Marshall McLuhan famously said “Knowledge creates ignorance.” He wasn’t being flip. He was asserting that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know. Or, looked at another way, the more we believe we know, the less we are aware of, and open to, knowledge that refutes that belief.
In a recent article, Indrajit Samarajiva suggested a possible corollary to this statement, explaining that technology creates incompetence. Once we have a tool that can do things for us, we quickly forget how to do it for ourselves. We become dependent on that technology, perhaps dangerously so. When that technology fails, we’re fucked.
This doesn’t apply just to ‘hard’ technical skills. If we don’t have to think (very often) — if we don’t get any practice using our cognitive, creative, analytical, inductive, and abductive thinking skills — then we’re going to forget how to think effectively. And we have lots of technologies now that, while they are not any more competent at ‘thinking’ than we ever were, have largely obviated the need for us to exercise our thinking skills. The competencies needed to plan a trip, for example, or to organize and facilitate a team of people to deal with something none of them can do alone, or to think through a problem and assess possible solutions to it and ascertain which to pursue, and in which order, have been stunted by technologies that ‘tell us’ what to do instead.
This applies to almost everything we use our brains to do. To use a crude metaphor, our technologies have become like the slaves that the ‘upper classes’ once got to do everything for them, to the point the only competence they had left was how to order slaves to do things. How much of our mental energy today is used to learn how to use (mostly terribly, and incompetently designed) tech tools, instead of how to do the things those tools have been (mostly terribly, and incompetently) programmed to do for us?
Indi writes:
I’m not saying that some people don’t have these skills, I’m saying that most people don’t, by design, by deleterious destiny. What used to be unspecial knowledge has become specialized, what used to be common has become commodified, what used to be known becomes technology. You can certainly still meet people that know how to build a house, fix an engine, and feed an army, but this used to be much more common knowledge. As it became commodified, however, it became specialized, so more people could take it easy. And thus what one generation makes the next-generation takes for granted, and so on, until degeneration becomes complete, the whole thing collapses and no one knows how to rebuild the thing because the Internet is down and there’s no YouTube…
We have mistaken connectivity for connection, photographs for seeing, and maps for the territory.
He uses the term infantilization to describe this phenomenon. When the tech doesn’t work as it is supposed to, we get angry and throw temper tantrums like a two-year-old. But as usual, our anger is a mask for fear. We feel helpless. There’s no all-knowing adult to ‘fix’ it for us. One of our most innate human talents — the workaround — which has long been the basis by which almost everything in our dysfunctional hierarchical corporatized lives gets done, is no longer part of our skill set. The front-line workers who once had the practiced skill to give the customers what they wanted and needed despite the incompetence and obstructions of senior management, are now hamstrung both by technologies that prohibit them from meeting the customer’s needs, and their own lack of practice and cognitive capacity to think through how to meet those needs.
We’re becoming like the dumbed-down, incompetent do-nothings that we were warned about in the 1960s Jonathan King dystopia song, with “arms that can only lift a spoon”.
All with the best of intentions, of course. We have always thought that using tools to make our lives easier and simpler was necessarily a good thing. So now we have leveraged our knowledge to become colossally ignorant of how to do almost anything essential to survival and a healthy, resilient life. And we have complexified our technologies to render ourselves incompetent to do anything but push buttons and complain when we don’t get our reward for doing so.
Too smart for our own good.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So strange what our human conditioning can lead to, and compel us to do. But that, I think, is where we are, now, as a result.
image by AI; my own prompt
