Ah, the nineties. The biggest threats to national security were gun-wielding, Doom-playing high schoolers, everyone could ignore our weekly Iraq bombings, and we were all worried that our new array of endless gadgetry, financed by an irrationally exuberant economy, felt so good to use that they must be bad for our health. And wherever there are Americans concerned that something is bad for their health, there's someone else there to confirm their worst suspicions. John Naisbitt filled this role superbly.John's only one of a thousand technology critics who crawled out of the woodwork in the eighties and nineties. They all said the same things and the arguments are pretty familiar (and ignored) in the post-9/11 era. Luckily, John's thesis for the first part of the book provides a decent summary of the combined tech alarmism that pervaded the entire decade. According to him and his fellow authors, we're all (Or we all were--you can decide the degree of relevancy you're willing to grant the book in 2009) living in a "Technologically Intoxicated Zone." Your kids are intoxicated with violent video games, you're intoxicated with gadgetry, and we're all intoxicated with the promises of the "quick fix." In fact, let me just give you list he gives. We'll get it out the system right away so you never have to read one of these retarded tech-is-evil books again:
John's "symptoms" of a "Technologically Intoxicated Zone":
1.) "We favor the quick fix, from religion to nutrition" (Oh, come on John, that's nothing new. Americans have been obsessed with instant gratification since they started putting crack in medicine bottles to cure backaches).
2.) "We fear and worship technology" (Okay, I'll admit the level of fear is something relatively new, although you could argue it really started with the Industrial Revolution. By the way, do Scientologists actually worship technology? That might be a new level).
3.) "We blur the distinction between real and fake" (This, too, is nothing new, but thanks to 24-hour news networks, the Internet, and globalization, this blur has some real consequences now. Once something is blurred, it's really, really hard to unblur it. Just look at The Da Vinci Code.)
4.) "We accept violence as normal" (Really, John? Really? This is new? Humans have accepted violence as normal since the beginning of time. Remember, this book was written before the blood was even dry at Columbine, so get ready for a very long chapter on how video games, TV, and, somehow, Stephen Spielberg's Toy Soldiers are creating a generation of mass murderers. Oh, yeah, and a polemic in favor of censorship. Excellent.)
5.) "We love technology as a toy" (Once again, this isn't new. If any generation started this, it was the postwar fifties generation with their Kelvinator Ice Cube Makers and Automated Kitchen Systems. And honestly, what's wrong with toys? John never really explains this.)
6.) "We live our lives distanced and distracted" (Oh, this is good. Guess where he goes here? Yup, the "voluntary simplicity movement". Basically, yuppies sacrificing their laptops and cell phones to play Walden Pond at some godforsaken shack in the Rockies. And oh, how focused and "in touch" with their "humanness"--John likes this word--they became! Lolcatz.)
The main point is that we have to balance HIGH TECH (our gadgetry) with HIGH TOUCH (our "humanness"). And most importantly, we MUST protect our CHILDREN from the horrors of high tech. The most Columbinesque chapter in the book is called "The Military-Ninetendo Complex". It's every bit as bad as it sounds and a bag of chips (hey, we're back in the nineties here!). Oh, the parade of intellectual-sounding experts John trots out to terrify soccer moms. One Professor Stephen Kline--a quick Google search will tell you everything you need to know about him--warns us that "Play is paradoxical. It subsumes both a connection to reality and imagination by definition." Video games, Kline says, are "packaged emotions." Is anyone else getting a little beeping noise from their bullshit-o-meter?
The worst part is that, at the core of it, there's a point. It is a little scary that the military trains its men with the same video games seven-year olds are playing. It's true that a steady diet of violent TV, video games, and movies probably isn't very good for children. A lot of stuff isn't. Like eating Deet. Or sticking fingers into electrical sockets. Or sticking M&Ms up the nose. Fortunately, nature provided our little ones with at least one (usually two!) defenses against these things: PARENTS. But, typical of the yuppie nineties, John lays all the blame on the "media," and especially the video game companies, the boogeymen of the entire book. "The danger to our children presented by the electronic war zone," John says, "should be equated with crying 'fire' in a crowded theater--absolutely unaccepable and punishable by law." If that quote doesn't make you seriously question John's opinions, I'm very, very worried about America. "American courts today," John writes with an unmistakable twinge of sadness, "view with strict scrutiny any legislation that appears to infringe on the First Amendment." Enforcing the Constitution--horror of horrors! Oh, please, Surpreme Court, save us from the evils of the First Amendment! Yikes.
Don't give up on John yet, though. Remember his milieu. Writing Part I of this book was probably like trying to write a book about Islam in October 2001. Panic and paranoia can do strange things to otherwise intelligent people. Stick around for Part II. John and his fellow authors speculate on genetic technologies and their influences on morality and religion, and it's actually interesting. They argue that DNA is man's next great leap in his understanding of himself. Galileo gave us a cosmic perspective, Darwin gave us a natural perspective, and DNA technologies give us a molecular perspective. He quotes a ridiculous amount of very famous theologians from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic traditions about the ethical concerns involved in cloning, "designer babies," and genetically-engineered food like Roundup Corn. Irving Greenberg (creator of the "voluntary covenant" concept for any Jews in the audience), Archbiship Sly, and Pastor John Eagen all speculate on the new technologies' effects on their respective faiths. John correctly predicts that concerns over genetic privacy would need to be addressed by the federal government, and soon--he cites some terrifying stories about people denied insurance coverage because of the "cancer gene." At least here, I had a sense of relief: Congress did address it, of course, creating GINA (the Genetic Information Non-Discrimation Act) that's supposed to prevent any of those horror stories from ever happening again.
The last part of the book is especially interesting. Here, in a chapter called "Death, Sex, and the Body: The New Specimen Art Movement," John and his fellow authors speculate on the new DNA tech's effects on art, music, and culture. The New Specimen Movement, by the way, is basically art using the "real" instead of the representative. "Specimen Art," John explains, "is based on real human specimens." If you remember that "Bodies in Motion" exhibit that came around recently, where they had real bodies donated to science set up in all those weird poses, then you saw Specimen Art. The beauty of the "inner body" and the "outer body" is represented as scientists become artists and artists become scientists. Nancy Kedersha has a few quotes in there. Even the artist of the very controversial "Piss Christ" makes an appearance. All in all, it's a nineties art reunion, but it's worth it.
In fact, the whole book's a nineties reunion. Reading through things I remember only vaguely--I was in grade school in 1999--gave me pangs of nostalgia for a time before al-Qa'ida and economic recessions, a time when the biggest concern was taking your measurements for a customized Y2K Doomsday space suit, a time when The New Millenium was still coming and held so much promise, before we realized that 2001 came after 2000 and humans were still killing each other. It was fun to remember what worried us all back then, how we all thought in a little more innocent times. And believe it or not, a lot of it really is still relevant.
Agree or disagree with John's politics (I mostly disagreed), but he undertook quite a cultural study here and used pretty sophisticated methods, which he describes in the appendices. He tries to raise our everyday consumer culture to the level of academic discourse, and I can't help but respect him for that. Technology DOES matter, and John and his fellow authors describe choices we all really do have to face both as individuals and as a society.
A nineties reunion and a tech morality lesson--who can argue with that?
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