Erich Fromm on Our Relation to Technology

Within the earlier submit, we talked concerning the promises of modern technology and the way, in keeping with Erich Fromm, these haven’t paid off.

Know-how, capitalism and obsolescence

This type of technological progress is especially harmful in combination with capitalism, which naturally results in perverse methods like planned obsolescence: the development of technical gadgets which might be supposed to interrupt a short while after their interval of guarantee is over, in order that the client has to purchase the identical factor once more.

Having grown up within the logic of the capitalist system, most of us do see the purpose: if issues saved working endlessly, there wouldn’t be sufficient demand for them to justify the existence of the factories that make them. However we even have to grasp that we’re not speaking about pottery product of clay or chairs product of pure wooden that can finally decay and be recycled in nature. These items really do preserve for tons of of years, as vintage furnishings retailers and historic vases present in excavations testify. What we’re throwing away with wild abandon are merchandise which might be, for probably the most half, not recyclable: electronics that can leach heavy metals into the atmosphere whereas they decompose; batteries that comprise valuable uncommon earth metals (in 2019, Tesla warned of a shortage of rare earth metals utilized in battery manufacturing, even if these can, really, be recycled); and plastics of every kind that decompose in nature and enter the our personal meals chain within the type of microplastics, now already discovered in lots of water sources and inside our our bodies.

In California, there’s one lightbulb that has been burning since 1901. It now even has its personal Wikipedia page. This proves that lightbulbs, typically a logo for throwaway expertise, might simply final a lifetime – if the businesses that make them didn’t put their income above each buyer comfort and the atmosphere. In the meantime, the lightbulb trade has pushing us for many years in direction of fluorescent, power saving lamps – which is, the place the power is worried, absolutely factor; however these lamps contain mercury and different toxic supplies that once more find yourself within the atmosphere after the lamp’s helpful life is over.

Essentially the most infuriating instance for deliberate obsolescence is what each Apple and Google are doing on the earth of cellphones and tablets. Whereas an iPhone might final a really very long time and be helpful as a telephone for a few years, Apple has deliberately caused the batteries of older phones to fail, thus forcing the purchasers to purchase new ones. Each Apple and Google are commonly releasing new variations of their working programs which might be deliberately breaking compatibility with older telephones: after 5 years, Apple formally stops supporting its personal older {hardware} and even prevents older gadgets from connecting to its providers. Google does the identical, maybe much less clearly, with its frequent updates to Android that go away older telephones unsupported and never lined by safety fixes, finally forcing their house owners to purchase new telephones. None of that is primarily based on any regulation of nature. These corporations might properly create suitable software program they usually may very well be compelled, for instance by governments which might be actually enthusiastic about defending the atmosphere, to offer long-term assist for his or her merchandise. However after all, the identical governments get tax earnings and jobs from these corporations, and nobody has an curiosity in stopping this observe.

Can we management expertise?

There’s a dialogue within the philosophy of expertise that has been occurring for a few years about whether or not expertise forces society to undertake it or whether or not societies can really management their applied sciences. Proponents of a idea known as “technological determinism” or “autonomous expertise” level out that our societies have by no means been profitable in regulating even probably the most harmful applied sciences.

From the car, plastics and nuclear energy to TV, the Web and social media, and now AI, applied sciences have typically had nice damaging results on society: the plastering of countryside with highways, the ensuing dying-off of inside cities and the rise of crime and air pollution, nuclear disasters, Web abuse and dependancy, the disappearance of excessive streets, retailers and public areas because of on-line procuring and now the issues of surveillance, lack of jobs and algorithmic justice. All these inform a really lengthy and complicated story of how we now have failed to control applied sciences in order that they keep helpful to human societies – leaving them as a substitute to take over and develop programs and values of their very own which might be, all too typically, against the values of a sane and wholesome human society.

Focal practices: The rituals of life

Studying Fromm’s expertise criticism immediately leaves one a little bit disenchanted – we really feel that we perceive the purpose that Erich Fromm tries to make about expertise, however his examples do probably not resonate any extra. In spite of everything, Fromm was writing for the world of the 60s and 70s – a much more harmless world than ours, one by which expertise nonetheless appeared to carry some promise for enhancing human life and the place the issues that it causes weren’t but as seen as they’re for us immediately. It was a world with out Fukushima and Chernobyl, a world with out private computer systems, Web and iPhones, with out surveillance cameras, microplastics and oceans dying from overfishing and air pollution. It’s us who’ve actually seen a a lot uglier face of the technological dream than Fromm might have imagined.

One fascinating side of the technological transformation of life is the meaningfulness of what individuals typically name “chores”. Family expertise has, like Fromm says, promised us that utopian family that will do the whole lot itself: machines to clean our dishes, machines to clean our garments, machines to hoover the ground, machines to warmth up our meals inside twenty seconds.

The results of all these machines managing our lives isn’t, as we have been promised, extra freedom. What can we do with the half hour we saved by way of not doing the dishes? What can we accomplish within the hour by which we didn’t cook dinner a meal however had the microwave warmth up a ready-made mess out of the freezer? We now have saved a lot time and what do we actually do with it? We spend it watching cat movies on Youtube or endlessly binge on ten-year-old TV collection on Netflix, feeling extra drained and fed up with the world than if we had really completed one thing significant.

The results of all these machines managing our lives isn’t, as we have been promised, extra freedom. 

Congregating with one’s household across the dinner desk is an historic ritual that goes again to the early ancestors of people: in a collapse South Africa, archeologists found evidence of a Homo Erectus cooking fireplace that could be a million years outdated. The ritual of cooking is so vital to our lives, that every one world wide human beings have believed in gods that have been specifically associated with the hearth: the traditional Greek Hestia, the Norse Frigg, the Korean Gashin, the Ainu-Japanese Kamui Fuchi, and Zao Jun, the kitchen God of the Chinese language. Our fashionable tradition of comfort and pace has lowered that historic tradition to twenty seconds and a ding of the microwave – however is that this actually factor? There’s a magnificence within the outdated rituals of household life, in consuming home-made meals collectively, even in cultivating the fundamental abilities of constructing one’s personal bread or yogurt, which doesn’t take a lot time in any respect.

Properly, sure, they do take a while. Nevertheless it’s form of time. Time spent exercising one’s abilities and talents, and producing a piece, a factor, a meal of which one will be proud. Having baked loaf of bread isn’t the identical as getting one of many squishy, sugary, white, cellophane-wrapped, lifeless issues from the grocery store and even popping a bag of dough into the automated bread maker. A house-made loaf is a factor of magnificence, its thick crust, nonetheless sizzling, lined with melting butter, connecting one to a convention hundreds of years outdated.

There isn’t a achievement in having a bread machine bake a loaf of bread, or a yogurt incubator make a cup of yogurt. However make it your self, and you’ll really feel the satisfaction of getting, in a small method, reclaimed a few of your humanity that this society had taken away from you. After which, take into account this: baking one’s personal bread doesn’t require computerised electronics, plastic wrapping, a freezer, aluminum foil: an entire bag of rubbish that can instantly go from store to landfill.

And so we’ll have spent an hour baking a bread. However wouldn’t this be an hour well-spent? Wouldn’t this be a extra significant use of these sixty minutes than watching one thing on TV that we’re not even enthusiastic about, or enjoying Sudoku on a telephone?

For some time, my household cherished to look at Ruth Goodman’s re-enactment of outdated occasions in a number of educational BBC series. In fact, residing in Tudor occasions was arduous, with out fashionable medicines, with no safe meals provide, on the mercy of the climate and the seasons. However what one additionally realises is how significant life should have regarded to these individuals again then, and the way a lot satisfaction they should have received from simply residing each day, exercising their abilities and their creativity and reworking their little world throughout them: planting, harvesting, cooking, tending to the hearth, making their very own garments, even constructing their very own homes with the work of their very own palms. In our fashionable world, I panic when the faucet begins to drip, as a result of this implies a name to the plumber, a wait for 2 weeks till he can lastly grant me an viewers, and fifty {dollars} gone simply to get him to take a look on the factor.

In the event you’d like to present Fromm’s concepts a strive, you possibly can begin by searching for alternatives to reclaim a few of these historic abilities. The data is all there, at no cost, within the type of limitless web sites, blogs and Youtube movies. You possibly can study to bake bread on Youtube, to make cleaning soap from ashes and outdated oil, to make yogurt, ice-cream and cheese and your own wine and mead. You possibly can contain the remainder of your loved ones in these duties. Youngsters love experimenting, cooking and enjoying, and I’ve but to fulfill somebody who doesn’t admire a contemporary loaf of bread or doesn’t get pleasure from a cup of home-made yogurt with honey.

So go and have an incredible, inventive weekend and luxuriate in rediscovering a few of the abilities that when all of us had! Abilities that, removed from being “chores,” could maintain the keys to a extra completely satisfied, extra fulfilled, extra significant life for all of us.

Return to The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Thanks for studying! Do you agree? Do you observe some these abilities your self or with your loved ones? Inform me in a remark!

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