Apparently I’m not the only one struck by this. Leonard Pitts Jr., a commentator for the Miami Herald, ponders the future of our past and the new trend in unlikely mating of technology with common household items. Its a more optimistic way of saying something I was trying to get at.

He’s right to be optimistic. Not every step moves you forward and what you learn from mistakes often slingshots you towards greater enlightenment. But beneath the gloss of his wit and optimism he touches on a greater problem. “The future is always sold to us bright and shiny by big corporations making bigger promises about how new technology will render us complete. There’s always a sense of ‘Buy this and all your worries will be over.’ You’ll be smarter, thinner, wealthier, healthier and have more sex. Somehow it never works out that way, but we keep lining up anyhow..”

Our misstep isn’t that we feel the need to put a television in a refrigerator, its that we line up to buy them. With every new invention comes a marketing slogan that claims this new thing will make us whole. Every time it fails to. Over and over, ad infinitum ad nauseum. Our lack of identity and self confidence keeps us from breaking the cycle; it keeps them making power toilet brushes.

If we keep buying, they’ll keep selling. I believe in personal responsibility for choice and our choices. Free will is somewhat like an ouroboros because how do we make choices if not by personal experience and values, if those experiences and values have been set by some external will? Most of what people know and believe comes from 3 places: family, religion and the market. Most people won’t immediately admit the third. Its not until recently that smoking cigarrettes carried a stigma. For decades tobacco companies convinced us that smoking was sophisticated and sexy. What is sexy about foul smell and yellow teeth? The only thing our nation spends more on than food today is dieting — we’re supposed to eat more but be thinner. That sounds like a lucritive partnership between industries to me!

Perhaps it is not impossible for consumerism to drive real innovation, though it may seem that way. Perhaps it is not the corporations’ fault for doing what it takes to make money. Perhaps its our fault for spending so much money on items we think will give us a soul because we apparently have none. Perhaps if we didn’t count our self worth in dollars. Is it their fault for lying or ours for believing?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2004 at 9:10 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Mixed Bag, Rhetoric, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.