Should Sapiens Survive? (Anti Point #4)

Devolution

“Lemmings… come charging down… to burst into the sea… and drown. Man… break[s]… into groups which destroy one another. We do not know the reasons for…the sudden mutation in the group psyche which makes lemmings men react in such an interesting way.”

– John Steinbeck to Wilbur Needham, 1940

You may have seen the decal that begins with evolution from simpler creatures to humans, and then devolves into a human sitting at a computer. That visual trope is a cautionary tale of our time, as the stories of Icarus and King Midas were in theirs. J. K. Rowling’s Mirror of Erised echoes other old tales, and reminds us that human idolatry can “unearth” us, and go badly wrong.

My enchantment with technology has fallen to earth, but I’m still delighted with many of its fruits—especially redemptive films—and prone to pick up technobabble.

I was recently disillusioned to discover that I had been misusing the term “bandwidth.” I was thinking like a radio fan: I thought it referred to breadth of awareness and knowledge. Instead, it refers to humans as desirable CPUs: able to process data from a variety of channels with great speed. It would have come out of the jargon of IT, and been meaningful in that context. In the living world, it suggests the view that humans would be better off as Borg—half robotic and completely unable to use their miraculous in-born gifts. It suggests the idolization of tools that turn humans into tools. I really don’t want to “go with the flow” by using a word that suggests that tools set the standards for their makers.

If this were a matter of bootless ideation, it wouldn’t matter, but the degradation of wisdom and knowledge to information overload and big—and often useless or bad or insignificant—data is often accompanied by a permanent move into cyberspace. This involves narrow, biology-blind awareness and very little thinking. More, it can lead to disablements, namely all kinds of process addictions—including screen addictions, inclusive of all video displays but especially digital crack, aka the “smart” phone.

On a more hopeful note, many small signs indicate that our new tools’ dark side is being seen. Data junkies who are not too far gone have taken note of Bill Gates’ transformation from Senate-sassing wunderkind to avuncular elder. Industry leaders like Will Cady are taking notice. Let’s hope that others follow.