Idle essays

Dick Tracy’s wrist radio is here! You’d think we’d all be thrilled. The future has arrived.

Back in the day, when men were men and, every morning, they competed with the kids to read the comic strips over breakfast before they went off to their mill jobs, we all thought the intrepid detective’s trademark two-way-wrist radio was the ultimate promise of the future. This was the way “progress” was taking us!

By golly!

And, by golly, so it came to pass.

Now we have, among many other improvements, a handy-dandy two-way wrist radio that will convert your job from 40 hours a week to a 168-hour-a-week arrangement. No increase in pay, of course (don’t be silly!)…and by the way, your health insurance premiums will consume half your salary unless you select the $1,000 deductible.

We’re told, according to Moore’s Law, that computing technology capabilities double about every two years. And that may be so, at least for the era we live in. Over the past hundred or hundred and fifty years, a Big Bang in technologies — not just electronic, but let’s include internal combustion, nuclear power, plastics, agriculture, building, medicine, communication, transportation, and just about anything else we can think of — has transformed the daily lives of people who live in developed countries.

The other day I was thinking about that, and it struck me that most of the real, fundamental, meaningful improvement — things that made our lives more comfortable, less grindingly drudging, safer, and healthier — happened early in the twentieth century, before about 1970. Between 1900 and the last quarter of the century, people’s lives actually did improve, get longer, get healthier, get easier, and overall get happier.

But since then? I wonder. Does computer technology really make our lives better? Or just more…cluttered?

Consider, as a case in point, my father. He was born in 1909. As a young man, he drove a milk wagon behind a horse. Earned $10 a month. That, he said, was enough for a young fellow to live on comfortably.

At the age of 60, he sat in his living room and, watching his television, saw men walk on the moon.

That was a huge technological leap, of course. But it didn’t make any difference to his life, any more than it makes any real difference to our lives.

But in the interim between 1909 and 1969, technological and social changes occurred that did change the way he lived his life, much for the better. I would argue, though, that most of those changes happened by about 1950, and that most of what came afterward has been on a par with men walking on the moon, in terms of the extent to which they have changed our lives for the better.

By 1950, my father drove a car to get around. He was sailing tankers and earning a good wage at it — without so much as a high-school diploma. He earned enough to support his family and to send his kid to college without have to take out a loan. His daughter’s free grade-school and high-school education was excellent and turned her out of the 11th grade fully ready for college-level work.

He and my mother lived in modest but safe and sturdy housing. They had a machine to wash their clothes…a gas or electric stove inside the house to cook their food…an electric refrigerator with a freezer to store fresh foods…supermarkets in which to buy those foods…electric lights to navigate the night-time darkness…a vacuum cleaner…a television…a radio…a record player…a telephone…electric hand tools…antibiotics to fight off potentially fatal or crippling infections…central heating…air conditioning (of a sort)…clean, safe running water flowing from taps in the kitchen in bathroom…indoor bathrooms…an airplane to bear them across the Atlantic to a job overseas…

In 1909, none of those things existed. In 1929, not very many of them did. Between the time my father was a young  man and the time he was fully settled in a new job after the war, the physical improvement in day to day life was SO vast as to make it seem that his generation had been transplanted to another world.

To what extent has the explosion in electronic technology actually made our lives better in the sense that we are more comfortable, that our work is physically easier, that we are really healthier and better off than we were in, say, the 1950s?

Not much, that’s what I think.

It’s given us a lot of eye-goggling stuff, but most of that stuff makes no real difference in our comfort and happiness. It doesn’t add very much of real significance to our lives.

Consider: Do you really need a smartphone on your wrist to communicate with your family, your friends, and your boss? Does it really help your life to be interrupted everywhere you go  by whoever thinks they need your attention right this second — while you’re driving, while you’re eating dinner, while you’re at the movies, while you’re walking the dog, while you’re shopping for a new shirt, while you’re sitting in church?

Does your car really need a cockpit full of confusing electronic equipment to get you from here to work or from work to the grocery store? Do you really need a talking GPS to tell you how to get around town? Can’t you read a map? Do you really need a phone conversation right this instant while you’re dodging traffic on a busy highway? Can you seriously not find a restaurant without Siri telling you where it is?

Does any of that gadgetry relieve you of hard labor? Make your health better? Light your way at night? Free your time to spend with your family? Give you time to go fishing?

No.

In fact, you could argue that, in a backhanded way, the exponential growth of computerized technology is dragging us backward, in terms of quality of life.

In 1950, my father could be pretty sure that what he said over the telephone, what he did inside his home, where he went when he walked down the street or drove his car from point A to point B, what he wrote in letters to friends and family was observed and noted only by those around him. Today we know that everything we do and say is being tracked. Big Brother is watching us, and there’s no such thing as privacy.

In 1950, my father made a good wage at a blue-collar job that allowed him to work up into the equivalent of management — he became a sea captain. That happened because he belonged to a mariner’s union. Today he couldn’t hope to support a family on what he could have earned without a high-school diploma…or even with one.  Many young people can’t earn a living wage with college diploma, and most couples have to warehouse the kids in day care and send their mother to work, just to keep a roof over a family’s heads.

In 1950,  the physical labor required to maintain a home for several people was a fraction of what it would have been in 1909: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, lawn mowers, electric lights, indoor plumbing, indoor stoves and ovens were just a few of the technological gadgets that truly did make life easier, cleaner, safer, and more comfortable. Scarlet fever, a disease that nearly killed my grandmother, was a thing of the past, as were smallpox, typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, cholera, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria…things we all got shots for.

Commercial airplanes made it possible for him to fly himself and his family back and forth across the Atlantic and Europe to his jobsite in the Middle East. Automobiles and interstate highways allowed him to drive us, once every two years when the company sent us home for a long leave, from New York City to his brother’s home in Texas and then to San Francisco, where my mother’s family lived, and then like a shot back across the country to La Guardia International Airport.

Radio, television, newspapers, and magazines kept us fully informed of current events and of the culture around us. Can you say the same for Google News, which adjusts itself according to your browsing history so as to show you mostly what it “thinks” you want to see and to shield you from anything that might impinge  upon your comfortable bubble of semiconsciousness?

Google News is convenient, you can say that for it. But conveniences don’t make our lives objectively better; they don’t improve our knowledge or understanding or lead to world peace or feed the hungry or get us decent jobs that pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work. Something that allows you — or forces you — to work more hours for less pay does not make your life better.

To the contrary, I suggest the ubiquitous noise, the attention-grabbing, privacy-busting clutter of The Device makes our lives worse. You can’t walk through a mall, down a sidewalk, or through a mountain park without listening to someone yakking on the phone at the top of his voice and without knowing you are probably being watched and recorded. You can’t drive a modern car without knowing your movements can be tracked. Jobs that used to be done by a secretary or an assistant are now done by you. If you would have been a secretary or an assistant in 1950, today you’re waiting tables or stocking shelves — working harder for less relative pay and no benefits. Unless you’re among the top 10 percent of earners, you work more, you work harder, and you get paid less — because The Device makes all those wonders possible.

We have less time to ourselves; we work harder and longer for less disposable income; devoting one parent’s time to raising the children has become a prerogative of the wealthy, as has access to really good education. We have less privacy and more noise…

None of these improve the base quality of our lives, what my father would have called our “standard of living.” They don’t make day-to-day life significantly easier. They don’t make us more comfortable. They don’t help us to earn a better living. They don’t make us healthier or put better food on our table. Other than sometimes amusing us and filling our lives with noise and clutter, they do surprisingly little for us.

The base quality of our lives — the fundamental things that are important, such as freedom from crushing labor and a decent income and good education and good sanitation and sound homes with indoor plumbing and easy communication and nationwide highways — I don’t think those things have changed much since about 1960. None of the gadgetry we’ve developed since about 1970 has really made our lives objectively better. It’s illuminated our lives with lights and mirrors and filled our minds with noise and clutter, but it hasn’t done much for our fundamental comfort and contentment.

 Image: Chester Gould, Dick Tracy. This image is from a comic strip; the copyright for the image is probably owned by either the publisher of the comic or the writer and artist who produced the comic in question. It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of the cover of a comic book to illustrate the scene or storyline depicted and  the copyrighted character depicted on the excerpted panel in question, where no free alternative exists or can be created, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.