[Note: If you read my first book (no longer available), The Emperor Has No Clothes, you might recognize parts in the below. I am reworking my thoughts on this subject as part of an upcoming project.]
We live in a world where technology is taken as either a good thing or an inevitable bad thing. Others are more like sleepwalkers on technology and don’t think about it while blindly taking it in. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of all this and will occasionally remark on the good or bad elements while mostly sleepwalking and not thinking about it. But we should think about it. And we should realize that the outsized role tech plays in our culture means that the good and the bad have profound effects on us all.
There is a principle that says the longer something has existed, the longer it will exist into the future.[1] For example, shoes have been around for 4,000 years. We can expect that in 4,000 years, shoes will still be around. iPhones have been around for only 14 years. Chances are iPhones will last another 14 years (but perhaps not 50). Chairs have been around for thousands of years. Chances are they will be around in 1,000 years. Laptop computers have been around for 30 years, and chances are they will last another 30 (but perhaps not be around in 100 years). Old people, in other words, have experience with all the things that will be around when you are an old person. The stuff you laugh at them for not knowing you will not need to know when you are their age. Instead, something new will come along that you don't know yet, and you will probably ask your grandkid to help you with it.
The first thing we must realize about most new technology is that it decays and fades rapidly. And like elements that decay quickly, harms are being done. Cancers are growing. Our society is getting sick.
Here are some of the adverse effects.
Technology erodes manliness[2]
George Orwell wrote, "[T]he tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and soft,"[3] but for some reason, technology is thought to be a man's thing. For Father's Day, advertisers encourage wives and kids to buy dad's technology. Instead, technology takes away our manliness while given the impression of being a manly thing.
Boys used to spend their time wrestling and playing football. Now they spend their time playing each other in Madden Football on the Playstation and do their wrestling via war games like Call of Duty and Halo. And this is also true of adult men who do less and less physical exercise. We drive in our cars to work; we sit in front of a computer. We drive home; we sit in front of a TV until bed. Some men may jog, lift weights, or hike, but men are getting fatter and weaker on average. Do you know who has more body fat on average and are weaker on average than men? Yep, women. So, technology makes us closer to women in physical strength and build.
What used to be an important part of being a man - physical strength - is no longer something that most men develop. A study was released recently that showed that men’s grip strength had dropped significantly. NPR recently reported,
“In a study of Americans ages 20-34, occupational therapists found that men younger than 30 have significantly weaker hand grips than their counterparts in 1985 did. The same was true of women ages 20-24, according to the study published online by the Journal of Hand Therapy a few months back.”[4]
Men are built to develop skills, strengths, and achievements. We are naturally competitive and seek to outperform those around us. But with technology, this natural pursuit becomes worthless. George Orwell wrote,
"All...progress is towards greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, towards a world in which nothing goes wrong. But in a world in which nothing went wrong [qualities of strength and survival] would be no more valuable than ...moving the ears."[6]
Technology Makes Us More Infantile
The average age of a gamer is now well above 30 years old and men are playing games well into adulthood. But our addiction to the games is a corruption of manliness. Men are more likely to be gamers than women because games fulfill a lot of the things that men are built to want. We want goals, and games have goals. We want missions, and games have missions. We want victory, and games offer victory. We want glory, and games provide a fake sort of glory that seems important while you play, but no one other than you cares about as soon as you try to tell someone else. It is the sort of fake manliness of children - like playing war with sticks in the front yard.
Technology Makes Men Impotent
I heard Gavin McInnes on the radio a while back, and he talked about his circle of friends having a “no-wanks” policy where men should not masturbate because it is an unmanly thing to do. This rule goes something like this: no masturbating except once a month and even then only with your girlfriend or wife's permission. Given that no one wants to ask their significant other if they can masturbate, it effectively bans the practice altogether. This was the first it ever occurred to me that porn and masturbation diminish our manliness. Like almost all men, I have been tempted by the allure of naked women on the internet but have resisted (imperfectly) because I view it as inconsistent with my Christian morals- but one thing that had never occurred to me how unmanly porn is.
It is a weird thing. You would think that men looking at naked women would be the height of manliness, but our sense of that comes from the fact that it used to be a manly thing to be able to see a woman naked. In real life, for a man to see a woman naked, he needs some combination of charm, good looks, social skill, physical strength, and financial success. Obviously, those qualities can be used for good (to find fulfillment in married life) or for ill (to sleep around promiscuously), but some level of manliness was always required to see a woman naked.
But today, the most pathetic creepy, poor, and unsuccessful man living in his mom’s basement has access to endless realistic nudity. Porn gives unmanly men for free the very thing that all men used to seek manliness to get. And as a result, men are becoming more and more likely to avoid getting traditional sex and are instead spending their free time masturbating furiously.
At least for a while.
There is another thing about porn: it has a diminishing effect. The more porn men look at, the less arousing the porn becomes. Weirder and weirder porn is required to get the same arousal. And the effect of reduced arousal carries over to real life.
From the NY Post:
Dr. Matthew Christman, a staff urologist with the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, told HealthDay the reason porn addicts are at greater risk of erectile dysfunction is that their “tolerance” for sexual stimulation is higher.
He said: “Tolerance could explain the sexual dysfunction, and can explain our finding that associated preferences for pornography over partnered sex with statistically significantly higher sexual dysfunction in men.”[8]
But the impotency goes even beyond not being able to get it up in sex. It is even getting to the point where men do not want sex at all. Again from the NY Post:
Dr. Joseph Alukal, an associate professor of urology and director of male reproductive health at New York University, said: “Visual stimulation will often increase sexual arousal in both men and women.”
“But when the majority of their time is spent viewing and masturbating to pornography, it is likely they will become less interested in real-world sexual encounters.”[9]
So, porn is fundamentally emasculating. If being a man is related to sex, and sex-drive and capability are destroyed by porn, porn is inherently unmanly.
Technology Makes Things Intended to be Temporary Permanent
When having social media discussions, I delete comments every few weeks after the conversations are done. I don't do it to disrupt the conversation; I just do it because almost every conversation we have on social media is at least somewhat time/context-bound and may not make sense in a year or two to someone not currently a part of the conversation. 99% of the things we say verbally are temporary. They come out of our mouths, are heard by the listener, and then the sound waves dissipate, and they are left only in the minds of the people that were there. For most of human history, that is how almost all communication has been. The social media app Snapchat does this for people (deletes posts as you go), and that is why it, at least for a time, became popular. It is more natural. It allows communication to go back to regular conversations where you can discuss ideas with a beer in your hand, unconcerned that everything you write will be written in stone and made searchable globally for the rest of history.
Some forms of communication make sense to be permanent. For example, when I write books, everything I write takes years of reflection, research, writing, modifying, editing, rewriting, getting input from others, etc. In other words, part of the process of writing a book ensures that it will do a better job of standing the test of time. But comments on Twitter, Facebook, etc., are more like verbal speech or somewhere between a letter and spoken discourse. I certainly do not edit them very carefully, and if my brain could truly comprehend those comments are all permanent, I would probably never comment on social media again. There is something unnatural about a permanent record of things that we say lying down on the living room floor watching football as you keep your sick kid company.
Can you imagine if you were around a group of friends drinking beer and someone pulled out a recorder and said, "Okay guys, everything you say will be recorded and transcribed and then put on the internet for all to read?" That would be weird and unnatural. Everyone would get very quiet. The party would be over. Recording such a discussion would be inhuman.
We all intuitively understand that this is not how most communication works. For all of humanity’s history, we have said things; the words went out and were heard; and then the record was left only in the minds of those present.
Technology is destroying this human experience.
Technology Makes the Problems with News Way Worse
News makes us dumber, not smarter. If the news media actually cared about giving an accurate portrayal of the world, they would change the length of the shows (or newspapers or whatever) to match the day. By filling up every day with news, they confuse us and make unimportant things seem important and important things get buried.[10]
Technology makes this almost infinitely worse. We have phones in our hands that give us notifications and updates not just when we turn the TV on but every waking moment of our life. It all becomes distressing, distracting, and meaningless. Humans are naturally built to hear important news and to act on it. But creating massive amounts of noise and clouding everything we know about what is important and what is not, the constant news provided by technology confuses us, causes anxiety, causes fear, and, ironically, complacency towards the things that are actually important.
Technology almost always Replaces the Real with the Fake
Imagine a mallard hovering down and coming to a rest next to his potential mate. She sits perfectly still. As he draws near, she does not move. He nuzzles close to her. Still, she does not move. She is beautiful but frozen. He suddenly realizes that she is not real. She is a decoy. There is probably a hunter nearby. He would probably be shot soon.
We are the mallard. Technology is the decoy.
Technology almost always replaces the tangible, real, and meaningful with images, sounds, and blinking lights. Instead of going to the ballpark, smelling the beer, hearing the cursing drunk in front of you, eating the hotdogs, and cheering as part of a crowd, you experience the whole thing on a box, in your living room, alone. Dehumanizing.
There is nothing as soul-suckingly unhappy as wasting a day in front of a television. There is nothing more depressing than realizing that you just spent weeks making lights on your TV blink a certain way, thanks to your favorite video game.
But the funny thing is that you feel happy the whole time you play. As we have reviewed in earlier chapters, happiness is difficult to measure. Despite being happy at the moment, technology almost always brings a net negative of happiness. It almost always leads to misery and emptiness.
Would you rather climb a real mountain or climb one on a video game? Would you rather be a real basketball star or be one on your Xbox? The answers are obvious. For almost every situation, technology is a happiness-suck. It is putting something counterfeit in the place of something real. And what our generation does is waste our lives doing fake things. Just like the mallard regretting his infatuation with a decoy, we too will regret our infatuation with the fakeness offered by technology. We are happiest when we are accomplishing something great. Technology gives the impression of accomplishments while actually giving us nothing. We are sitting next to our decoy, like suckers.
C.S. Lewis, in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy, had an insightful observation on the harmful effects of modern transportation.
“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course, if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”[11]
In the way that only he could, Lewis observes the paradoxical aspect of technology. It gives the appearance of providing us with things while, in reality, taking them away.
I remember being ten and camping with a few friends. One of their parents owned a few acres, and we got sleeping bags, a tent, and a few supplies and went back into the fields. We went down to the river and hunted for squirrels (catching none), frogs (none), and firewood (some). As it got dark, we built a fire, roasted marshmallows, and smashed them between the graham crackers and chocolate-filled our bellies with sugar as we silently watched the wood we had collected crackle and smoke.
Looking at the fire, I realized that life was magical. Filled with wonders. Filled with adventure.
There is something about being in nature that allows someone to know there is something more than us. Something about the stars, the night, the fresh air, and the quiet that points to God.
Today, like everyone else, I have some sort of electronic device at hand almost 24 hours a day. There are no quiet moments. Waiting for marshmallows to cook? Why not check the score? Check Twitter? Text a friend? Play some stupid video game?
Those moments in life that help us see the world so clearly are now filled by blinking lights on my screen.
The Internet Makes us Dumb
The internet makes us dumb but gives us the sense that we are smart. We offload stuff we used to have to keep in our brains. Who was the president right before Lincoln? Wait a second... Buchanan! See how smart I am? Thanks, Google! Wikipedia and Google do an excellent job of providing us all the information we could want at the tips of our fingers. But because the information is at the tips of our fingers, it is not in our brains. So, when we think about history, we do not think about the context of the Civil War or who was president and when. We don't think about it because we feel we do not need to. I can access that information any time I want, and therefore that information is not in my head. It is in my fingers. And we cannot think with our fingers. So, counter-intuitively, having access to all the information in the world causes a reduction of our brains' information rather than an increase.
On the other hand, books have a way of getting that information in our heads. Read a book on the Civil War, and the details will sink in and stick there. You might not remember every date, but you will remember the themes and the context. Books, unlike the internet, will make you smarter. They will give you head knowledge rather than finger knowledge. And this is needed in the world right now.
Another way that the internet makes us dumb is that tech companies are now curating the information we get. There was a time early in the days of the internet when Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia became our go-to sources for information because they were able to figure out what information we wanted and give it to us. But of late, they have taken the opposite approach. They know what information we want, and they intentionally hide it. Any controversial issue on religion, politics, culture, or science is filtered and biased according to the biases of the employees and management of the tech companies. Algorithms are modified. Information is hidden. Books are deleted. Links are made impossible to find. When you finally do Google the vaccine, that political figure, or statistics on sexuality, you find only information Google wants you to find or nothing at all. You search for books on Obama, and you only find glowing biographies. You search Wikipedia for Trump's background, and the article makes him sound like a monster.
To understand any important or controversial issue, it is essential to evaluate it by both sides. Modern technology is increasingly making that impossible. As a result, it is making us dumber.
Technology Destroys Privacy and Paves the Way to Tyranny
Edward Snowden famously gave up a life of wealth and privilege and became an exile in order to expose the massive scale of government spying. Snowden revealed that the US government is seeking to obtain and store all data on everybody, forever. Everything. Everybody. Forever.
Snowden blew the whistle on all this in 2013. A few things changed since then, but it is highly likely that government data collection is every bit as massive and ambitious as the day he came forward. No significant movement within either major party is talking about this. The voters seem not to care. As heroic as they were, Snowden's efforts seem to have been largely ignored.
I jokingly say that the only people who should be concerned about government spying are people that have any independent thoughts or people that do not blindly trust every politician. Everyone else should sleep well at night. But few realize these dangers. Large percentages of the population have no fear of government spying.
But government spying is horrific and terrifying.
Did you know that half of the Bill of Rights were intentionally designed to hamper the government's ability to exercise power and conduct surveillance? Specifically the 4th, 5th, 7th, and 8th amendments. If you support the Patriot Act, you are not a patriot. Like Orwell's Ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty, and Truth, the Patriot Act was created to do the exact opposite of what the original patriots (the Founding Fathers) would have wanted. The fourth amendment says,
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
But today? Thanks to the Patriot Act, the government has everything you ever wrote. They know exactly where you go. They know everything you bought (everything in your house). There is no part of the 4th Amendment that the government has not already violated. No warrant. No probable cause. Everything you ever did has already been searched. Everything you ever did is now in a database somewhere.
Snowden wrote, "We are building the greatest tool for oppression the world has ever known."[12]
In 2013, the IRS admitted to and apologized for unfairly scrutinizing groups, "based on their political leanings when they sought a tax-exempt status, court documents showed." This should have been a bigger scandal than it was. But the reason I bring it up is not to air old dirty laundry but simply to note that the temptation to use government to destroy political opponents is not something of the distant past. That was Obama that did that. That was less than a decade ago.
Now, imagine that you had everything your political enemy ever did in his or her life. What if you knew everywhere that enemy went. Everything they ever did. Everything they ever bought. Everything they ever searched.
Everything.
Don't you think there would be a temptation to dig through that? Of course, there would be. The thing with this sort of temptation is easy it would be to justify in your own head. How important is it to you that your political party wins? For most people, it is incredibly important. The whole future of our nation - from civil rights to judges to tax law to war - rests on the next election, right? And you have a way to do something to change it? You have the data right in front of you.
And you do nothing?
It is a huge temptation. And this is what the Founding Fathers feared. There is an overwhelming temptation for the powerful to use searches and surveillance to achieve their ends. And this is exactly what we gave up in the days after 9/11.
Maybe we stopped terror. Perhaps we saved lives. I have no idea. Perhaps not - we didn't have a significant terror attack in our whole history prior to 9/11, but maybe there were more coming. But what did we give up in exchange? Half the Bill of Rights - at least. If some foreign power tried to destroy the Bill of Rights, we would have happily sent millions to war to protect it. But because terrorists killed 3,000, we willingly set half of them aside. We now give more power to the government than the Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. More than has ever been given to any government in history. What a disaster.
And Edward Snowden is the one that rang the bell. He is the one that told us what was going on. He currently hides in Russia because he cared more about the constitution than we did. Trump said he should be killed. Obama refused to pardon him. Biden has thus far declined to pardon him. But I think he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Presidential Medal seeks to recognize those people who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." Who has done more for our national interests than Snowden?
Technology Makes George Orwell's 1984 Plausible
Comparing our modern society to Orwell’s 1984 has become a cliché. But the reason it is so often cited is that the book is unbelievably prophetic. There is an interesting passage in 1984 related to our discussion on technology. The protagonist, Winston, is reading the history of Oceana, his now dystopian country, and he comes across this passage,
“… in the past, no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of [various technologies] made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument… private life came to an end. Every citizen… could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed for the first time.”[13]
Any modern reader should get a chill of familiarity in this passage. It is shocking that Orwell wrote this long before everyone carried a cell phone in their pocket and were constantly connected to the internet and through which all information could be curated and controlled. He wrote those words, not knowing that those same phones could observe everything we did and everywhere we went.
Even history can be modified.
In the novel, the memory hole was a place that you needed to put news items and popular culture that had been determined to be no longer acceptable to the State. If the State wished to delete something from the historical record, everyone was expected to take their newspapers and drop them into the memory hole. All history would be modified and republished by the government with the proper edits.
But the digitization of information has made this dystopian idea a reality. Let's say you have a movie starring an unpopular politician - you can just edit him out on future copies. Let's say that you have a book (including the Bible) that contains unpopular or un-PC ideas? How do you fix that? With paper books, it was damn near impossible (Orwell had to conceive of the memory hole to do it). But now, with everyone reading Kindle books, it is as easy as having Amazon make the edits, and voila, it is done. Movies, Twitter, Facebook, books, articles, and TV are all subject to change. Many get their information from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is already doing this. Take Caitlyn Jenner's (or any trans person’s) Wikipedia page. Pull it up, and you will need to read quite a bit to realize that Jenner was an Olympic hero as a man! Deadnaming (saying Jenner's pre-transition name) is considered a thought crime by Big Tech, and they have put that old name down the memory hole.
We all remember that Caitlyn was once Bruce, but the records are quickly being put down the memory hole.
And this is now true with media as well. Revenge of the Nerds was an insanely popular movie when I was a kid and got sequels, and the actors in it went on to fame in other things. But because several of the scenes are not acceptable to our #MeToo era, good luck finding it. They have removed it from most streaming services. And others are disappearing (good luck finding a copy of Disney's Song of the South). With all things digital, removing something from history that is no longer compatible with the values of those who control the record is easy to do. They simply remove them (or edit them) from their platforms.
In 1984, somehow, Big Brother was able to perfectly monitor all citizens. This seemed farfetched when it was written. How could a government listen to everything you say, watch you constantly, and know everywhere you go? Well, as discussed above, now governments can and do. Everyone. Everything. Forever. And because we are all constantly on devices - phones, computers, smart cars, etc., this data is available. What were you thinking about two years ago on Tuesday? Google knows (you were checking football scores), and the government does too. Where did you do the third Sunday of June? Your cell phone movements are recorded, and the government knows, even if you do not remember. We all carry these cell phones with cameras and microphones on them that can easily be hacked. We used to think the idea of the government wiretapping us was ridiculous. Now, we are all wiretapped—every single one of us. And the government is working to make all data collected permanent.
Orwell's Big Brother watched everything everyone did. This is a reality now.
Before I close, I feel obligated to acknowledge that some technology is good. Medicine makes life more bearable for many. Farming technology reduces starvation. There are certainly upsides to some technologies. But this in no way makes "technology" as a class of things good. To say that because some technologies make life better, technology as a whole is good is like saying that because some things we consume for food are good for us, we should eat anything and everything we see. Some things are poison, and eating everything we see would kill us. It would rot our teeth. It would make us fat. Ancient humans had to learn NOT to eat most things. 99% of what we see is not edible. We had to learn which berries, fruits, and meats were edible. We had to learn what to do with them before we ate them. He had to learn to cook them in specific ways. We had to learn to clean them. In short, in order to survive, we learned to be EXTREMELY picky about what we put in our mouths.
Our society is like a dangerous child putting everything he can see in his mouth. We blindly consume technology. And if we do not wake up soon, we will destroy ourselves. Technology cannot be mindlessly adopted. It cannot be taken as an inevitable matter of course. It has the potential to destroy everything it means to be human.
Dehumanizing Technology
Like technology the education/school system makes children dumber not smarter. The only real and good comes from God, not from the government, man, or world.
"So, porn is fundamentally emasculating. If being a man is related to sex, and sex-drive and capability are destroyed by porn, porn is inherently unmanly."
Doubt it. TFR in US was rising 2000-2007, as porn was becoming rapidly increasingly available. A more Nietzschean explanation is in order; sex drive is falling around the world as a result of phone-related low back hyperflexion. People generally resort to porn in order to prevent inability to orgasm (this happened to me in two distinct periods of my life as I was entering flatback posture).
"I heard Gavin McInnes on the radio a while back, and he talked about his circle of friends having a “no-wanks” policy where men should not masturbate because it is an unmanly thing to do."
I only have this policy because the Catholic Church considers masturbation a grave sin. I do not question church teaching unless surely warranted.
"But the reason it is so often cited is that the book is unbelievably prophetic."
Indeed, it is, just from reading the first two pages. Orwell was describing a troll world, run by people who could perfectly see into the future (as I call them, body compositional Whites):
https://eharding.substack.com/p/the-seven-body-composition-types