High-tech: Destroyer or saviour?

I just caught the opening night presentation of the film The Crazies, a remake of the early seventies film by zombie veteran George Romero. It’s the very unsettling story of a U.S. military plane crashing and unleashing a virus among a small town population, a virus which turns ordinary people into rabid killers. The story’s been done a hundred times, usually by depicting the killers in zombie guise, but this version of The Crazies is particularly well done and unsettling.

It really made me think, not that unusual a phenomenon, because I think far too often sometimes, generally about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. When the first Crazies was released, I was in my early teens and life was far more simple than it is today. We had no computers or cell phones, my family had not yet even acquired a colour TV and as for video games... let’s just say that the high-tech miracle of the day was Pong, where you stared at a white line on a black screen that knocked a white blip to your buddy’s white line until you were dizzy with a mix of boredom and, yeah, fascination.

My world then changed, about 1975 or so, when my buddy Cherif and I were at a local bar that had just picked up this stunning new game called Pac Man. We were amazed... or rather “a-mazed,” spending about 50 quarters and two hours watching Inky, Blinky and friends scurry around trying to avoid being eaten by Pac Man. We had no idea at the time, but Pac Woman and even more astounding games weren’t so far behind. I think the burgeoning video game craze caused me to read less, down to one book a week from two.

Truly, we had no idea about anything back then, none of us. The genome? Black holes? Global warming? The ECOLOGY? What the heck were those things? We still had cords attached to our rotary telephones and also to our TV remote controls in the late seventies, for heaven’s sake! Digital? That meant our fingers.

Then, suddenly, the early eighties appeared and with it the production of home computers far more complex than the Commodore 64 you may have been using as a fancy adding machine till then. And since those days of amber monitors and horrendously slow activity (remember what it was like to download a picture using a 286 and dial up? ARGGHHHH!), can you possibly get your head around all the technological advances that have multiplied at an exponential rate? I mean, really, can a kid possibly exist without the latest mobile phone, or Wii game, or laptop, or fancy coffee shop to WiFi it into? Invite most teens or young adults to watch a black-and-white classic movie with you and they look at you as if you are daft. They can’t even get through a song without fidgeting madly, as if on speed.

And we adults are no better. The Internet, with its buckets of email, plethora of opportunities to watch porn, multitudinous pathways toward engaging in extramarital relations with others who are SO lonely because their husbands, or wives, and children are all so thoroughly bored with life that the family unit is a prehistoric concept... well, if the Internet isn’t the face of evil, I don’t know what is. Don’t get me wrong, I am not preaching and I am not innocent. I, too, have been warped by the Scientific-Technological Complex and I am scared to death of what happens if it all comes crashing down around us. Because there is NOTHING else anymore and The Crazies made me realize that we have all been made a lot crazy by technology.

Here is one really unsettling thought. The world, as it stands, is so precariously close to annihilation and it will not take a massive nuclear exchange to end it all. You have all likely heard of EMP, or Electro Magnetic Pulse, no doubt. That is the signal given off by the detonation of a nuclear weapon, which causes electronics to stop functioning. Cars, for instance would stop in their tracks if a nuke was dropped on a city quite far off.

Well, a few recently published books have postulated that the explosion of a low-yield nuclear weapon above a city would not kill that many people through radiation, blast effects, etc., but would fry all electronics below that are not properly shielded. Set off a few of these nukes in the skies above a country and you will fry most of the electronics of that nation.

Think about this. Everything today uses electronic components, because everything is digital. Computers – and computers run everything, from the fire department and EMS services, to the water filtration plants, nuclear reactors, hospital equipment and such – will not function. Neither will trains, planes or automobiles, because all their electronics will be fried. We rely on transportation to deliver food, medical supplies... everything. We rely on electronics to stay warm in the winter, or if we use oil, oil trucks to deliver it to us. We rely on transportation to deliver new electronic components from elsewhere in the world, to replace the fried ones, because everything we have as replacements will also be fried. And we certainly rely on transportation and electronics to run the military machine that would protect us if, following an EMP strike, the villainous nation that attacked us decided to move in for the kill.

High-tech’s a great thing? I challenge you to tell me how we are better off today than we were in the 1970s. We have a lot more to worry about today than what happens when television networks all switch to High-Definition, or whether Blue Ray forces their competition out of business, but even then, we have been duped into laziness and complacency while the Scientific-Technological Complex has waived the bait under our very noses... and we took it, hook, line and sinker. It’s almost like the computer-run devils in the Terminator films have engineered the world we now live in... and are tightening the noose on humankind with every passing technological advance.

But then again, The Terminator and The Crazies are just movies, aren’t they? In reality, it’s not 2012 and its bad acting that has me worried. Actually, a three-mile high tsunami or an earthquake off the scale would be a blessing, compared to some of the other possible scenarios that we are directing ourselves.

Pong, where are you when we need ya?