There’s a line of verse I’m always coming back to, and it’s been on my mind more than usual these last few months:
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
It’s the second to last line of one of Robert Frost’s
earliest and best poems, a sonnet called “Mowing.” He wrote it just after the
turn of the twentieth century, when he was a young man, in his twenties, with a
young family. He was working as a farmer, raising chickens and tending a few
apple trees on a small plot of land his grandfather had bought for him in
Derry, New Hampshire. It was a difficult time in his life. He had little money
and few prospects. He had dropped out of two colleges, Dartmouth and Harvard,
without earning a degree. He had been unsuccessful in a succession of petty
jobs. He was sickly. He had nightmares. His firstborn child, a son, had died of
cholera at the age of three. His marriage was troubled. “Life was peremptory,”
Frost would later recall, “and threw me into confusion.”
But it was during those lonely years in Derry that he came into his own as a writer and an artist. Something about farming—the long, repetitive days, the solitary work, the closeness to nature’s beauty and carelessness—inspired him. The burden of labor eased the burden of life. “If I feel timeless and immortal it is from having lost track of time for five or six years there,” he would write of his stay in Derry. “We gave up winding clocks. Our ideas got untimely from not taking newspapers for a long period. It couldn’t have been more perfect if we had planned it or foreseen what we were getting into.” In the breaks between chores on the farm, Frost somehow managed to write most of the poems for his first book, A Boy’s Will; about half the poems for his second book, North of Boston; and a good number of other poems that would find their way into subsequent volumes.
“Mowing,” from A Boy’s Will, was the greatest of his Derry lyrics. It was the poem
in which he found his distinctive voice: plainspoken and conversational, but
also sly and dissembling. (To really understand Frost—to really understand
anything, including yourself—requires as much mistrust as trust.) As with many
of his best works, “Mowing” has an enigmatic, almost hallucinatory quality that
belies the simple and homely picture it paints—in this case of a man cutting a
field of grass for hay. The more you read the poem, the deeper and stranger it
becomes:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
We rarely look to poetry for
instruction anymore, but here we see how a poet’s scrutiny of the world can be
more subtle and discerning than a scientist’s. Frost understood the meaning of the
mental state we now call “flow” long before psychologists and neurobiologists
delivered the empirical evidence. His mower is not an airbrushed peasant, a rustic
caricature. He’s a farmer, a man doing a hard job on a still, hot summer day.
He’s not dreaming of “idle hours” or “easy gold.” His mind is on his work—the
bodily rhythm of the cutting, the weight of the tool in his hands, the stalks
piling up around him. He’s not seeking some greater truth beyond the work. The
work is the truth.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
There are mysteries in that line.
Its power lies in its refusal to mean anything more or less than what it says.
But it seems clear that what Frost is getting at, in the line and in the poem,
is the centrality of action to both living and knowing. Only through work that
brings us into the world do we approach a true understanding of existence, of
“the fact.” It’s not an understanding that can be put into words. It can’t be
made explicit. It’s nothing more than a whisper. To hear it, you need to get
very near its source. Labor, whether of the body or the mind, is more than a
way of getting things done. It’s a form of contemplation, a way of seeing the
world face-to-face rather than through a glass. Action un-mediates perception,
gets us close to the thing itself. It binds us to the earth, Frost implies, as
love binds us to one another. The antithesis of transcendence, work puts us in
our place.
Frost is a poet of labor. He’s always coming back to those revelatory moments when the active self blurs into the surrounding world—when, as he would write in another poem, “the work is play for mortal stakes.” Richard Poirier, in his book Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, described with great sensitivity the poet’s view of the essence and essentialness of hard work: “Any intense labor enacted in his poetry, like mowing or apple-picking, can penetrate to the visions, dreams, myths that are at the heart of reality, constituting its articulate form for those who can read it with a requisite lack of certainty and an indifference to merely practical possessiveness.” The knowledge gained through such efforts may be as shadowy and elusive as a dream, but “in its mythic propensities, the knowledge is less ephemeral than are the apparently more practical results of labor, like food or money.”
When we embark on a task, with our bodies or our minds, on our own or alongside others, we usually have a practical goal in sight. Our eyes are looking ahead to the product of our work—a store of hay for feeding livestock, perhaps. But it’s through the work itself that we come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our situation. The mowing, not the hay, is what matters most.
* * *
Frost is not romanticizing some distant, pre-technological past. Although he was dismayed by those who allowed themselves to become “bigoted in reliance / On the gospel of modern science,” he felt a kinship with scientists and inventors. As a poet, he shared with them a common spirit and pursuit. They were all explorers of the mysteries of earthly life, excavators of meaning from matter. They were all engaged in work that, as Poirier described it, “can extend the capability of human dreaming.” For Frost, the greatest value of “the fact”—whether apprehended in the world or expressed in a work of art or made manifest in a tool or other invention—lay in its ability to expand the scope of individual knowing and hence open new avenues of perception, action, and imagination. In the long poem “Kitty Hawk,” written near the end of his life, he celebrated the Wright brothers’ flight “Into the unknown, / Into the sublime.” In making their own “pass / At the infinite,” the brothers also made the experience of flight, and the sense of unboundedness it provides, possible for all of us.
Technology is as crucial to the
work of knowing as it is to the work of production. The human body, in its
native, unadorned state, is a feeble thing. It’s constrained in its strength,
its dexterity, its sensory range, its calculative prowess, its memory. It
quickly reaches the limits of what it can do. But the body encompasses a mind
that can imagine, desire, and plan for achievements the body alone can’t
fulfill. This tension between what the body can accomplish and what the mind
can envision is what gave rise to and continues to propel and shape technology.
It’s the spur for humankind’s extension of itself and elaboration of nature.
Technology isn’t what makes us “posthuman” or “transhuman,” as some writers and
scholars these days suggest. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our
nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the
world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both
spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.
One of the many jobs the human body
is unsuited to is cutting grass. (Try it if you don’t believe me.) What allows
the mower to do his work, what allows him to be a mower, is the tool he wields,
his scythe. The mower is, and has to be, technologically enhanced. The tool
makes the mower, and the mower’s skill in using the tool remakes the world for
him. The world becomes a place in which he can act as a mower, in which he can
lay the swale in rows. This idea, which on the surface may sound trivial or
even tautological, points to something elemental about life and the formation
of the self.
“The body is our general means of
having a world,” wrote the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945
masterwork Phenomenology of Perception.
Our physical makeup—the fact that we walk upright on two legs at a certain
height, that we have a pair of hands with opposable thumbs, that we have eyes which
see in a particular way, that we have a certain tolerance for heat and cold—determines
our perception of the world in a way that precedes, and then molds, our
conscious thoughts about the world. We see mountains as lofty not because
mountains are lofty but because our perception of their form and height is
shaped by our own stature. We see a stone as, among other things, a weapon
because the particular construction of our hand and arm enables us to pick it
up and throw it. Perception, like cognition, is embodied.
It follows that whenever we gain a new talent, we not only change our bodily capacities, we change the world. The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we master, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities. It becomes more interesting, and being in it becomes more rewarding. This may be what Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who rebelled against René Descartes’ division of mind and body, was getting at when he wrote, “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body can be disposed in a great many ways.” John Edward Huth, a physics professor at Harvard, testifies to the regeneration that attends the mastery of a skill. A decade ago, inspired by Inuit hunters and other experts in natural wayfinding, he undertook “a self-imposed program to learn navigation through environmental clues.” Through months of rigorous outdoor observation and practice, he taught himself how to read the nighttime and daytime skies, interpret the movements of clouds and waves, decipher the shadows cast by trees. “After a year of this endeavor,” he recalled in a recent essay, “something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars.” Huth’s enriched perception of the environment, gained through a kind of “primal empiricism,” struck him as being “akin to what people describe as spiritual awakenings.”
Technology, by enabling us to act
in ways that go beyond our bodily limits, also alters our perception of the
world and what the world signifies to us. Technology’s transformative power is
most apparent in tools of discovery, from the microscope and the particle
accelerator of the scientist to the canoe and the spaceship of the explorer,
but the power is there in all tools, including the ones we use in our everyday
lives. Whenever an instrument allows us to cultivate a new talent, the world
becomes a different and more intriguing place, a setting of even greater
opportunity. To the possibilities of nature are added the possibilities of
culture. “Sometimes,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “the signification aimed at cannot
be reached by the natural means of the body. We must, then, construct an
instrument, and the body projects a cultural world around itself.” The value of
a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but
what it produces in us. At its best, technology opens fresh ground. It gives us
a world that is at once more understandable to our senses and better suited to
our intentions—a world in which we’re more at home. Used thoughtfully and with
skill, a tool becomes much more than a means of production or consumption. It
becomes a means of experience. It gives us more ways to lead rich and engaged lives.
Look more closely at the scythe.
It’s a simple tool, but an ingenious one. Invented around 500 BC, by the Romans
or the Gauls, it consists of a curved blade, forged of iron or steel, attached
to the end of a long wooden pole, or snath. The snath typically has, about
halfway down its length, a small wooden grip, or nib, that makes it possible to
grasp and swing the implement with two hands. The scythe is a variation on the
much older sickle, a similar but short-handled cutting tool that was invented
in the Stone Age and came to play an essential role in the early development of
agriculture and, in turn, of civilization. What made the scythe a momentous
innovation in its own right is that its long snath allowed a farmer or other
laborer to cut grass at ground level while standing upright. Hay or grain could
be harvested, or a pasture cleared, more quickly than before. Agriculture
leaped forward.
The scythe enhanced the
productivity of the worker in the field, but its benefit went beyond what could
be measured in yield. The scythe was a congenial tool, far better suited to the
bodily work of mowing than the sickle had been. Rather than stooping or
squatting, the farmer could walk with a natural gait and use both his hands, as
well as the full strength of his torso, in his job. The scythe served as both
an aid and an invitation to the skilled work it enabled. We see in its form a
model for technology on a human scale, for tools that extend the productive
capabilities of society without circumscribing the individual’s scope of action
and perception. Indeed, as Frost makes clear in “Mowing,” the scythe
intensifies its user’s involvement with and apprehension of the world. The
mower swinging a scythe does more, but he also knows more. Despite outward
appearances, the scythe is a tool of the mind as well as the body.
Not all tools are so congenial. Some deter us from skilled action. The technologies of computerization and automation that hold such sway over us today rarely invite us into the world or encourage us to develop new talents that enlarge our perceptions and expand our possibilities. They mostly have the opposite effect. They’re designed to be disinviting. They pull us away from the world. That’s a consequence not only of prevailing design practices, which place ease and efficiency above all other concerns, but also of the fact that, in our personal lives, the computer, particularly in the form of the smartphone, has become a media device, its software painstakingly programmed to grab and hold our attention. As most people know from experience, the computer screen is intensely compelling, not only for the conveniences it offers but also for the many diversions it provides. There’s always something going on, and we can join in at any moment with the slightest of effort. Yet the screen, for all its enticements and stimulations, is an environment of sparseness—fast-moving, efficient, clean, but revealing only a shadow of the world.
That’s true even of the most meticulously crafted simulations of space that we find in virtual-reality applications such as games, architectural models, three-dimensional maps, and the video-meeting tools used to mimic classrooms, conference rooms, and cocktail parties. Artificial renderings of space may provide stimulation to our eyes and to a lesser degree our ears, but they tend to starve our other senses—touch, smell, taste—and greatly restrict the movements of our bodies. A study of rodents, published in Science in 2013, indicated that the brain cells used in navigation are much less active when animals make their way through computer-generated landscapes than when they traverse the real world. “Half of the neurons just shut up,” reported one of the researchers, UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta. He believes that the drop-off in mental activity likely stems from the lack of “proximal cues”—environmental smells, sounds, and textures that provide clues to location—in digital simulations of space. “A map is not the territory it represents,” the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously remarked, and a computer rendering is not the territory it represents either. When we enter the virtual world, we’re required to shed much of our body. That doesn’t free us; it emaciates us.
The world in turn is made less
meaningful. As we adapt to our streamlined environment, we render ourselves
incapable of perceiving what the world offers its most ardent inhabitants. We
travel blindfolded. The result is existential impoverishment, as nature and
culture withdraw their invitations to act and to perceive. The self can only
thrive, can only grow, when it encounters and overcomes “resistance from
surroundings,” wrote the American pragmatist John Dewey in Art as Experience. “An environment that was always and everywhere
congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to
growth as sure as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. Impulsion
forever boosted on its forward way would run its course thoughtless, and dead
to emotion.”
Ours may be a time of material comfort and technological wonder, but it’s also a time of aimlessness and gloom. During the first decade of this century, the number of Americans taking prescription drugs to treat depression or anxiety rose by nearly a quarter. One in five adults now regularly takes such medications. Many also take sleep aids such as Ambien. The suicide rate among middle-age Americans increased by nearly 30 percent over the same ten years, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 10 percent of American schoolchildren, and nearly 20 percent of high school–age boys, have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and two-thirds of that group take drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to treat the condition. The current pandemic has only exacerbated the discontent.
The reasons for our malaise are many and only dimly understood. But one of them may be that through the pursuit of a frictionless existence, we’ve succeeded in turning the landscape of our lives into a barren place. Drugs that numb the nervous system provide a way to rein in our vital, animal sensorium, to shrink our being to a size that better suits our constricted environs.
* * *
Frost’s sonnet also contains, as one of its many whispers, a warning about technology’s ethical hazards. There’s a brutality to the mower’s scythe. It indiscriminately cuts down flowers—those tender, pale orchises—along with the stalks of grass. It frightens innocent animals, like the bright green snake. If technology embodies our dreams, it also embodies other, less benign qualities in our makeup, such as our will to power and the arrogance and insensitivity that accompany it. Frost returns to this theme a little later in A Boy’s Will, in a second lyric about cutting hay, “The Tuft of Flowers.” The poem’s narrator comes upon a freshly mown field and, while following the flight of a passing butterfly with his eyes, discovers in the midst of the cut grass a small cluster of flowers, “a leaping tongue of bloom” that “the scythe had spared”:
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of us to him,
But from sheer morning gladness to the brim.
Working with a tool is never just a practical matter, Frost is telling us, with characteristic delicacy. It always entails moral choices and has moral consequences. It’s up to us, as users and makers of tools, to humanize technology, to aim its cold blade wisely. That requires vigilance and care.
The scythe is still employed in
subsistence farming in many parts of the world. But it has no place on the
modern farm, the development of which, like the development of the modern
factory, office, and home, has required ever-more complex and efficient
equipment. The threshing machine was invented in the 1780s, the mechanical
reaper appeared around 1835, the baler came a few years after that, and the
combine harvester began to be produced commercially toward the end of the
nineteenth century. The pace of technological advance has only accelerated in
the decades since, and today the trend is reaching its logical conclusion with
the computerization of agriculture. The working of the soil, which Thomas
Jefferson saw as the most vigorous and virtuous of occupations, is being off-loaded
almost entirely to machines. Farmhands are being replaced by “drone tractors”
and other robotic systems that, using sensors, satellite signals, and software,
plant seeds, fertilize and weed fields, harvest and package crops, and milk
cows and tend other livestock. In development are robo-shepherds that guide
flocks through pastures. Even if scythes still whispered in the fields of the
industrial farm, no one would be around to hear them.
The congeniality of hand tools
encourages us to take responsibility for their use. Because we sense the tools
as extensions of our bodies, parts of ourselves, we have little choice but to
be intimately involved in the ethical choices they present. The scythe doesn’t
choose to slash or spare the flowers; the mower does. As we become more expert
in the use of a tool, our sense of responsibility for it naturally strengthens.
To the novice mower, a scythe may feel like a foreign object in the hands; to
the accomplished mower, hands and scythe become one thing. Talent tightens the
bond between an instrument and its user. This feeling of physical and ethical
entanglement doesn’t have to go away as technologies become more complex. In
reporting on his historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Charles
Lindbergh spoke of his plane and himself as if they were a single being: “We have made this flight across the
ocean, not I or it.” The airplane was a complicated system encompassing many
components, but to a skilled pilot it still had the intimate quality of a hand
tool. The love that lays the swale in rows is also the love that parts the
clouds for the stick-and-rudder man.
Automation weakens the bond between
tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because
they ask so little of us. They hide their workings in secret code. They resist
any involvement of the operator beyond the bare minimum. They discourage the
development of skillfulness in their use. Automation ends up having an
anesthetizing effect. We no longer feel our tools as parts of ourselves. In a renowned
1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” the psychologist and engineer J. C. R.
Licklider described the shift in our relation to technology well. “In the
man-machine systems of the past,” he wrote, “the human operator supplied the
initiative, the direction, the integration, and the criterion. The mechanical
parts of the systems were mere extensions, first of the human arm, then of the
human eye.” The introduction of the computer changed all that. “‘Mechanical
extension’ has given way to replacement of men, to automation, and the men who
remain are there more to help than to be helped.” The more automated everything
gets, the easier it becomes to see technology as a kind of implacable, alien
force that lies beyond our control and influence. Attempting to alter the path
of its development seems futile. We press the on switch and follow the
programmed routine.
To adopt such a submissive posture, however understandable it may be, is to shirk our responsibility for managing progress. A robotic harvesting machine may have no one in the driver’s seat, but it is every bit as much a product of conscious human thought as a humble scythe is. We may not incorporate the machine into our brain maps, as we do the hand tool, but on an ethical level the machine still operates as an extension of our will. Its intentions are our intentions. If a robot scares a bright green snake (or worse), we’re still to blame. We shirk a deeper responsibility as well: that of overseeing the conditions for the construction of the self. As computer systems and software applications come to play an ever-larger role in shaping our lives and the world, we have an obligation to be more, not less, involved in decisions about their design and use—before progress forecloses our options. We should be careful about what we make.
If that sounds naive or hopeless,
it’s because we have been misled by a metaphor. We’ve defined our relation with
technology not as that of body and limb or even that of sibling and sibling but
as that of master and slave. The idea goes way back. It took hold at the dawn
of Western philosophical thought, emerging first with the ancient Athenians.
Aristotle, in discussing the operation of households at the beginning of his Politics, argued that slaves and tools
are essentially equivalent, the former acting as “animate instruments” and the
latter as “inanimate instruments” in the service of the master of the house. If
tools could somehow become animate, Aristotle posited, they would be able to
substitute directly for the labor of slaves. “There is only one condition on
which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing
slaves,” he mused, anticipating the arrival of computer automation and even
machine learning. “This condition would be that each [inanimate] instrument
could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation.”
It would be “as if a shuttle should weave itself, and a plectrum should do its
own harp-playing.”
The conception of tools as slaves
has colored our thinking ever since. It informs society’s recurring dream of
emancipation from toil. “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull
labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant
conditions, must be done by machinery,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. “On
mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world
depends.” John Maynard Keynes, in a 1930 essay, predicted that mechanical
slaves would free humankind from “the
struggle for subsistence” and propel us to “our destination of economic bliss.”
In 2013, Mother Jones
columnist Kevin Drum declared that “a robotic paradise of leisure and
contemplation eventually awaits us.” By 2040, he forecast, our computer
slaves—“they never get tired, they’re never ill-tempered, they never make
mistakes”—will have rescued us from labor and delivered us into a new Eden.
“Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video
games. It’s up to us.”
With its roles reversed, the
metaphor also informs society’s nightmares about technology. As we become
dependent on our technological slaves, the thinking goes, we turn into slaves
ourselves. From the eighteenth century on, social critics have routinely portrayed
factory machinery as forcing workers into bondage. “Masses of labourers,” wrote
Marx and Engels in their Communist
Manifesto, “are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.” Today, people
complain all the time about feeling like slaves to their appliances and
gadgets. “Smart devices are sometimes empowering,” observed The Economist in “Slaves to the
Smartphone,” an article published in 2012. “But for most people the servant has
become the master.” More dramatically still, the idea of a robot uprising, in
which computers with artificial intelligence transform themselves from our
slaves to our masters, has for a century been a central theme in dystopian
fantasies about the future. The very word “robot,” coined by a science fiction
writer in 1920, comes from robota, a
Czech term for servitude.
The master-slave metaphor, in
addition to being morally fraught, distorts the way we look at technology. It
reinforces the sense that our tools are separate from ourselves, that our
instruments have an agency independent of our own. We start to judge our
technologies not on what they enable us to do but rather on their intrinsic
qualities as products—their cleverness, their efficiency, their novelty, their
style. We choose a tool because it’s new or it’s cool or it’s fast, not because
it brings us more fully into the world and expands the ground of our
experiences and perceptions. We become mere consumers of technology.
The metaphor encourages society to
take a simplistic and fatalistic view of technology and progress. If we assume
that our tools act as slaves on our behalf, always working in our best
interest, then any attempt to place limits on technology becomes hard to
defend. Each advance grants us greater freedom and takes us a stride closer to,
if not utopia, then at least the best of all possible worlds. Any misstep, we
tell ourselves, will be quickly corrected by subsequent innovations. If we just
let progress do its thing, it will find remedies for the problems it creates.
“Technology is not neutral but serves as an overwhelming positive force in
human culture,” writes one pundit, expressing the self-serving Silicon Valley
ideology that in recent years has gained wide currency. “We have a moral
obligation to increase technology because it increases opportunities.” The
sense of moral obligation strengthens with the advance of automation, which,
after all, provides us with the most animate of instruments, the slaves that,
as Aristotle anticipated, are most capable of releasing us from our labors.
The belief in technology as a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force is seductive. It allows us to feel optimistic about the future while relieving us of responsibility for that future. It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.” But, he hastens to add, “it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.” Being freed up sounds a lot more pleasant than being fired.
There’s a callousness to such
grandiose futurism. As history reminds us, high-flown rhetoric about using
technology to liberate workers often masks a contempt for labor. It strains
credulity to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings
and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast
wealth-redistribution scheme that would be necessary to fund the
self-actualizing leisure-time pursuits of the jobless multitudes. Even if
society were to come up with some magic spell, or magic algorithm, for
equitably parceling out the spoils of automation, there’s good reason to doubt
whether anything resembling the “economic bliss” imagined by Keynes would
ensue.
In a prescient passage in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
observed that if automation’s utopian promise were actually to pan out, the
result would probably feel less like paradise than like a cruel practical joke.
The whole of modern society, she wrote, has been organized as “a laboring
society,” where working for pay, and then spending that pay, is the way people
define themselves and measure their worth. Most of the “higher and more
meaningful activities” revered in the distant past have been pushed to the
margin or forgotten, and “only solitary individuals are left who consider what
they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living.” For
technology to fulfill humankind’s abiding “wish to be liberated from labor’s
‘toil and trouble’ ” at this point would be perverse. It would cast us deeper
into a purgatory of malaise. What automation confronts us with, Arendt
concluded, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is,
without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.”
Utopianism, she understood, is a form of self-delusion.
* * *
A while back, I had a chance meeting on the campus of a small, liberal arts college with a freelance photographer who was working on an assignment for the school. He was standing under a tree, waiting for some uncooperative clouds to get out of the way of the sun. I noticed he had a large-format film camera set up on a bulky tripod—it was hard to miss, as it looked almost absurdly old-fashioned—and I asked him why he was still using film. He told me that he had eagerly embraced digital photography a few years earlier. He had replaced his film cameras and his darkroom with digital cameras and a computer running the latest image-processing software. But after a few months, he switched back. It wasn’t that he was dissatisfied with the operation of the equipment or the resolution or accuracy of the images. It was that the way he went about his work had changed.
The constraints inherent in taking
and developing pictures on film—the expense, the toil, the uncertainty—had
encouraged him to work slowly when he was on a shoot, with deliberation,
thoughtfulness, and a deep, physical sense of presence. Before he took a
picture, he would compose the shot in his mind, attending to the scene’s light,
color, framing, and form. He would wait patiently for the right moment to
release the shutter. With a digital camera, he could work faster. He could take
a slew of images, one after the other, and then use his computer to sort
through them and crop and tweak the most promising ones. The act of composition
took place after a photo was taken. The change felt intoxicating at first. But
he found himself disappointed with the results. The images left him cold. Film,
he realized, imposed a discipline of perception, of seeing, which led to
richer, more artful, more moving photographs. Film demanded more of him. And so
he went back to the older technology.
The photographer wasn’t the least bit antagonistic toward computers. He wasn’t beset by any abstract concerns about a loss of agency or autonomy. He wasn’t a crusader. He just wanted the best tool for the job—the tool that would encourage and enable him to do his finest, most fulfilling work. What he came to realize is that the newest, most automated, most expedient tool is not always the best choice. Although I’m sure he would bristle at being likened to the Luddites of the early nineteenth century, his decision to forgo the latest technology, at least in some stages of his work, was an act of rebellion resembling that of the old English machine-breakers, if without the fury. Like the Luddites, he understood that decisions about technology are also decisions about ways of working and ways of living—and he took control of those decisions rather than ceding them to others or giving way to the momentum of progress. He stepped back and thought critically about technology.
As a society, we’ve become
suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we’ve turned
the Luddites into cartoon characters, emblems of backwardness. We assume that
anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia,
of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real
sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better
suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a
child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing
to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us,
how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede
choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called
progress is folly.
Technology is a pillar and a glory of civilization. But it is also a test that we set for ourselves. It challenges us to think about what’s important in our lives, to ask ourselves what human being means. Computerization, as it extends its reach into the most intimate spheres of our existence, raises the stakes of the test. We can allow ourselves to be carried along by the technological current, wherever it may be taking us, or we can push against it. To resist invention is not to reject invention. It’s to humble invention, to bring progress down to earth. “Resistance is futile,” goes the glib Star Trek cliché beloved by techies. But that’s the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, “the active soul,” then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the active soul.
One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a challenge, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but, as Frost saw, it’s the work—the means—that makes us who we are. Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
This essay is adapted from the book The Glass Cage, published by W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright by Nicholas Carr.
