Opiate of the masses

This morning, I overheard a young woman on the train- a college student, perhaps- telling someone on the other end of a phone call that she was planning to get the new iPhone as soon as they are available. Apparently, her current iPod is "just so big", and her phone is nearly 2 years old, so she was going to throw it away, anyway. The fact that they both seemed to be in working order didn’t appear to be a consideration. This ordinary exercise in consumerism got me thinking about for a moment about cost, before raising the broader questions of value, values, and self.
It’s no surprise to the reader that people, especially Westerners, increasingly define themselves by what they own. I don’t need to dwell long on the ubiquity of advertising, nor on the shift of "music lover" from meaning one who has studied and practiced music (even if informally), to one who spends a great deal of money on MP3s.
I’m not suggesting that humans have not long been technologists. Our modern understanding of the history of humans is based substantially on what we have made, whether that be fluted stone spearheads, constitutions, or rifled muskets. Nor am I suggesting that humans have not equally long spent much of their time and energy learning technology.
A key difference I see is that people are increasingly losing the knowledge of how to provide for themselves, even in the most rudimentary ways. A century ago, even many city-dwellers kept garden plots that helped to fill their tables. Fifty years ago, a person able to afford a pickup truck likely knew something about how to maintain it beyond taking it to the dealer when the light comes on. The practical appreciation for how technologies like agriculture and automobiles work increased their perceived value.
I find myself again looking at the question that Pirsig raised, that of "what’s new" versus "what’s best". Perhaps if we could move toward this mindset, we could pursue genuine happiness and community, rather than drugging ourselves with new diversions and creating ever-larger piles of trash.

Pendulum

I am struggling with a curious backlash. Having cut my teeth and built my education and career around technologies that long ago might have been called witchcraft (thankfully, I don’t weigh the same as a duck), I find myself increasingly drawn toward older and simpler technologies, or pursuits that involve little or no technology at all. The irony of recording all of this in a blog is not lost on the author.
I’ve been pressing my nose into dusty old books, like my Moore’s Historical Geology, printed in 1931. Dr. Moore does a charming job of correlating rocks and fossils without the benefit of plate tectonic theory. I’ve been drinking coffee made with water boiled on my stove and steeped in a French press. Grounds be damned. I think my wife is starting to have fiscal suspicions about my periodic musings about the merits of vinyl and turntables.
Nest site (Blogger is being very cross about images, as I post this)
Yesterday, I ran across a link from the Shenandoah National Park website that live-links to a webcam aimed at a falcon nest site. Such a thing should be antithetical to my present leanings. I watched the clouds roll-in for a moment and returned later to finds the falcons briefly at home. Seeing them from a hundred miles away, preening, preparing for their little falcon-errands, was somehow moving.
This led me to wonder if my bout of techno-malaise is perhaps off-base. Is it a vestige of youthful rebellion? Maybe I'm simply being contrary. After all, technology is my friend. It runs the lights, puts stripes in my toothpaste, staves off the end. I hoped for an instant that the question was closed, until I recalled that technology also blackens the sky, blights the earth, and populates mass graves.
Now, as I lord into a big blue pack all of the things I will need to sustain me for a weekend, I am reminded of my first backpacking trip. On that trip I stood at arms length from a red-tailed hawk, who has been with me for the 10 years since. I can still see his feral gaze and smell his wild, murderous musk.
This memory began to lend some clarity to the problem of the scrying box and the distant falcons. Like words, the images of the falcons are signs of natural facts. In total isolation or abstraction, they could be meaningless, even profane. But they are truthful, connected in my mind to something significant, an event that follows and influences me.
I see that the angst against technology is not neigh-saying. Nor does it throw the baby out with the bath. It seems now to be an attempt to replace "What's new?" with "What is best?"