This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

While you live and sleep, technology is conspiring and gaining on you. Whatever you used to know, they don’t do it like that anymore. A quick tour through a second-hand store, exploring the 90s technology. Cordless phones with huge antennas, CD players, video games and VHS tapes. Now imagine it’s not just consumer technology, but everything in the world. I saw a washer -dryer that was Wi-Fi enabled. The machine would message you with a text and tell you the laundry was done. That means, my phone is going to “ding” twice, telling me to get up and answer the message from the clothes dryer.

How is that technology helping me to lead my best life? I can guesstimate the washer-dryer cycle. I don’t need to be reminded. I don’t need to message myself to email myself and add the dryer to my email contacts. Life teaches its own lessons. If we leave wet clothes in the washer, they’ll smell. If we leave them in the dryer, they’ll wrinkle and defeat the whole process. I guess what I’m asking; isn’t it just easier to remember some stuff yourself?

The late recently deplaned Spirit Airlines charged you to print a boarding pass. Here’s your ticket to Pittsburgh; if you want an actual ticket it will be extra. If you wanna do it on your phone, fine, dandy, but don’t penalize me for being so archaic as to want some in exchange for these actual dollars I’m handing you. But that is part of the reason Spirit is gone. They took the low-cost airline thing too far, no pun intended. Supplanting technology for customer service. All that glitters is not gold.

How many of you will press the button for service in a store famous the world over for poor service? The question just sort of answers itself. I need a toothbrush attachment (brand specific) You can buy them at Walmart for around $25, but they are behind Plexiglas, and if you want one. You have to push the big red button and wait. Then someday, if you keep on pushing that big red button, eventually, maybe, someone will come to help you. “I’ve never seen it done myself, but I reckon it must be possible. If you order it online, it’s such a small dollar amount they’ll kill you on freight. Why can’t I just buy a toothbrush? Capitalism was supposed to make my life easier. I call it the Walmart museum; things to just walk by and remember when. “When I was a boy, you could actually just throw that into your basket!”

But they’re fighting crime. These are the anti-theft devices that eliminate over-the-counter sales and shoplifting entirely. By cutting back on floor staff, the stores have a shoplifting problem. So as a cure, they institute anti-theft devices which eliminates most shoplifting and legitimate sales. If your store is famous around the globe for poor to non-existent service. Don’t put items behind Plexiglass and ask me to ring a bell and stand there like a dope. While my fellow Walmart shoppers snicker at me under their breath, asking. “What does he think he’s doing? Does he really think someone is coming? Is he a foreigner? From a third-world country? Doesn’t he know? Maybe he’s just lost and confused?” Just how bad would you need that toothbrush, before just giving up?

I had a 1965 Mustang once; if it broke, I fixed it. If it needed a new water pump, I just put one on and went on my way. Today’s cars, I wouldn’t know where to start. Mercedes pays technicians an hour for “opening” the engine. That means taking off all the plastic parts that keeps you from reaching the engine itself. It all got away from me way back in the 1990s with oxygen sensors and computer control. The new cars are faster, cleaner, and safer, but less durable and much more expensive to own and operate.

At first, I thought it was just me being fifteen or twenty years behind the technological curve. When I saw a man ten years my junior, ten years behind the curve. It’s everybody! Technology won’t wait. We could all be left behind in a world we don’t understand anymore. For $40, Walmart will come into your house and put away your groceries. Of course, they won’t be on hand to ask where they put something when you can’t find it.  “Ah, for the good old days of putting away your own groceries. I remember when!” Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I’m not paying anyone to organize my kitchen. Even if they do have that high-caliber, intensive, and well-known Walmart training. “Who let the cat out?”

It’s not that the good ole days were better; it’s just that the pace of change was slower and easier to manage. Personal confidence was higher. If their car broke, they fixed it. If their washing machine or dryer broke, they fixed it. Now, the washer follows me on Substack, and the dryer wants me to join its Facebook group.

The big issue on Wall Street these days, are AI data centers going to become the next big thing? Supercomputers, super- computing their little hearts out, ever faster and faster, at rates undreamed of just a decade before. But because of the size and complexity of the faster and faster date centers, they are ungodly expensive to build and operate. But surprise! That same high-tech data center’s technology will become obsolete in five to seven years, needing completely new technology, and on and on, amen. Until the cost of the technology itself outstrips the ability to afford to use it.

A creeping fog of technology pushing control further away from the hands of those who use it. Most of us control reset or control Alt, Delete. Living in a machine universe as a biological proxy. I’m marked like the cows in the fields and recorded. The cameras follow me to work and follow me home. It’s for your own good, you know! You can’t fix your car, and you can’t fix the vacuum cleaner anymore, and you can’t fix your government either. How can you fix something you can’t understand that’s not made to be repaired?

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”

― Mark Twain