"The Devil Lives In our Phones"

The Trojan Horse of Our Day

. . . Beware the Greeks Inside

A piece appeared recently in the New York Times which is essential reading for all responsible parents.  We always ought to be cautious about pieces of general scaremongering, since it is easy to fall under the influence of wacko conspiracy theories.  We, as Christians, are commanded to reckon ourselves to be soldiers, pressed into service of the King of kings.  It is not becoming to be racked with fear and intimidation.

However, for a long time we have been deeply sceptical about the usefulness of IT.  In fact, there are signs of  it being not a boon, but a curse--unless it is managed carefully. 

The NY Times piece, written by Nellie Bowles, calls our attention to the phenomenon of parents working in the tech world being deeply sceptical, if not fearful, of the impact of electronic devices upon their children.  Consequently, they actively reduce, police, and control their children's access to electronic devices--even while "officially" the companies they work for actively promote these devices and their applications to young children.

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”

Nellie Bowles
New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.  “Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”

Robber Barons: Control Too Strong to Resist

Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers?

Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers?

By Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

 

High-tech corporations have acquired massive power and wealth, dwarfing the might of the robber barons of the past.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.

No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.

In the last two elections, Facebook has sold its user data to Democratic and, apparently more controversially, Republican campaign affiliates. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often been accused of censoring users’ expression according to their own political tastes. Civil libertarians have accused social-media and Internet giants of violating rights of privacy, by monitoring the shopping, travel, eating, and entertainment habits of their customers to the extent that they know where and when Americans travel or communicate with one another.

Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are the world’s five largest companies in terms of stock value. Together they have market capitalization of about 3 trillion dollars, about the net worth of the entire country of Switzerland.

Brave New World

The Difference Between Labour and Slavery

The Age of Technology--that is, our age--has removed so much drudgery from human existence that life is now a much more positive proposition than it was when it was considered cheap.  The age of calculating machines and information processing machines (which we call computers) has replaced much human mindless repetitive work.  

The Luddites amongst us argue that this is a bad thing.  Machines increasingly make man redundant.  Redundant men are unemployed men.  Endlessly efficient machines drive down the costs of human labour; under their realm, machines reduce man, at best, to a latter day serf, etc.

Yet this is not the historical view of technology and machines.  Western society increasingly became mechanized and machine-led so that mankind could come to be more and more  in God's image, more and more human.

Historian Lynn White put it this way:

The humanitarian technology that our modern world has inherited from the Middle Ages was not rooted in economic necessity; for this necessity is inherent in every society, yet has found inventive expression only in the Occident [that is, the West], nurtured in the activist or voluntarist tradition of Western theology.

It is ideas which make necessity conscious.  The labor-saving power-machines of the later Middle Ages were produced by the implicit theological assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality, by an instinctive repugnance towards subjecting any man to a monotonous drudgery which seems less than human in that it requires the exercise neither of intelligence nor of choice.  [Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), p. 22.]

The Benedictine order made a distinction between toil and labour.

Unlocking The Potential in the Creation

Change We Can Believe In

Sheik Yamani once cryptically said, "The age of oil will inevitably come to an end but not for lack of oil."  The Sheik was a smart man who had more than a basic understanding of economics and history.  On this point he was much wiser than most modern politicians, bureaucrats, and academics who show repeatedly that they have very little understanding of markets, economics, and the history of technological development.  Malthusianism remains alive and well.

The Sheik knew what should have been obvious to all adults.  The age of the horse came to an inglorious end, but not because of lack of fecundity in the species.  The age of sail ended, but not for lack of wind.  The age of steam came to an abrupt end, but not for lack of wood.  The age of coal began petering out decades ago, but not for lack of the hard black stuff.  Oil and gas took over.  But the age of both will come to an end as new, cheaper technologies emerge.

One apparently significant (and recent) technological development gives a clue to at least one technological advance that will help make oil redundant: batteries are changing.  Consider the following:

The Church in a Dehumanized Desert

The Prophetic John Stott

John Stott, writing over 30 years ago (in 1982):

It is difficult to imagine the world in the year A.D. 2000, by which time versatile micro-processors are likely to be as common as simple calculators are today.

We should certainly welcome the fact that the silicon chip will transcend human brain-power, as the machine has transcended human muscle-power.

Much less welcome will be the probable reduction of human contact as the new electronic network renders personal relationships ever less necessary.

In such a dehumanized society the fellowship of the local church will become increasingly important, whose members meet one another, and talk and listen to one another in person rather than on screen.

In this human context of mutual love the speaking and hearing of the Word of God is also likely to become more necessary for the preservation of our humanness, not less.

—John R.W. Stott, I Believe in Preaching (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), p. 69.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor,
February 28, 2014

Simplistic Nostrums Don't Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations' World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That's a truly alarming number, because it's hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion - more than a third of the world's total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

Ouch

Jeremy Clarkson Reviews the New Honda Insight

Spare a thought for Honda which must be writing off some investment after the Clarkson kiss of death. The full review was published in The Times.

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit. . . .

There’s more. Normally, Hondas feel as though they have been screwed together by eye surgeons. This one, however, feels as if it’s been made from steel so thin, you could read through it. And the seats, finished in pleblon, are designed specifically, it seems, to ruin your skeleton. This is hairy-shirted eco-ism at its very worst. . . .

In a Prius the electric motor can, though almost never does, power the car on its own. In the Honda the electric motor is designed to “assist” the petrol engine, providing more get-up-and-go when the need arises. The net result is this: in a Prius the transformation from electricity to petrol is subtle. In the Honda there are all sorts of jerks and clunks.

And for what? For sure, you could get 60 or more mpg if you were careful. And that’s not bad for a spacious five-door hatchback. But for the same money you could have a Golf diesel, which will be even more economical. And hasn’t been built out of rice paper to keep costs down.

Of course, I am well aware that there are a great many people in the world who believe that the burning of fossil fuels will one day kill all the Dutch and that something must be done.

They will see the poor ride, the woeful performance, the awful noise and the spine-bending seats as a price worth paying. But what about the eco-cost of building the car in the first place? . . . .

The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars?

At this point you will probably dismiss what I’m saying as the rantings of a petrolhead, and think that I have my head in the sand.

That’s not true. While I have yet to be convinced that man’s 3% contribution to the planet’s greenhouse gases affects the climate, I do recognise that oil is a finite resource and that as it becomes more scarce, the political ramifications could well be dire. I therefore absolutely accept the urgent need for alternative fuels.

But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish. And that pure electric cars, such as the G-Wiz and the Tesla, don’t work at all because they are just too inconvenient.

Since about 1917 the car industry has not had a technological revolution — unlike, say, the world of communications or film. There has never been a 3G moment at Peugeot nor a need to embrace DVD at Nissan. There has been no VHS/Betamax battle between Fiat and Renault.

Car makers, then, have had nearly a century to develop and hone the principles of suck, squeeze, bang, blow. And they have become very good at it.

But now comes the need to throw away the heart of the beast, the internal combustion engine, and start again. And, critically, the first of the new cars with their new power systems must be better than the last of the old ones. Or no one will buy them. That’s a tall order.

And here’s the kicker. That’s exactly what Honda has done with its other eco-car, the Clarity. Instead of using a petrol engine to charge up the electric motor’s batteries, as happens on the Insight, the Clarity uses hydrogen: the most abundant gas in the universe.

The only waste product is water. The car feels like a car. And, best of all, the power it produces is so enormous, it can be used by day to get you to 120mph and by night to run all the electrical appliances in your house. This is not science fiction. There is a fleet of Claritys running around California right now.

There are problems to be overcome. Making hydrogen is a fuel-hungry process, and there is no infrastructure. But Alexander Fleming didn’t look at his mould and think, “Oh dear, no one will put that in their mouth”, and give up.

I would have hoped, therefore, that Honda had diverted every penny it had into making hydrogen work rather than stopping off on the way to make a half-arsed halfway house for fools and madmen.

We wish that Clarkson would be a little more clear and definitive on his likes and dislikes! The metaphor of sitting a dog on a ham slicer invoked an involuntary belly laugh.

As always, underneath the dripping sarcasm and the ability to skewer idiocy at a hundred paces with unerring accuracy, he makes some very serious points. Clarkson understands the reality of market forces. He also understands that behind every free market lies the countless and incalculable preferences of millions of individual people. That is why the market is so powerful. Commerce, if it is to prosper, can only do so in the long run by serving the market--which is to say, it must put its customers first.