s. Let's hope that early adopters of this technology still have time to save their possibly irradiated brains.

CT Scans: While we're on radiation, here's another ironic revelation perfectly built for techno-blowback: Computer tomography (CT) scans could possibly give you cancer while looking for it.

According to a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine by University of California-San Francisco professor and radiologist Rebecca-Smith Bindman, patients undergoing a single CT scan might be absorbing the equivalent of 74 mammograms or 442 chest X-rays. They also may be contributing to nearly 30,000 new cancers and over 10,000 casualties per year. The scary part is that the numbers could rise as CT scans are increasingly, and perhaps unnecessarily, prescribed. Over 72 million were performed in 2007.

"Our prior research has demonstrated the dramatic increased in CT utilization, which has gone up around 10 percent per year," Smith-Bindman told "AlterNet. "There is little data available about how many are necessary and how many may be unnecessary, although there is widespread belief that at least 20 percent of CTs may be unnecessary. But it's an area that clearly needs more research."

A continuing issue, Smith-Bindman said, is that CT scans are often repeated at short interval. Or performed when it's unlikely to lead to a change in behavior or practice. And sure, her study hasn't uncovered totally unknown territory: CT scans emit radiation, just like phones, laptops and other helpful gadgets. But as science continues to quantify its helpful gadgetry, especially its life-saving machines, it is often finding that it had been previously hypnotized by miraculous possibility while underplaying obvious dangers. And the user-friendliness of such devices certainly hasn't helped. Sometimes, it has done the opposite: Technology likes CT scans could be overused precisely because they are so easy to use.

"In part, this is this case," Smith-Bindman agreed. "The speed, simplicity and economic profitability have also almost certainly driven its increased utilization. But the images are also exquisitely detailed. and lead to better and faster diagnoses, so it's not so simple."

Of course it isn't. But just because it's complicated, doesn't mean it's safe. As further studies are undertaken, who knows? If it's statistically possible that we may find enough data to show that we are creating as much cancer as we are preventing, well...that's the kind of tightrope you can hang yourself with.

Traffic Surveillance Technology: From the office to the freeways to the streetlights and beyond, surveillance of most any kind has led to less freedom, not more. And it hasn't really seemed to significantly reduce crime or prevent accidents. According to studies conducted in Oregon and Virginia, red-light cameras increased collisions rather than decreasing them, in some cases by 100 percent. Sure, fewer motorists ran red lights, but more of them crashed right into each other. Worse, whatever additional revenue the trend generated was sliced up by refunds to deeply offended parties entrapped by lame schemes like sped-up yellow lights, which encourage motorists to step on it or slam on the brakes. Instant accidents.

The idea that a patently invasive stop-light camera is incentivizing transgression is bad enough on the surface. It's worsened by the fact that some states allow its snapshot to be obtainable under Freedom of Information Act requests, so that literally anyone can have access to the event. Like its birth, the techno-blowback on this has become political and financial: Washington state representative Chris Hurst, a law enforcement veteran, sponsored a bill decreasing fines from nearly $125 to $25, and more importantly demanded that yellow lights last at least four seconds, rather than the scant two they've been reduced to in search of lethal regional profit.

"Now they're actually killing their citizens to make money off these things," he told the Seattle Times in January.

That's the overall plan of surveillance technology, Alan Moore, famed author of dystopian comic classics like Watchmen and V For Vendetta, told me in a 2004 interview. "V for Vendetta has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early '80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner." Before long, Britain and America, Moore said, "had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country."

That impulse toward "invisible omniscience" dates back to Jeremy Bentham's infamous panopticon, a specially designed prison in which all prisoners were monitored simultaneously, without their knowledge. The result, Bentham explained, was not just invisible omniscience but also a "mode of obtaining power of mind over mind."

We have since upgraded Bentham's panopticon for everything from our rampantly escalating prison-industrial complex (which Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser once called "not only a set of interest groups and institutions," but "also a state of mind") to our so-called Reality Television. The latter is where we willingly turn the panopticon upon ourselves in surveillance spectacles like Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, American Idol and worse. (Much worse).

"One of the reasons we singled out media in V for Vendetta was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny," Moore said. "[It] might be a horrifying notion, but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves."

The result has been our consensually mediated hyperreality and its very real consequences, including two devastating wars that have decimated millions in total, the destruction of our national economy (if not the global one) and an escalating environmental nightmare at the hands of excessive consumption. What follows from a serious political and economic addiction to incentivized pain and suffering? Nothing but abuse. Speaking of abuse....

Tasers: Nonviolent weaponry? Tell that to Oscar Grant. Or those pregnant women who were tasered. Or that 6-year old. Or that disabled man. Or....

You get the picture. There is perhaps no other recent technological innovation in widely politicized social play today than the Taser, which has spread like wildfire to law-enforcement organizations worldwide in search of options beyond the usual batons and chokeholds. In the TaseTr, they have found the perfect device for immobilizing offenders: One jolt from its "electro-muscular disruption technology" and you're pinewood, as they say in the business. And business is good, although the weaponry is more controversial than ever.

"I don't see the issue as politicized in the classic sense of conservative versus liberal issues," Taser International spokesman Steve Tuttle told AlterNet. "Instead, I see a tremendous amount of polarization on Taser technology. There is nothing worse than being irrelevant in this day and age, and the polarization is something that overall is good for debate when you have a revolutionary sea change in modern day policing. We're changing the world," Tuttle added, "and true revolutions don't come without pain."

Speaking of pain, Raytheon's Pain Ray, more marketably known as the Active Denial System, operates on a similar premise. Instead of causing grievous bodily harm with bullets, batons or worse, it merely directs high-frequency microwave radiation at the nervous system, shocking the subject into compliance, so to speak. Like the Taser, the pain ray can penetrate thick clothing, although it cannot go through walls. Yet.

Tuttle's position that Taser is changing the world is accurate, although time will ultimately tell in which ways and how much. Right now, 15,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide use Tasers, "even though no one thought these life-saving devices would be carried full time by street cops seven years ago," he said. That's a significant adoption rate, and one that is surely to rise, no matter how much bad press the Taser gets. And it gets a lot. Whether it is being misapplied to the wrong people or parts of the body, or being targeted by the United Nations and others as a tool of torture and political suppression, it has continued to find its name associated with one scandalous report after another in the years since its rapid adoption.

Taser International's Tuttle thinks the problem comes down, predictably enough, to technology. And its brave new world of public relations. (Or propaganda, as the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, once called it.)

"The police are deploying a tool that is not only misunderstood, but also scares people by the very nature of using electricity," Tuttle said. "The first top-of-mind thought is that someone is getting shocked, and stigma is hard to overcome and requires an inordinate amount of explaining to do to truly understand how the Taser actually works. Throw in safety concerns by critics with misguided agendas, and you have a very challenging environment to not only work within, but you're constantly answering negatives.“

As with CT scans, cell phones and surveillance technology, more study is required on both sides of the divide. According to Amnesty International's Web site, "No study has adequately examined the impact of Tasers on potentially at-risk individuals," or "people who have medical conditions, take prescription medications, are mentally ill or are under the influence of narcotics." Which is to say, a lot of people getting tasered.

Like the aforementioned gadgets, machines and innovations, it could be that the Taser, like so many technological wonders, could eventually cause more problems than it solves. Compared to a baton and a chokehold, to say the least, the Taser is user-friendly pain compliance defined. But Tuttle, like CTheory, is blaming its problems on humans, not technology.

"The ease of use has nothing to do with the controversies," he said. "Use of force must still adhere to constitutional guidelines and civil rights issues. A violation is a violation regardless of the ease of use."


Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby tazmic » Tue Feb 02, 2010 9:51 am

I wish Marshall McLuhan was around to comment on today's world.

"The medium is the massage"
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Strong Law of Small Numbers
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:38 am

As I always remind myself at moments like this: "You know, bizzle, given the fact that AD has posted easily 10,000 articles that were excellent and informative, we've really got no right to complain about this one little deviation...just let it go."

Then, I do.
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby tazmic » Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:17 am

Cool. One idle comment and wombat makes me look like I'm ahead of the game ;)

I gave up reading Alternet a while ago as it started giving me a creepy feeling, like it was framing my dissent... Anyone think I should give it another chance?
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Strong Law of Small Numbers
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby elfismiles » Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:28 am

tazmic wrote:I wish Marshall McLuhan was around to comment on today's world.

"The medium is the massage"


Tazmic, did you set your sig before or after this OP?


"Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom" ~ Theodore Kaczynski (Manifesto)

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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby tazmic » Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:43 am

Before.
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Strong Law of Small Numbers
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:47 am

For whatever it is worth, the opinions expressed in this piece do not represent my thoughts.

ON EDIT: AlterNet is definitely part of the "Left Establishment" and brings all of the good, the bad and the ugly that this implies.

I do think that most of the problems described are real, but I wouldn't say that these technologies per se are the problem. Rather, it is the corporate/state nexus which frames and defines them that creates most of the problematic issues.

For example, with Ipods it is Apple's DRM policies that suck, whereas the monstrous profiteering on CDs by a few mega-corps previous to this era was really wrong and it's good that it has changed.

As far as mobile devices, I do think that EM fields have bio-effects and this is a problem. Texting does impair drivers, as probably does talking on the cell phone. If the State were correcting corporate power more than sucking up to it here in the U.S., these things would have less negative impact on all of us.

Computer Tomography may have a place in medicine but its use should be regulated by public health concerns, not the quest for profit.

Stoplight cameras? It's hard to be positive about what I personally consider to be a pimple on the ass of humanity, but maybe there is some limited use for good in this world that could actually be possible. To do that, it would have to be separated from the State's quest for more revenue.

As to Tasers, I hate 'em, but if they were used only under strictly regulated circumstances when there is no other good alternative to the use of deadly force, they could actually be positive. Please note that this has nothing to do with torturing "non-compliant" individuals at parties, apprehending "dangerous shoplifters" in grocery store parking lots, or punishing political dissenters.
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby tazmic » Tue Feb 02, 2010 2:22 pm

"McLuhan contends that all media--in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate--exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance--an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution."

McLuhan's Playboy interview:

http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_02.html

Funny, he often reads like a facilitating techno fan-boy, yet Wired, in all its usual wisdom, runs a hit piece:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//4.0 ... iredpeople
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Strong Law of Small Numbers
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby stefano » Wed Feb 03, 2010 6:02 am

American Dream wrote:I wouldn't say that these technologies per se are the problem. Rather, it is the corporate/state nexus which frames and defines them that creates most of the problematic issues.
Yes, and the imperialist system has co-opted and corrupted technology in this way since forever. The technologies in the OP are nothing compared to aeroplanes or nuclear weapons. Or steam power. Or gunpowder (funnily, used for fireworks in China for ages, it was only weaponised when it reached strife-torn Europe). Or, arguably, horse-taming.
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Re: 5 Ways Techno-Gadgetry Is Bringing Out the Worst in Humanity

Postby Avalon » Thu Feb 04, 2010 3:54 am

tazmic wrote:I gave up reading Alternet a while ago as it started giving me a creepy feeling, like it was framing my dissent... Anyone think I should give it another chance?


I read a couple of articles on AlterNet recently, after not visiting there for a long time. I was uncomfortable too. I'd have to go back to give any specifics, but what I was reading seemed to be coming from a rigid and nasty place, rather than a thoughtful and open-minded one. And that negativity was not how I remembered it being in the past when I visited more often.
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