Most people these days are so dependent on electronic devices that their entire world would be devastated by the experience we had. For all the talk about how e-books and the "cloud" and iTunes is liberating people, it really seems to me that all it is doing is making people weaker than ever.
This has been an ongoing concern and argument of my own for quite some time now as someone from inside the IT industry. If you look close enough you find that desire to strip the technology dependence back only to the point of tool for people with a lot of the philosophy and advice I post around here. Minimalism to the point of depriving yourself of physical, stand-alone, non-electronic tools fosters an innate dependence upon others to provide the resources necessary for you to be independent.
Technology is a great thing in some regards, as it lets us do far more work in less time through automation and the substitution of physical might with electro-mechanical ingenuity. However, we've lost sight of how much of a double-edged sword it is, and how the tools themselves are dependent upon not just the rest of society to enable you to use them, but the elite few who manage and control those core resources in the first place. Independence is traded for convenience, and the price is ar higher than most people realize. When you buy electronics, all you see are these neat little engineered small products that enable you to "save" your time and make life easier, and the electricity usage is just this magical little source of convenience that powers it all. The exhaust pipe and the human cost for this convenient stuff is hidden from us here in the developed nations. We've devalued labor and commoditized new technology so greatly through previous generations of technology, that most of us would rather buy another computer than pay someone to fix the one you already own simply because it would cost more money to pay the labor of a specialist than throw away and start fresh... but there's deeply hidden costs to this behavior that aren't immediately seen.
What about the lives of the people who have to mine the minerals that make these electronics work in the first place? How many people realize that most of the electronics you're using today probably has at least some raw materials pulled out of the Congo? Where do you think these things actually go when they're broken and you "do the right thing" by handing the equipment over to a recycler? This stuff can't really be recycled due to the nature and construction of it, not safely. That's the rub of fusing plastics with metals in construction. What about the energy that powers your equipment? It's a myth that any one form of energy can be "clean" as they all have hidden pollution costs to create, those exhaust pipes are just hidden in areas you don't frequent or have to see. Just for the sake of perspective, there was a report a little while back that actually demonstrated that
the net environmental and energy costs of streaming video was nearly equal to its consumption through physical media.
Say what you will about capitalism and the free market setting "appropriate" value for goods, but it's inescapable to me that this volume and scale have simply devalued
life in total as we've been given items that foster an easier and less laborious lifestyle, and are not appropriately priced for the actual global and societal cost these things actually come at.
I don't point out this stuff to make anyone feel guilty about their privilege or their habits... or to advocate abandoning technology. I point out these things to make people more cognizant of how they use these tools, especially when these tools are being used for such frivolous things. Be aware of how amazing and valuable these devices truly are, and treat them with the appropriate level of respect they deserve. Re-claim and recognize the true value of the physical good that requires nothing but you to operate. Finally, try not to become overly dependent upon technology within your life, because you never know if they will always be available to you to use.
