When I reviewed E. M Forster's The Machine Stops, I never expected to see his science fiction come true where people only live in hermetic cells and communicate with others by means akin to our World Wide Web.
But Forster's 111-year-old forecast came true in our time, thanks to a little understood virus that made for one still-here pandemic. Anyone with a job that involved mostly screen time--a surprising number--had the option of working remotely--quickly the norm. I started to think of its eventual consequences when a neighbor came out of her house complaining about "too many screens," and needing to socialize with some of her Reed alum friends in Portland.
That "too many screens" struck a chord. I avoid screens if I can. I have a $20 flip phone, if a dumbphone. Smartphone equals addiction in my book. I've seen too many smartphone-toting, somnolent walkers cross busy streets, offering up their lives to any errant driver for what? An FB like!? I once had lunch with a Facebook coder, asked him what he did. He said his job was to get people to stay on FB longer. Viz, maximize potential addiction, something like Las Vegas's variable reward system: Give out an unpredictable reward pellet, so the rat (er, iPhone user) keeps coming back.
In my long-gone tech pub days spent at Intel and other now mostly dead software companies, I'd get up from the desk, go over to the copier, chat with a co-worker, go to lunch at the company cafeteria. Such was moving around. I wasn't stuck in a chair, like today's remote worker.
It's intuitively obvious that chair sitting and staring at a screen for forty hours or so a week does nothing good for your mind, body, or spirit long-term. Forget the bank balance rewards. And only so much can be said for the freedom to go to work in your pajamas.
Lately, a tsunami of big cutbacks in IT are what I read about on slashdot. It's a quick way to boost company earnings, true, but also acknowledges AI now does massive amounts of coding. IT layoffs are approaching those of the dotcom bust.
So I was not surprised when neighbor Ike, a webpage coder, told me he had quit his job. Going on forty, he sure as hell doesn't want to end up like his uncle, seemingly molded to his easy chair and so exercise-resistant. Ike wants to work away from a chair, where he goes outside and moves his body. He's had it with screens. He's in HVAC school and will start as an installer. Then having IT savvy, the plan is to go into HVAC controls. Ike's acclimating!
Image credit: cbc.com
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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