In the 1997 film Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel, scientist Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) auditions to be the first human to interact with extraterrestrials. She is asked, “If you should meet [this advanced alien race], and you were permitted only one question, what would it be?”
After some thought, Arroway responds: “How did you do it? How did you survive your technological adolescence without destroying yourself?”
We are living that question. As a species, we are in the throes of our technological adolescence.
Humankind entered our technological adolescence in the mid-twentieth century. I’m thinking of the 1937 invention of a circuit crucial to computers, and the 1945 unveiling of the atomic bomb. The former would help get us to the Moon, and power our smartphones; the latter would ensure we could be the destroyer of worlds.
Humans reached the Moon when I was four. I can’t recall when exactly I learned we could, in theory, blow the Moon up.
While I prepped for fatherhood in 1997, humankind’s technological adolescence experienced a dramatic growth spurt. During my wife’s pregnancy, I signed up for AOL. We acquired our first family flip phone and desktop Mac. When our son Jack arrived in early 1998, I was able to say to him: “Welcome to the future. The agency of the gods is ours.”
We would raise a digital native (Gen Z, so-called) in a world where perceptions of time and distance had been radically altered by cell phones and the internet. Expectations changed. What are we entitled to? The concepts of waiting, of not knowing, of documenting – very different in a few short years.
When he was about ten, my son asked why we had so few photos of my grandmother. We had “only” about five on display.
At the time, it seemed like everyone adjusted pretty well to the seismic, lightning-fast changes wrought by digital technology, but I can’t help but notice the concurrent – and ongoing – tsunami of cutting-edge pharmaceuticals marketed for depression and anxiety, and the worsening opioid crisis. We have the agency of the gods, yet we are somehow more unhappy than ever.
Initially, I naively thought email might return folks to communicating epistolary-style, like when letters were de rigueur. As a writer and onetime avid pen pal, I was well acquainted with the part of the brain accessed via typing/writing – quite different from the part that talks. And I was familiar with reading a recipient’s response, composed from their unrestrained “writer mind.” Often revelatory. Not unlike talking to an intoxicated person, for good and for ill. Deep, lasting friendships were thus forged. (And occasionally destroyed.)
What happens, I wondered, when everyone is writing, plugged into that secret self?
With social media, texting, tweets, and the comments section, now we know. The irony is that all this writing on high-tech platforms has delivered many to rawer versions of themselves – compulsive, adrenaline-drunk, rapacious for attention.
I have been all those things. I have the depleted dopamine to prove it. But I have meds for that.
YouTube captivated me. Cat videos! Beloved bygone bands! Until I was “YouTubing” with my son, checking out the Arab Spring of 2011, and we clicked on a video of a huge black truck plowing into a crowd of Egyptian protesters, scattering dozens, surely killing most. We can never unsee that horror, one of countless available for view at this moment.
Soon after that 2011 episode, despite my outrage, “epic-fail” videos skyrocketed in popularity. People falling, trying to do something and hurting themselves, skateboarders breaking bones, even videos we once classified as snuff films. Millions upon millions of views. And shares and thumbs-up LIKES.
That can’t be good. Right? I do understand the pleasure of feeling independent, unconnected from strangers. In a way, free. But in my book, that way lies wickedness. And yes, I realize my revulsion puts me in the minority. Makes me get-off-my-lawn OLD. Perhaps even makes me psychologically unprepared for Dark Times Ahead.
In truth, I still watch stuff on YouTube almost every day, albeit with a more discerning eye. (I have my own channel.) And the YouTube algorithm has figured out I don’t want to see bloodshed and pain, so it doesn’t post any in my feed. So… progress?
I don’t think I’m alone in my hand-wringing. At least I hope not. Seems to me humankind’s relationship with technology has always evoked ambivalence, and for good reason. While it can give, objectively improve, and/or save life, technology can simultaneously reveal and amplify our destructive (and self-destructive) tendencies. And our hubris and/or dopamine-induced mindlessness and narcissism.
In the Icarus myth, master craftsman Daedalus builds wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son, Icarus, so they can fly out of a labyrinth prison. Old Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, lest the wax melt, or too close to the sea, lest the moisture loosen the feathers. Icarus takes the technology, but he is not ready. He is too young. Excitement overwhelms him. He flies too close to the sun. The wings melt, and he falls to the sea and drowns.
Millennia have passed since someone recorded that tragic Greek myth, with its unsatisfying – to me – interpretation of temperance, i.e. “fly the middle way.” Thankfully, in my early years of fatherhood, I came across an Icarus-related quote attributed to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. According to him, the message of Icarus is not “fly the middle way.” It’s “build better wings.”
That works for me. Kubrick FTW.
Perhaps those “better wings” will comprise a combo of compassion and technological wizardry that’ll help us fly the distance with souls intact. A way to soar and yet remain connected to others, to those ahead of us, and those behind. We’ll see. Hopefully, if and when the human species is asked by other beings how we did it, how we survived our technological adolescence, we can tell them, and advise accordingly.
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So prescient. Thank you.