Argumentum ad Novitatem

I am a late adopter. Most of my friends are early adopters. This puts me at something of a discord with them on a fairly regular basis.

It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.

But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).

Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.

There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?

Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.

To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.

Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.

Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?

We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.

The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.

So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.

And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.

But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.

Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.

Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.

Let us remember that new is not the same as good.