From Active Resistance to Civil Disobedience to Play-Time Protest

Emma Goldman is famous for, among other things, saying, “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution”. And that seems such an endearing slogan, beseeching us to retain our humanity on the battlefield. But sometimes it looks like there is an awful lot of dancing, and not very much revolution. There is a lot of crap going on in the world that could use attending to. Ever rising rates of carbon emission. Military “adventuring” for material gain. The economic gutting of working people. Governments moving ever further away from the public good toward corporate interest. Environmental regulations being dismantled. Food production slowly evolving into a kind of biological warfare. In 2009, we might be better served by a slogan more along the lines of “If you won’t get down to work then you have no place at the dance”.

I read in the news recently, that a protest group was declaring a hunger strike because the Copenhagen climate talks are taking on the character of a vaudeville routine (Who’s on first. What’s on second). Hunger strikes may be of dubious value, but they do tend to garner attention and they offer a pretty strong statement of commitment on the part of the protester. Being willing to starve, risk kidney damage, and possibly death does effectively shout “guys, this is really really important to me, I need you to listen”. It’s often overlooked that one of the handiest things about this form of resistance is it is simple and requires little in the way of effort or knowledge. As long as you are somewhere that people will notice, all you do is stop eating. Watching someone waste away, consumed from the inside out does make people uncomfortable in today’s world of delicate sensibilities.

I read a little further. It turns out that this group decided to fix something that wasn’t broke. They devised a rotating system of shifts: You starve today, I take my turn tomorrow and we’re letting Jack Sprat sit this one out, because he’s already a little on the thin side. More of a peckish strike than a hunger strike. The advantage of this strategy is you can keep up a hunger strike indefinitely instead of the previous hard limits of 30 to 50 days. Unfortunately, since it takes about three days for your body to even get past burning this morning's gummy bears, your previously visceral statement is turned into a lame metaphor and the cameras will move on to the topless protesters down the block.

What prompted this post was waking up to an email from Adbusters, with a bold 18 point font headline: “Buy Nothing Day Morphs into a Wildcat General Strike”. Wow, what’s this? Things have grown dire and we have to step up our efforts to bring down the “capitalist consuming machine”(otherwise known as ‘us’). While recognizing my noble efforts in the past, valiantly completing my immediate shopping needs by the 26th or else focusing my will to put them off until the 28th, the think tank in the Adbuster War Room calculates that we now need a hard push if we are to turn the tables on. . .on. . . well, I am still a little unclear on who the recipient of this message is, but I digress. This year, on November 27th, I need to go even further beyond the call of duty and “turn off all non-essential appliances”. Whoah, the kid gloves are off. I'm not sure how to differentiate between essential and non-essential though. Hospital life-support machines, ok, they’re probably essential. It gets a little grey when I think about the blender which provides my organic-whey-protein-with-açaí power shake in the morning(hey, I'm not in the hunger strike battalion). If Joan of Arc had had this hammer in her toolbox, just think how things could have turned out. More tools is good, isn’t it?

One of the benefits of the broad application of post-secondary education to the young adult consumer market is that there is just a hothouse of fertile creativity in the protest movement. Back around the time that unions started to gain strength, protesters were uneducated and had to resort to carrying two-by-fours and bricks and engaging in a kind of urban warfare to gain the attention of their oppressors. Remember those Wildcat Strikes! Today though, in a more enlightened age, we have Puppet Theatre. This is arguably a more complex form of protest, but education filled that ingenuity gap. Basically, the night before the protest, you pull on your best Che Guevera(TM)t-shirt, then you gather your cell members, pick up some markers, glue, scissors, fabric and a couple of six packs of local micro brew and then you just let your creativity run wild in an explosively anarchic synergistic collaboration. Then, at the protest, you stage a drama, rich in symbolism and mythic allusion and really let the enemy know you mean business.

Author Derrick Jensen cuts right to the heart of the matter. He poses the question, What if, in the Star Wars Saga, the rebel Alliance had used the tools of the environmental movement? Some highlights are the promoting of eco-tourism on Endor among the storm troopers, setting up fair-trade coffee stands on the death star, and letter writing campaigns imploring Vader to give up his destructive ways. Jensen’s telling of the story underscores the absurdity of it all. As amusing as it is, your laughter gets hollow and an uncomfortable feeling creeps into your gut when he gets to the more radical protesters. The hardcore of the movement go down to planets slated for destruction, link hands, sing give peace a chance and project "waves and waves of loving kindness" at Vader.

I do understand the value of protest. Sometimes it raises awareness on an issue. It gives people a chance to declare their non-support. Occasionally, with enough of a groundswell, it gets politicians itchy under the collar as they wonder where the voter heart lies. And it is an opportunity to build community ties, human bonds and to learn you are not alone in your discontent. But the flip-side is the mistaken sense of what it can accomplish, and its vulnerability due to media filtering (when the news reports a protest, it usually doesn’t identify the cause, but instead focuses on how “they” thwarted “you” by disrupting traffic). There are other liabilities too. It can cause complacency in the casual witness who may feel sympathetic but is comforted that “something is being done”. Worst of all, it becomes a substitution for the real work involved in change. A good portion of this cohort don’t vote and don’t “believe in” politics or institutions (wake up call: they are real, powerful, organized and effective and they don’t require our belief). For the most educated generation ever, there is a flabbergasting naivety concerning how things work, how things get done. If the limits of your political discourse are “hey hey, ho ho, blank-blank has to go”, and the limits of your resistance activities are token protest gestures and you are blind to how supportive to “the enemy” your complete civic absenteeism is, then you will always have a growing number of protests to attend. Because the world will keep merrily on in its terrible way, guided by the people who are actually doing things.

Years ago, I was sitting with some friends. Decent, intelligent, kind, educated middle class adults. All very concerned with the state of the world. My disgruntled peer group was highly identifiable by their fashionable blend of post-punk and nerd-chic. They considered the “anti-conformism” of their store bought clothes to be part of their “political” statement(yes, with enough education, you can simultaneously disbelieve in politics, yet believe denim is a political statement). A very ordinary looking guy in white shirt and tie walked up to us. Turns out he was a former classmate of the group. Nobody had seem him hanging around in a long time, and they asked what he had been up to. As it was, he had gone off to law school and was well on his way to becoming an environmental lawyer. After he left, they jeered about how he had sold out, and wondered what he hoped to accomplish. There was even a lament, that he “had been so cool, what happened to him"? If the whole group had all become environmental lawyers, would Canada have gotten away with re-designating a bunch of lakes, “tailings ponds”, as a clever cost-effective solution to toxic pollution by resource industries?

Incidentally, Emma Goldman wrote, spoke and did an awful lot of pretty impressive revolutionary stuff, but most likely never said that quote in the opening. She did however try to assassinate a corporate industrialist CEO that she had identified as one of the enemy.

Better Off

One of the more vivid stories from mythology we have carefully carried through time, is the flight of Icarus. It is a cautionary tale, and the villain is sometimes thought of as Hubris and sometimes as Recklessness. Daedalus, Icarus’ father, builds 2 sets of wings out of wood, feathers and wax, to use to escape from Crete. Icarus’ father had warned him not to fly too low or his wings would get wet and not too high or they would melt. Icarus, of course, flew higher and higher, in ecstasy at the glory and sense of freedom, until he flew too close to the sun and melted away his wings. It is a valuable story with many possible nuances in the telling.

I found myself thinking about that ancient tale while watching the latest incarnation in the Stargate franchise. Television, with its truncated story arcs, tendency to melodrama and its use of unlikely situations to illuminate the human condition has always struck me as being akin to a modern mythology. In Stargate Universe, our heroes are trapped on a hyper-advanced alien space ship that has run out of fuel and is on a collision course with a star. They soon realise that they should have burned up, but instead, their shields are holding. Depicted in breathtaking visuals, we watch the ship swoop down right into the star to harvest energy. The ship refuels and our awestruck heroes continue their quest into the unknown. Watching, the hair on my arms stood on end, I felt misty and moved and having followed the narrative through the crisis-climax-relief, I had a swirl of endorphins churning inside that gave me wonder at the possibilities in the universe. Great story-telling.

And you know part of why it was so satisfying? It was a myth of wish-fulfillment. It was the opposite of the kind of wisdom that has been honed to its essence in a myth. The Icarus myth warns us of our shortcomings, our short-sightedness and what we stand to lose when we neglect what is important in a bid to have it all. The Stargate myth is the myth of our time. It is the technology myth and it is the myth of no limits and it is the myth of more is better.

Only it isn’t a true myth. It is a child’s fantasy of being loose in the candy store. Fantasy and myth are not the same thing at all. Fantasies provide escape and temporary relief from stress and are a valuable contribution from our imaginations. Myth, like its cousins fable, parable and allegory, is meant to harness the power of story in order to guide, instruct, and provoke reflection. Myth is meant to give you pause.

I came across a book recently by Eric Brende, entitled, “Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology”. In the course of completing a PhD at MIT on the social effects of machines on human life, Brende spent 18 months living in a small Mennonite-styled farming community that had closed the door on electricity and fossil fuels. He did this to gain some sense of what life is like without automatic machines, to discover other forms of technology and to reflect on what technology brings as well as takes away. Brende is instinctually wary of technology, yet not wanting to be reactionary. He asks how much technology is enough. How much is too much? Like Daedelus, he is looking for a successful flight path.

In a sumptuous narrative that twines strands of history, science, religion, economics as well as community, friendship, and family, Brende weaves an engaging story of his own voyage, his own reflections on the myth of technology. The very structure of the book is designed to be an example of what it discusses. It moves at a lazy pace, and winds in and out of spaces and times and ideas. It encourages the reader to step out of linear efficiency and slow his own pace down. It invites the reader to have his own reflections interact with the text. That the book turned out the way it did, is a demonstration of things learned along the way.

It isn’t an anti-technology polemic, far from it. The first thing Brende does is distinguish between tools and automatic machines. Tools bring a person into contact with his aim. Tools engage. Tools are useful without being in the way. Machines tend to rob a person of skills, physical health and human connections. Machines, designed to free up time tend to rob a person of many human pursuits and take activities that once integrated many functions—social, physical, mental, emotional, and fractures them. Aside from the energy drain of working for the money to buy and maintain machines, life becomes cluttered and stressful trying to manage jobs and friends and family and personal life that each have their own little compartments of time. He makes the point over and over again that instead of shaping machines to our human ends, we end up shaping ourselves around the machines.

Brende soon learns that life among the Mennonites isn’t drudgery, but a rich complexity of skilled tasks set in a densely interdependent community and carried out with gentle rhythms and cycles. While he is at it, he discovers a multitude of simpler, sometimes older, technologies, each with a specific purpose, each requiring human skills. Some technologies are recent innovations, applications of human ingenuity that fine tune an application without displacing the human input.

When it comes to questions about technology, members of the community meet in council to discuss what purposes their might be in adopting a new technology and what risks it entails. Society at large tends to simply adopt most technology on the principle that more is better. At best, we ask what can this technology give us. We don’t spend much time at all worrying about what it will cost, what will be lost, and if it would be reversible. To this day we use the term luddite to ridicule anyone who questions technology. The luddites balked at the introduction of automatic looms which destroyed an entire skilled trade, severed a history of skills and craftsmanship, put an entire sector out of work, concentrated the wealth of the community into fewer hands, and probably caused all manner of tragic circumstances in the families of those affected. And those are only the immediate consequences. One might ponder higher order consequences linked to standardization, homogenization, the consumerism that follows mass production.

The Mennonites ask will this technology rob us of skills? Will it cut us off from cherished activities? Perhaps, most importantly, they ask will this technology interfere with the cooperative nature of our community. They are concerned with their social fabric. They don’t see independence and idleness at rewards. They’re all for technologies that help get the job done well, technologies that serve their efforts and technologies that genuinely benefit the community.

By way of example, forgoing cars is seen as essential to maintaining a human pace. Just as the “new urbanism” movement discusses building communities that are human scaled, human pace is to be considered also. Travelling by foot, bicycle or horse drawn wagon limits speed and the sphere of travel. It is a precondition for neighbourly stability, mutual aid, and everyday face to face interaction. Brende makes the point also, that human paced transportation lets you remain interactive with your environment. You can see more, hear more, you can smell things, touch things, talk to people. He described the wagon as a “kind of moving front porch” that let you become a “transitory neighbour”.

After functional communities, maybe the best benefit discussed is silence and stillness. Human paced life is full with quiet times, slow times. It leaves time to reflect and be mindful. It is difficult to lead a directed and centred life if you are always rushing about, your whole life is compartmentalized and your day is an assembly line of moments. The sensory overload that comes from our electronic commercialized world can be both blinding and numbing.

One of the first criticisms that comes to mind is the question of whether any of this folksy charm is applicable in the greater world of near seven billion rapidly urbanizing souls. As well, technologies are linked in an intricate web and it is hard to just pick and choose. I might feel many of the technologies in a hospital are quite desirable, but they do not manifest without a whole host of other technologies I find undesirable.

Between fossil fuel shortages and the need to constrain carbon emissions, we may just find out the wide scale applicability of the ideas in Brende’s book. But the obvious first question is: what is more likely, that technology will solve our problems, or that runaway technology helped us arrive at this problematic place in the first place. Frankly, I'm often terrified by our desperation to hang onto what seems to me to be a fairly ugly way of life. I carry an image in my head befitting a Steven King story, of the slaves working in the fields to grow corn for the cars, and then the cars drive the slaves back home and plug them into their televisions to maintain stability. I carry another one similar to the “grey goo” theory of nanobots, except we are the nanobots and we eat every last thing on the planet.

I also have daydreams of a country having thousands of small towns rather than a few megacities. I imagine endless variations between towns in their look, culture and flavour. I imagine people working at many different tasks rather than being specialized. I imagine knowing and needing your neighbours. I imagine people listening to live music together that they produce instead of having massive CD collections that they listen to isolated in their headphones. I imagine communities where the various talents of everyone is useful because we haven’t sought out economy of scale, mass production or the most efficient path to profit.

I'm not naive. If we are in for challenging times ahead, I understand perfectly well the problems engendered by greed, paranoia, and desperation. I understand collective action problems and the problem of previous investment. And then there are the hardwired problems of evolution around competition for resources. The list doesn’t end there. I have a hard time hanging onto my little daydreams of a more wholesome slow paced world and an even harder time not being overwhelmed with frustration and fear at the bad places I can imagine ourselves heading to.

Icarus plummeted after attaining great heights. That the sun educated Hubris and Recklessness is a sublime serendipity when viewed today. The sun gives all life and is the source of every energy we have from oil to the flexing of our own muscles. It is a symbol of power and ambition and a destructive force. Apollo, a sun god, is a god of harmony, yet a god of conquest. He is associated with healing and with bringing plagues. The issues we face today are all about our relationship to the sun, and which side of Apollo we have been promoting. In our own playing out of the Icarus tale, we have been trying to change our relationship with the sun from harmony to conquest. We keep cranking out the technology trying to heal our ills and we bring more plagues. The ancient sunlight in coal and oil that we burn have given us flight, but with the onset of climate change, we are melting the wings we have been so proud of.

As much as that Stargate storyscape is wondrous and fascinating, I don’t need or want that in my future. I don’t need more technology. I need very simple things, the same as everyone else does: food, community and meaningful things to do. Brende’s book may contribute some idea and inspiration for how we respond to the things that are coming our way. It may also offer a sense that what is coming could be viewed as a renewal, not a collapse.

Economics - The schizophrenic science

Sorry to besmear those who suffer from actual schizophrenia by associating them with economists. I’ve just read an article for class, “The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love”. Written by Richard Florida, it was published in the Washington Monthly, March, 2003. Florida is an urban economic policy guru. I have to get this out of my system because I feel a little dirty after reading it, so profound was its lack of lack of substance or logic. What makes it worse, is Florida isn’t some minor neoliberal crank. Toronto just gave him a 100 million dollar school to run and an annual pay check of 350 000$. Did I say school? I meant a lab, to manufacture crack pipe dreams.

I have to give credit where credit is due. Florida has spun what Hollywood calls High Concept (ideas that can be completely summed up into a few simple phrases, or one line) into a stack of books and papers and an international industry. Florida’s entire snake oil song and dance rests on two words: creative class. That’s it, there isn’t much else to the story. He preaches sinking all resources into enticing, supporting and subsidizing the wealthy elite as a sure fire formula for utopia. These are some magic beans.

He calls it a new kind of capitalism and differentiates it from that old one where lots of people had good secure jobs running the nitty gritty of day to day life. His new economy is that little patch of the city that has granite-countertop million dollar condos, high rise office towers, and the boutique glamour zone that the well-to-do play in. He describes creativity as the central force in the economy and offers up a non sequitur that 70% of the population are not engaged in it. Drat, I knew there was a catch.

Florida says worker expectations are changing: the old American dream was a job with which to feed your family, but the new American dream is a job you love, with which to feed your family. Luckily he doesn’t have to reconcile this pronouncement with the reality that wages are down, unemployment is up, job security is down, cost of living is up, social services are down, and requests for emergency food and housing are up. I think in a lot of places, the American dream is a job, period. Or maybe a waterproof cardboard box.

But wait, we’re still in Kansas. Florida is going to bring us all the way to Oz. He cites outsourcing labour and reducing manufacturing capabilities as positive factors in the new creative economy. Twanging his one string banjo, he tells us “creativity – the ability to come up with and implement a new idea” has always been the prime source of economic growth and advantage. So, I wasted a lot of money at school learning about the functions of ample supplies of energy, resources, cheap labour pools, and complicated market tools. Substantiating his claim with images of a post WWII America, he claims they changed from “perennial creativity to constant creativity”. I got lost at this point, because again, I couldn’t find the part about them being the wealthiest nation on the planet, after making buckets of money on a war that left the rest of the civilized world bombed into the stone age.

He made no mention of the use of economic and military clout to dominate global economics and trade agreements. And there was still no mention of all that cheap oil and steel, or the advantages of migrant workers in the agriculture industry I guess, when you get right down to it, Florida didn’t really make much connection between his idealized world of designers, artists and marketers and the post war baby-boom economy of Fordist production-wage protection-consumption models. I'm not unfair, I am willing to admit that fanning a multigenerational cold war under your arms industry can be construed as creative.

Just when you might be ready to laugh at the article, he just starts to get really disturbingly bizarre. Concerning Americas “golden age”, among his praises are union empowering laws and federal projects like mortgage guarantees, the GI education bill and highway construction. Then, in a surprise sucker punch, Florida says we shouldn’t keep doing archaic social projects if we want our cities to thrive. We’re not sure what is creative, but spending money to ensure a resilient diverse functional community is not creative.

He does encourage “creative education” so everyone can get in on the creative wealth. He never wonders who will clean the sewers once everyone is fully engaged in the creative economy. The creative economy doesn’t have much patience for the people who answer phones, clean teeth, keep records or any of the thousands of vital jobs that make up a city(lots of these people don’t want creative jobs, they want living wages, dental benefits and a well defined job description). He doesn’t wonder where the creative education will come from or what it will look like(except that it isn’t government subsidized).

Next, we get this brain frying powerhouse: “inequality is bad”. Skipped, is the part explaining how lowering wages and then hyper educating the population that will still be stuck with those “tedious” jobs helps cushion the inequality in any way. (It’s not really a question, Russia in the late 19th century enjoyed a sense of pride about a creative elite and ended up producing what they called The Superfluous Man. This man was smart and capable and sophisticated and expected to be made use of in some way befitting his talents. But there really wasn’t anything all that creative or cerebral for him to do. They still needed plumbers and farmers and clerks, but that wasn’t his job so he was idle. It kind of went downhill in Russia after that. Social inequality, raised expectations and lowered rewards are a nasty combination).

One little note, Florida make lots of references to painters and performers and plucky inventors in his creative class sleight of hand, but when you look up his sleeve, he is referring to the powerhouses of advertising and finance behind corporations like Apple and Sony, and the pharmaceutical firms that bring us Viagra and acid reflux pills. So, his range of creativity is getting pretty narrow at this point.

The real prize still to come, the Shoot-Yourself-In-The-foot Prize goes to the massive article space Florida devotes to statistics correlating cities with the biggest “creative class” to cities with the highest economic inequality. He also relates a causal relation between busy wealthy creative class types and the rise of low paid service sector jobs(servants). Hey, whose side is this joker on? Does he conclude that stripping public money from real civic works and giving it to an economic elite might not be good for a city? Does he insightfully note that that small segment of high earners skew income curves and cost of living. Does he make the leap connecting the deconstruction of the manufacturing sector with the desperate plight of income-insecure service workers. Nope. Creative cities, he insists, are winners.

Florida, confident, beaming big white teeth, pulls that one string banjo back out. What these cities need is still more creativity. We need to douse these cities in pure, virgin cold-pressed creativity, until we can “catch” those mired masses and “teach them right” (honest, I am not making this up). Then and only then, can they share in the limitless creative wealth out there just waiting for clever people to come along and pluck.

Anyway, you might want to roll up your sidewalks and fasten the shutters if Mr. Florida comes knocking. You shall know him by his one string banjo (and like Walmart and the corn-into-fuel guy, he may be riding a pale horse).

Magic Beans

A couple of weeks ago, my cell phone died and I’ve been left deprived of an extraordinarily useful tool in navigating my day, namely, a clock. I have a busy life and have never had much luck with watches. Before I had a cell, I used to check payphones for the time when I was out. Phones have always been my sundials. But as far as the actual communication technology goes, I rarely use it.

I never bothered with a cell until I had a job that required me to carry one, and stay on call 24 hours a day. I’ve long since freed myself of that job, but not before I was habituated to my phone. It’s a curious thing about technology. We are so nonchalant about embracing new technology even though once we do, our lives tend to adapt around it and make it very difficult to let go of if we later find it is costly in some way that may outweigh the benefit.

When a city wants to open a new landfill, it commissions an environmental impact statement. You would think, in a similar way, it might be prudent to create a psychological or social impact statement before unleashing a technology. It’s a nice thought, but generally new technologies have unforeseeable consequences, what are sometimes called ‘higher order consequences’. These may take generations to evolve, and may be so many steps removed from the technology that they are difficult to trace back to it.

The term higher order consequences has such a dramatic flair to it, that I again wonder why we are not more wary. But we aren’t wary. We are impulsive and wide-eyed at most new gadgets and gizmos. “New” is often the best marketing strategy. New doesn’t tell you anything about how a gadget will affect your lifestyle, your livelihood or even whole social structures.

Sometimes it seems a technology doesn’t so much change social structure, as illustrate it. After reading a few books on primate studies, I gather that apes, when not busy gathering food, boinking or knocking each others teeth out, just like to hang out, gossip, tell jokes and strategise ways to move up the social ladder. Primates like to be amused. They play pranks. Generally they like to laugh and immerse themselves in silly pastimes. Coming full circle back to my question of whether or not to replace my phone, I have become acutely aware of how people use their phones. I see them everywhere, and usually I see people typing on them, rather than talking into them. It makes me think of the old saw about what an uncountable number of monkeys will pound out at typewriters. Well we know: Paris Hilton jokes. We are spacemonkeys and we still mostly like to horse around. We type out celebrity gossip, puns, and gags. We share funny pictures and generally immerse ourselves in silly pastimes. People ask whether television, videogames, and the internet have made us stupid. I think we were always stupid, or at least really easily distracted by amusements.

I'm being flippant here, when it could easily be argued that a lot of bad things go on in the world because people are too absorbed in mindless pastimes. Or perhaps worse, people are so aware of big slowly converging complex crises, that the resulting high anxiety pushes them into ever more stress relieving amusement retreats. That’s what monkeys do when they are nervous: they grin and try and defuse things. Or, to put it another way, what looks endearing in a tribe of fifty apes, begins to look nightmarishly cancerous in a global village of nearly 7 billion people who have consciously committed to a rejection of limits

I could mention also, there are, I think, severe personal and interpersonal consequences to shifting the bulk of social experience out of physical face to face environments and recreating them in buffered layers of communication technologies.

I do wish we were more selective about technology, or that we could put it back in the box once it started to show negative gains. Cell phones and microwave ovens largely seem to help facilitate a way of life that denigrates personal time, family, and community in favour of production, and maintaining a busy frantic pace. Cars, well the big ugly picture with cars is still rolling in. A lot of technology can be boiled down to increases in speed, efficiency and intensity when maybe that isn’t really in anyone’s best interest.

We’ve all read about the Manhattan Project scientist who casually remarked on the possibility of igniting the atmosphere with the detonation of the bomb. Now you might think someone who takes that kind of risk should have been in jail. But he was only a part of a culture that decided the best thing in life was to churn out as many different machines, as fast as possible, to play with and make money from. And this orgy has, in its use of energy, now had a higher order consequence you could describe as “igniting the atmosphere”. All that, while we retained our basic ape natures. It makes me feel that despite an awful lot of consequences, our obsessive love affair with technology hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in any meaningful way. It’s kind of sad to think how much we will keep trading for more magic beans.