On the radio this a.m. I heard a writer talking about his computer and how he did not know how it worked, and, further, he did not know how anything worked in this modern technology dominated world. The interviewer agreed, saying that whenever her computer would not work properly she used to get a ‘computer friend’ to help her out, though now she is more likely to google the problem.
This seems to me to read like a horror story.
Imagine waking up to find that you have been transported (2001: A Space Odyssey) to a mysterious world. Unlike that film, however, this is a world where everything is strange and you do not know how to work it. I mean, e.g. that you cannot even walk through a door because they are locked and have no handle or buttons, and you cannot turn on the tap for water and so on. There is nothing you can do because nothing is simple, like a handle.
Eventually, by a process of accident and exploration you discover that if you stick out your tongue at yourself in the mirror and step on a certain series of tiles on the kitchen floor the cold water will come on. Then you discover that if you whistle a high note, snap your fingers twice, and press a button on the coffee table then the front door will open.
It seems to me that that is a pretty accurate picture of how almost everyone in the technologically developed societies is living now. The only difference is the instruction books are provided so they do not have to find out for themselves how things work. Which is just as well, because in such a world of non-intuitive complexity finding out how things work for oneself is not a real option. When reason and experience and insight will not help you then you are in the position of trying to find a 10 digit code by guess work alone – chance in a million. (You find yourself up against this sort of thing rather a lot in video games. Often they operate by a sort of trickery, so the way forward is a matter of guess work – there is no way you can ‘work it out’.)
One bad problem with this sort of guess work is that you never know whether or not you might be pressing the ‘wrong’ button. That is to say, you might press a button that has things happening that you did not intend, or even pressing buttons that should not be pressed, or not pressed in that order because to do will cause the machine to break down. This is very discouraging of exploration. One is afraid to try things out because one might cause breakdown. This is nightmarishly restrictive. Human beings need to be able to PLAY.
Also, technology has made people helpless to help themselves. When anything goes wrong they have to call in an ‘expert’ to do the repairs. This is a fearful world. That feeling of helplessness; that feeling of unpredictability (elsewhere I decried the determinism of classical physics, but this is the wrong kind of unpredictability); that feeling of having no control whatsoever over things.
I know that many people deny that they live in fear in the modern world. My answer would be that they are either blind, sick fools (and it is a recognised problem among children these days that more and more of them are losing their ‘sense of danger’.), or else, to quote Eowyn from Lord of the Rings, they are no longer aware of their own fears because “use and old age have come to accept them.”
As to living life by instruction books, as I said above, that is a world in which all real possibility of play, and hence of REAL learning and REAL creativity have been lost.
On the other hand, if humans have degenerated so much that they are incapable of autonomy, that they actually NEED instruction books in order to deal with life then they may NEED this technological world: it provides them with crutches, supports their disabilities.