Defying Dystopia

Going on with the Human Journey After Technology Fails Us

Ed Ayres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351523110
• Subtopic: Sociology

To most, the collapse of modern civilization is the stuff of fiction. Yet, science confirms that misuse of technology and environmental abuse places our world in grave danger of ruin. The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity places our civilization on a collision course. Defying Dystopia analyses how we have come to this, and what options remain for far-seeing people to take control of their own destiny and survive the future.

Ed Ayres, who has worked with some iconic environmental scientists of the past half-century, argues that technology was originally used to augment the natural strengths of humans, but has been increasingly used in ways that weaken us—shifting from useful work to the industries of distraction, entertainment, convenience, pain-relief, and sedation. Ayres advises on how at least some of us can avoid that collision. The most critical task, for those of us who want humanity to survive and thrive, is to disengage from our tech thraldom, and shift to a conscious management of our evolution in which we use technology to enhance our skills and strengths rather than erode or supplant them.

Ayres provides insightful, actionable suggestions we can use to increase our odds of survival. He asks far-seeing individuals to take on a mission that the dominant governments and institutions demonstrably cannot: the epic task of shepherding a low-profile, resilient transition to a new kind of human future.

1 Losing Balance

Technologies Tilting the Wrong Way

For the good people of our world, there has always been a certain comfort—and maybe also some complacency—in our knowing that when threats to our life have arisen, they have ultimately been fended off. Our stories—in novels, movies, TV—reassure us: there are bad people among us, and probably always will be, but they get caught or killed in the end. There have been a thousand wars in our history, but we humans are still here—more of us than ever before. The developing technologies and skills that enabled us to build civilization have also enabled us to keep the endless struggle between creative and destructive uses of those technologies and skills in a kind of balance. Only recently—in the last 1 percent of civilization as we can recall it—have we seen disconcerting signs that on a global scale, the balance may be tipping in the wrong direction.

Going into the second decade of the twenty-first century, no one had heard of ISIS. Suddenly, there it was—so shocking to most human sensibilities that countries like Jordan and Egypt, which had remained on the sidelines during the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, became enraged enough to send bombing missions, and the governments of sixty nations met for an emergency conference. But ISIS was only the latest of those signs, which had begun appearing at an accelerated rate a quarter-century earlier. Until the early 1990s, almost no one had heard of global warming and the onset of “climate change”—a highly euphemistic name for the destruction to come— but suddenly it was upon us, along with the disconcerting message from thousands of scientists that the destruction was being largely human-caused.

Signs of the tipping are omnipresent now, and two measures are unmistakable. First has been the massive build-up of what we Americans were warned about by—ironically—the man who led the Allied victory in World War II, Dwight Eisenhower. The “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower cautioned about is now vastly larger than he likely ever feared it would be, and it has consumed a world of resources that might otherwise have been used for better education, health care, and preparation for the coming catastrophes of climate change and ecological failure. Second, and not just coincidentally, has been the equally heavy build-up of multinational corporations whose industrial waste is polluting our land, fresh water, air, and oceans—and driving our fellow species to extinction—with virtual impunity.

These two overwhelming categories of destructive force far outweigh such shocking phenomena as ISIS, or the hacking of our insurance companies and banks, which are only secondary symptoms of the general shift. Yet, while together they put heavy strain on the ability of civil society to stay in control, they are only the most obvious parts of the shift. There’s a third destructive vector that may be the one that finally tips the balance: the unseen, cumulative impacts of hundreds of everyday technologies we use for our convenience, entertainment, and comfort that are in many ways making us too distracted, inattentive, oblivious, sedated, and weak—whether as Americans or as citizens of the world—to regain control of our destiny in time.

What We Don’t See

As a student at Swarthmore College, a lifetime ago, I studied scientific method—how we know what we know and how we build on that knowledge. That study was fairly academic, and didn’t much excite me. Later, in grad school at Columbia, I studied something I happened to have a “real-life” personal interest in—the physiology of the human body in motion. I’d been a competitive runner in high school and college, and the grad work came as a revelation: if science has direct implications for the things you have a passion for, it can become deeply engaging. If not, it drifts to the back of your head—out of sight, out of mind. For me, that was a key insight into the phenomenon of denial, and particularly the enormous denial by most of the American public, of what scientists were trying to tell us. I realized that even something as horrific as the possibility of nuclear holocaust can drift out of sight, out of mind, if it’s not related to everyday experience. In the 1950s and early ’60s, when I was a teen, and atomic bomb tests were lighting up the sky in US and Soviet atmospheric tests, we were acutely conscious of the nuclear threat. When the tests ended, public anxieties abated—even though the nuclear arsenals remained poised.

Decades later, while reflecting on some of the more recent research in human physiology, I found myself wondering: if the public fear of nuclear war can recede so far that it doesn’t even register in the media lists of top issues, how in the world is anyone likely to get worked up about such small things as weakening muscles due to physical inactivity, or a shrinking hippocampus (the part of the brain that enables mental navigation) due to increasing reliance on GPS? That got me to ruminating about the growing multitude of everyday technologies we now routinely rely on, and on the growing dependence we have on them. I was far from alone in wondering what their cumulative effects might be.

A few years ago, I saw a cover story by Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” And more recently, I noticed a New Yorker cartoon that riffed nicely on Carr’s theme: a man and woman are at the altar, and the minister is ready to pronounce them husband and wife—except that, hold on, they’re both busy on their phones. And sometimes, reality overtakes comedy: in 2015, the Huffington Post published a photo of a man sitting on the deck of his boat off the Southern California coast, looking into his phone. Between the photographer and the man, a Humpback whale is surfacing—so close to the boat that the man could have jumped onto its back. But he doesn’t see it! He’s on the phone. There was no commentary accompanying the photo, on the implications of such obliviousness for our big-brained species; it was just another amusing moment.

The message of a lot of those digital-tech cartoons—and amusing observations—is that contrary to the popular cliché that tech “connects” us as never before, in significant ways it disconnects us—from physical or face-to-face contact not only with each other, but also with the natural world to which we owe our existence. It’s not the relatively recent inventions of military weapons or internal-combustion engines or smart phones, but the complex natural world with which we evolved, that enabled humans to survive for hundreds of millennia before civilization began.

The original teacher of survival was biological evolution, so some of the most pointed humor about human survival comes from the somewhat urban-legendary Darwin Awards, given posthumously to people who do such stupid things—who are so disconnected from the skills evolution taught us—that they get killed off before they can reproduce and pass on their “stupid” genes. What we face now is the possibility that our whole civilization may soon be deserving of a Darwin Award—not so much because of defective genes, though, but because of escalating misuse of the intelligent nature most humans are born with.

Having spent so many years immersed in the cauldron of worried science, I see that there’s more to this recent amusement about our tech-dominated culture than just easy jokes. A larger reality lurking behind all the smart phone, smart toilet, and Google Glass jokes is that nearly all technologies are disconnecting us—not just some of the sillier digital gadgets and apps. The cars or planes we ride in separate us from the earth we ride over. The technologies of food processing separate us from the farms that produce actual vegetables or meat. The technologies of remote military deployment enable an officer at a secure facility in America to kill dozens of people in Afghanistan or Syria without ever having to look into their eyes. The GPS in a hiker’s Garmin disengages him from inborn navigational skills that were essential to the survival of humans for thousands of millennia, but that in the hiker may have shrunk from disuse.

Still, you might ask—so what? Isn’t it a sign of great human advancement that our techs can now relieve us of all the dirty work and drudgery our forebears had to endure? Isn’t it a good thing that we can be relieved from hip pain, depression, erectile dysfunction, or a hankering for mindless entertainment or titillation anytime we want? And isn’t it great that we can do things so much faster—sometimes thousands of times faster—than our parents or grandparents could? Isn’t it a blessing that by the early twenty-first century, an Intel chip the size of a fingernail could do in one second a calculation that would have taken one of the early supercomputers years? With such awesome advances in power and speed, doesn’t our tech development give us vastly more freedom and choice, and more time for the things we really value?

Of course, all those questions are rhetorical traps. Recent studies confirm that Americans today feel more pressed for time and more frustrated with massive tech malfunctions. Faster techs don’t always translate to faster work by tech-dependent systems. It takes a Los Angeles County deputy just a few minutes to write out a collision report at the scene of a minor traffic accident, but it takes the Sheriff’s Department bureaucracy about thirty days to “process” the report. We are also more uneasy than ever about things our techs do that are not what we want—Big Brother surveillance, offensive TV commercials invading our personal space, malware in our computers, and scam phone calls undeterred by the federal “Do Not Call” list. Will we soon have camera-equipped drones peering in our bedroom windows, or driverless cars running over our kids?

In trying to understand why such frustrations have become chronic, I have noticed that it is apparently not just our digital devices and diversions, but the products of human invention going all the way back to the First Agricultural Revolution beginning around 10,000 years ago, and then all the technological revolutions that have followed, that are at play here. Through accelerating accumulation, they have led to a state where instead of feeling on top of the world like the champions of survival we humans have been until this century, we now feel vulnerable, stressed out, and apprehensive in ways that past generations probably were not.

One thing I learned early is that when technological change is rapid, the excitement it brings is often tainted by exasperation. As a teenager, I got interested in printing and publishing, and somehow persuaded my parents to buy me an antique cast-iron printing press that was about the size of a refrigerator, weighed a ton, and used the same letterpress method invented by Guttenberg. I learned how to set type by hand, one “a” or “p” at a time, and after setting a few sentences my fingers would be gray with lead dust. Lead was the main constituent of the alloy used to make type in those days, and I wonder how much of it I absorbed. In any case, the process was just too slow, and after a year I abandoned that beautiful machine (I wish I still had it) for much easier methods—first, something called hectograph (making a dozen copies by laying a typed master face-down on a tray of ink-absorbing gelatin); then mimeograph (hundreds of copies!), then a field trip to the local newspaper’s tractor-sized Linotype machine (thousands!).

Years later, I started a magazine about my favorite outdoor activity, Running Times, and bought a Compugraphic typesetting machine the size of an upright piano, which actually had memory—a whole line!—so if you made a typo while still on that line, you could fix it instantly. Of course, if you went past the “carriage return” before you could stop your eager fingers, you’d have to print out the page, place it on a light table, retype the line that had the typo, print that out, run it through a waxing machine, lay the waxed paper with the corrected line over the typo line, and use a razor blade to overlay the corrected line on the bad one—and be sure you didn’t leave it crooked. However, as it turned out, after a couple of years the Compugraphic was totally obsolete and had to be junked, as the wonders of much more advanced word-processing machines beckoned. Then came the siren call of desktop publishing, which for a while overlapped awkwardly with our use of wax machines and light-table layout. Finally, we got the Internet and digital transmission of manuscripts. What had required laborious all-nighters fueled by bad coffee in the pre-Starbucks era could now be done in minutes. Similar progressions of innovation-cum-obsolescence have characterized our progress in sound recording, personal computers, telephones, and a thousand other categories of tech products. Things just keep getting better, or at least faster.

Funny thing, though: I recently talked with the last editor of my old magazine (it merged with Runners World in 2016), who confirmed what I have long found puzzling not just about publishing or printing tech, but about technology in general: no matter how much faster or more powerful it gets, the use of it doesn’t seem to be making our lives any easier, happier, or more fulfilling. If anything, things are more frantic and fraught with malfunction than ever. It’s worth asking, now, why we want things to be ever faster. From what I knew of human physiology, I began to suspect some years ago that our pursuit of greater speed in all things was proving to be a colossal mistake.

After leaving my magazine and going to work at Worldwatch, with its big-picture studies of global agriculture, water, resource depletion, hubristic World Bank and IMF-funded development, and the emerging studies of biodiversity loss and climate change, I could see commonalities across the fields that the specialists might not. Specialists are by necessity deeply preoccupied with the frontiers of their own research, which gets increasingly narrow as knowledge advances.

Even the personal interest I’d cultivated as a long-distance runner, which I continued to pursue as I grew older, proved to be provocatively interdisciplinary. My early interest in the physiology of endurance piqued my curiosity about our abilities as humans not only to survive but to see ahead on the trail of life—to envision a place we have not yet reached. In the 1980s, I became familiar with the revolutionary “persistence-hunting” theory of human evolution published by biologists David Carrier and Dennis Bramble at the University of Utah and Daniel Lieberman at Harvard—their surprising discovery (earning a cover story in the journal Nature) that humans evidently evolved by using endurance and patience, rather than speed, to make their way in the world.

A few years ago, I began a personal investigation of a question that had been puzzling me for years: How does technology, which enabled us to build civilization to begin with, now have us racing toward what many of the world’s top scientists fear could destroy that same civilization? What I found may be cause for both Darwin-Award humor and existential alarm:

• We are infatuated with our technologies of effort-saving convenience, entertainment, and sedation, but the more we indulge in or depend on them, the weaker we become as individual humans. If I ever stop running, and just ride wilderness trails on a gasoline-powered dirt bike, my legs and lungs will weaken. And that goes for our brains, as well. When we let our devices take over more and more of our thinking and decision-making, our cognition and ability to remember the past and envision the future, too, weaken.
• Because our techs are now so capable of almost anything, we fool ourselves into thinking it is we, the inventors, who have those capabilities. We don’t. Very few of us are inventors. In fact, the opposite is true: The more knowledge society accumulates as a whole, the smaller a share of it any one person has. In the realm of the Internet, the great libraries of the world, and vast government and corporate databases, each of us is actually more ignorant of our world than the serfs of the Dark Ages were ignorant of theirs. As societal knowledge grows, individual ignorance also grows, and self-reliance shrinks.
• The more powerful our techs become, the greater the danger that we will misuse them, with catastrophic results. I first learned this from a very gentle and kindly man who in his younger years had built (for the US military) an atomic bomb that could kill over a million people in less than a minute—but who one day woke up to wonder what on earth had made him do that (more on that in the next chapter). If his bomb had been dropped on Moscow, as tentatively planned, it would probably have triggered a civilization-ending nuclear holocaust. Providentially, that didn’t happen. But as my young grandson and a hundred million other kids his age will soon learn, we now have even greater risks of tech-apocalypse than we had then. It’s not just atomic bombs, or the weed killer Roundup, or the still rising levels of global-warming gases, now. It’s the stuff we buy to entertain or sedate ourselves, or to relieve us from physical or mental effort, that may be our greatest risk.
• The faster the new techs of the moment are released, the more of our time and energy is squandered trying to keep up, and the less awareness we have of our civilization’s epic past and anticipated future. The more we try to “keep up with the Kardashians”—to keep pace with the latest celebrity selfies, smart phone apps, or viral videos—the less capable we are to draw on the wisdom of evolution and history, and to prepare for what’s becoming an increasingly perilous future.

The chapters ahead tell the story of how I came to know (or at least suspect) these things, and how my family and I—and I hope you and yours—can survive the dangers they bring. I’m glad to know I’m not alone in my feeling that our thrall with tech is taking too heavy a toll. Just a few years ago, the general public’s response to the rise of what we called “high tech” was almost cult-like. Figures like Steve Jobs and Ray Kurzweil were American idols. But then a few prescient critics began questioning where this thrall was leading. In the past few years, we’ve seen a welling discussion (at least in some of the non-mainstream media) of whether our preoccupation with “tech” is taking over our lives in worrisome ways. Is Silicon Valley playing God? Is Google really making us stupid? Is automation making us incompetent? Is the Internet doing an end-run on the sovereignty of nation-states? Is Big Brother here for real, only more pervasively than even George Orwell imagined? Are we losing control of our humanity? But to appreciate that conversation fully, it’s essential to see that it’s not just about the rise of Amazon and Google and a hundred other startups that have made multi-millionaires out of kids not yet fully cognizant of risk, but about a phenomenon of human invention that began with the agricultural revolution of 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, picked up speed over the past 500 years, and has gone into a hurricane-like acceleration over the past 50 years.

We live in the moment, now. But if you can see beyond the moment, you can also see that the seductions of techn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Waking Up
• 1 Losing Balance
• 2 Big-Picture Thinking
• 3 The Numbing
• 4 The Weakening
• 5 The New Trojan Horse
• 6 The Stumbling
• 7 The Footprint of the Future
• 8 Seeing Past Dystopia
• 9 Reigniting Imagination
• 10 Hands, Feet, Bare Skin, and Privacy
• 11 Overriding Evolution
• 12 Breaking Away
• 13 A New Beginning
• Appendix: Further Reading and Resources
• Index