My Tech Made Me Do It

"Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, & how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them..” Farhad Manjoo

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A scan of more discerning and thoughtful commentary will turn up a recent chorus of voices (like Farhad's) warning against the agenda of the tech that dominates our daily lives. I'm not talking about the voices yelling at us to chuck our cell phones and spend more time on our front porches (even though I love a good front porch discussion). There will always be those who wish we could go back 20 years to a time where life was seemingly easier to understand and control. 

No, I'm talking about a growing realization that our technology has a preference. The way it is wired wants to affirm certain patterns and discourage others. Our apps and gadgets are training us to adapt to them rather than the other way around. This is only more obvious as our tech gets circuitry wired with machine learning and AI. 

But besides the obligatory naysayer to counter the glowing technologist in an interview, we give very little space to consider the preferences of our technology. So let me highlight just three things that our tech wants us to do that may not be in our best interest:

1. Go Fast: Our tech values speed and efficiency above truth and context. Whenever it has to make a choice, it will always choose what it values and push us to do the same.
2. Stay Connected: Technology gets its power from being on all the time and accessible at all times. It only exerts power over us when we are connected to it and thus it pushes us to stay connected.
3. Want More: Part of technology's power is the fact that it has been able to deliver incrementally more power/speed/access/information over these past years. Tech thrives on wanting more and making others desire more at any cost. The more we want, the more power tech has as it pushes the limits of processing power and data aggregation. 

We could probably go on to name 20 more things that our tech values that impact our behavior. But these three make the point. 

It is our job to be discerning. We must realize that technologies' values are probably not the values that should guide and govern our lives. And at that moment we must ask the deeper questions about what values we have and how we hold ourselves accountable to live by them. 

In the end, "My tech made me do it," is probably not going to be a good excuse!