Born before electricity reached several parts of the world, when our town was electrified and several appliances plugged in our homes, we had reason to believe that our life will be much better than the previous generations.
Soon after we switched on our TV sets, manipulative marketing gurus with mesmerizing commercials took advantage of our ignorance about new technologies, characterized our common sense as old fashioned and brainwashed us that in order to have a more comfortable lifestyle we must acquire every gadget manufactured.
This further confirmed that our life would resemble a leisurely walk in the park during a sunny day, with a lot less effort than previous generations. We abandoned our simple, healthy, stress-free lifestyle, and entered a race track that removed “finish lines” and started chasing endlessly for miraculous gadgets and devices.
Fate of destiny saw me travel to the big manufacturing and sales centres of Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. When I stood in front of huge showrooms of assorted electronics I started wondering, how these products could make my life better? How much harder must I work to obtain these costly devices?
Technology today has reached even the most remote corners of our planet, entitling us to claim a milestone in the history book of human achievements: “The Golden Generation of Technologies Advancements.”
However, the rapid technological developments exposed the inability of our political leaders who, despite their highly paid technical consultants, failed to cope with the new realities to enact practical regulation and approve for consumption, only essential technologies that truly improve our standards of living.
The fundamental question to ask here is: Why do medical devices, before approval for use, go through a long and tedious scrutiny while new technologies of consumer electronics were left unregulated to damage the economy, human health, the environment and impoverish the already poor job market?
Were we right in our assessment that technology will provide us high standards of living with less effort? Who among us is benefiting from technology and who are the victims? Was it worth sacrificing our healthy lifestyle? Do we need all of this technology today?
Let’s take a closer look at the refrigerator, air-conditioner, microwave, laundry machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, computers, cellular phones, computer games, digital cameras, high definition television sets and so many other devices.
Though space limitation constrains will not allow us to state all the details, briefly we can say that though appliances preserved and maintained our food fresh or frozen, we cannot believe the myth that artificial temperatures generated through machines in an enclosed box made of toxic plastics, chemical paints and various questionable qualities of metals made human life healthier.
Neither the artificially generated cold or warm air is of good quality to breathe.
Directly cooked food by microwaves leaves many questions to its healthiness. Toasting bread on heated metals has its negative effects too and all the other little electric motors in our practically sealed from the natural environment apartments, contribute further to altering our natural lives.
Laundry chemical detergents certainly make our clothes clean but not healthy to wear. Needless to mention the damage caused to the environment by adding these chemical detergents to the rest of the industrial waste.
Computers too, which stole many human jobs and helped in business office work, succeeded to addict a large number of users into spending endless hours browsing, playing games, chatting through social networks and are not providing any mental, visual or body benefits to human beings. Television sets might provide some entertainment and news updates, but good programs are overshadowed with all sorts of toxic propaganda such as commercials of various unknown quality products, organized brainwashing through mind-setting serials, biased news, etc.
Adding to all the above is the overuse of cellular phones, which occasionally was reported as mildly radioactive. If we take a clear picture with our high definition digital camera, we will realize that our state of mind is defined by electronic gadgets which continuous use will only perpetuate the deterioration of our overall health and necessitate the development of more gadgets to just diagnose the damage but not to treat it.
Yes, technology relieved us from manual labour ( job losses) but replaced it with mental fatigue and stress, resulting to many people maintaining their mental balance through the use of behavioural enhancing drugs or supplements.
Who benefited from the new technologies? Net beneficiaries are Microsoft, Nokia, Apple Ericson, Samsung, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and the rest in the technologies industry who without significant investments amassed trillions of dollars, making the poor consumers poorer. Multinational corporations too, benefited tremendously as technology helped them reduce labour costs at home as well as coordinating efficiently their overseas outsourcing operations.
Ironically the big losers are the consumers who despite losing their jobs to new technologies they are using unemployment benefits to purchase the same machines that took away their jobs.
Many of us live with the illusion that new technologies will make us rich, ignoring the fact that although money making machine creators gave us the money to consume – they never gave us the machines to produce money. Using the same principle, technology developers flooded us with devices but they will never tell us how to make these machines and enrich ourselves.
To ensure that we don’t learn how to make similar machines and become rich, they use their financial power to protect globally their patent rights.
How much technology do we need? To write this article I am using a high tech multi-featured laptop of which probably I know only about 30 per cent of it, while our unemployed children who have higher level of knowledge are using it to broadcast through social networks their present and future worries. Declaring that I am not totally against progress and new technology, in my view I think only about 30 per cent of the developed technology is beneficial and the rest is toxic and must be trimmed.
* Ilias Sourdis is a freelance 60-year-old Greek expatriate and businessman. He has lived outside Greece since 1976.