Technology and Freedom

That “T” is for Technology. I’m supposed to pretend I’m clever on this blog sometimes; that should pass for being clever, right?

Computers have been around for a long time. I remember when I was thirteen or fourteen, I spent hours playing the computer game NHL ‘95. My devotion to the game grew with time; I went from merely playing the game to making players–myself, my friends and family–and, eventually, setting out to re-make the league. Because the game was designed with the ‘94-’95 NHL rosters, that quickly lost its immediacy, so I wanted to fix them. I wanted my simulation to be perfect so that I could come as close as possible to operating within the real NHL. I found some player editors outside of the game so I could use the efficiency not found within the game and I think actually completed this task. This, of course, didn’t put me into the NHL, but it was fun. I had a good time throughout the process.

In these young days, my experience of technology remained a toy. I grew as it grew. It was a novelty to me: I could play games on it, but it hadn’t yet grown into part of the way I conducted my life. I was quite dedicated to that game, so I worked towards that dedication. Follow that through today, one of my days off from work, when I spent most of my day also sitting at a computer. I do most of my writing in a notebook, so eventually I have to type it into the computer. I accomplished this typing today with a story I’ve been working on for a while; the current draft was particularly messy–with sections here and there needing to be put in order and sorted through–so it was not only monotonous, but monotonous and requiring some degree of attention.

The task was boring, as THIS story is becoming. I was distracted, displaying symptoms of the attention deficit disorder we diagnose: constantly tiring of my work, I turned to technology: movies and the Internet. I ran movies as I was typing and also looked up car repair costs, read a bit about the Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri, failed to discover when the special edition Kill Bill DVD is coming out, and kept up with news and other websites I visit daily. Etcetera. I watched “Life Aquatic” and “O Brother Where art Thou.”

These were not things I planned for my day. They distracted me from the task at hand, thus stretching that task out into time in which I would’ve done other things; I did not accomplish much. I don’t want to blame technology for this failure, but there is a connection.

I’ve been re-reading Peter Hershock’s “Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age,” which discusses the values behind our reliance on technology. At the base of what I’ve read so far is a re-thinking of the definition of freedom. We think of freedom as unlimited choice, and, as per that definition, because our society strives for freedom as its goal, we grow closer and closer to it. Instead of being restricted to accessing information in libraries and books and newspapers, we can find anything, anywhere. We have instant access to all sorts of information.

In contrast, Hershock presents a definition of freedom in contrast to ours: one emphasizing harmony with the people and things around us; instead of emphasizing the freedom to be strictly individual, it emphasizes the freedom to live in interdependence with everything. He presents this as superior because of Buddhist notions rejecting dualisms:

Dualisms, precisely because they allow us to assert ‘this’ over ‘that,’ are conducive to the most altruistic forms of arrogance. It was in the spirit of having clearly seen this that the Buddha declared that ‘is’ and ‘is-not’ are the twin barbs on which humankind is impaled. And it is also why he denied that our world had some definite beginning, that it is informed by a singular purpose or intent, that its history is essentially and necessarily progressive. The segregation of progress and regress or the domestic and the wild–like all segregation–is ultimately an act of impoverishment and mutual destruction. Among other things, the Buddha’s refusal to take a stand on either ‘this’ or ‘that’ provides us with a method for beginning to question our conviction that the world we happen to inhabit lies at the summit of all cultural and technical evolution. Far from signaling a skeptical disengagement from the world, this refusal aims at inaugurating an ethics of resisting our habits of valuation and conduct–a concerted return to the virtuosity of truly horizonless intimacy. (39)

When individuality is asserted, it diminishes the harmonious or horizonless intimacy Hershock mentions here. The Buddhism Hershock presents considers interdependence to be a basic principle. Therefore, the unlimited choice of an individual will cast that individual apart from other people and things. Hershock uses his three year-old son as an example of the contrast between these two models of freedom, telling a story of a time when the child desperately wanted to assert his individuality over anything else. “That his personhood at age three was already consciously bound up in recognizing the limits of what he could control–and not, for example, what he could contribute–is a profound revelation of the extent to which our identity and freedom are wrapped up with our isolation, our existence or ’standing-apart’ from one another” (28).

This distinction struck me. I’ve been playing the part of Charlie for a while now, and while when the contract is up I will return to my indulgent lifestyle as Jeff Jefferson with conviction, I’ve picked up tendencies in this role. Being a writer involves extended periods of creative work without distraction, and technology doesn’t help this. I can’t do any work at the computer because I’ll constantly step away from my work in favor of other, mostly mindless, things–like checking facebook or news or other people’s blogs. I find that when I have the freedom to do anything I want, I end up wasting that time. My life goes down the tube in those times. Take today for an example: instead of rushing through typing up my handwritten work, leaving me time to go to a coffee shop and write or read, I spread it out over many hours, doing random things on the Internet and watching movies. Consider both sides of this: not only did I not do what I set out to do with the day, but the time I was doing research was completely unfocused, and my experience of the two movies I watched was distracted as well. This freedom to choose meant I experienced little quality in my day. I mean this actively, of course: I actively engaged in nothing of quality. I was active in sub-par experience today. I learned and accomplished nothing.

I find that my experience is of a much higher quality when I restrict my choices. When I’m at a coffee shop, I have four choices: write, read, talk to people, or leave. I have no choice but to be engaged in something, so that’s what I do. There is much less conflict this way; there is much greater harmony with my work and my day.

Eventually I will fulfill this contract and return to my natural lifestyle: I will crave the individual freedom this country affords because of its usefulness in amassing wealth and power. I need to set myself above others in order to win at Capitalism and America. Of course this outlook keeps me from considering Peter Hershock’s book as truly enlightening, but I see its benefits from my current perspective: as a fairly low-income writer; as a person who is required to care about what he does. As an entrepreneur, I care only about making good business decisions, but writers are concerned with meaning in pretty much every sense. As a writer, I can see the interdependence of the world and how this philosophy makes sense. Thankfully, as an entrepreneur, I don’t care.