By Ed Keenan
“The information highway is about arriving without travelling.”
I don’t know who said this, but it neatly sums up the whole marketing campaign used by the corporations and media outlets which are engineering the technological revolution.
Think of the comfort, they say, the convenience. Think of being able to do your shopping and banking from the warm fuzzy comfort of your living room. Think about being able to do all your work from home.
The ad says “Ever talk face to face with a person 40,000 miles away? You will.” By implication, I think, it goes further: ever have a best friend you’ve never touched? Ever vacation in Cuba without leaving the house? Ever make love to someone who’s half a continent away? Soon, I’m told, we’ll have the capability to do nearly everything we need (or want) to from one console in our living room. Virtual workplace, virtual banking, virtual friends, virtual sex, virtual sterility and mediocrity at every turn—yours at the push of a button.
It seems to me that humanity has spent the last half century trying to make our lives easier without ever questioning whether it makes them any better. Think of a task that takes time or effort—say washing dishes or mailing a letter—and you can pretty much be sure we either have or are developing the technology to do it faster and with less effort.
What’s lost on these techno-wizards is that a good part of human experience is made up of these very tasks, these processes, these hardships that we are trying to eliminate. The very thing that makes great people great is the sum of these often mundane and usually unpleasant experiences. If Hannibal had had access to chemical and nuclear weaponry, his taking of the Alps wouldn’t have been much of an achievement. Jack Kerouack’s On the Road would have been a much quicker read if he’d been able to take a jet—or better yet, see his pals by virtual-telephone without leaving his folks’ place.
It seems that we’re sacrificing visceral experience on the alter of comfort and convenience, in the name of progress. By eliminating the process we may be missing the point we want so badly to rush to.
Arriving without travelling, for me at least, takes some of the joy and wonder out of arriving. The blood and sweat and mud and tears and semen and saliva and shit that we’re trying to get rid of make up a good deal of the memorable experiences of our lives. Without them, nothing has value: “easy come, easy go.”
I can’t stand in the way of progress—and who’d want to?—but I’d like to take a second to whimper softly at the thought of some future person, whose entire life experiences can be summed up with the push of a button.
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