Is technology getting worse?
Does anyone actually need wireless bluetooth headphones?
I’m sure most users will be able to cough up a few reasons for preferring wireless headphones over wired ones. Freedom to move without being hindered by a tangle of wires, minimal visibility (for those self-conscious about being seen with wired headphones) are likely to be among those reasons. The over-arching theme is convenience. This, at least, is why people want wireless headphones. The less subjective matter of need presents a trickier question.
Strictly speaking, the set of truly necessary things is quite limited. If you prepared a list of necessary things sorted by importance (even considering our modern lifestyle), bluetooth headphones would not rank very highly.
But where is the line between convenience and necessity?
Of course, all of these things could be said about wired headphones, loudspeakers, or any other product of technology more advanced that those in the Stone Age. Wired headphones offer more portability and privacy than loudspeakers which, in turn, offer the massive convenience of listenting to live performances whenever and wherever you choose.
Necessity is uncertain and ill-defined. Our actual needs are either very basic or extremely broad. Other animals have been meeting their basic needs of food and shelter without any technical advancement. Humanity does aspire to higher goals. But how often is it that a new technology comes along to cure cancer or solve world hunger, without creating new problems in its wake?
Convenience is not any easier to pin down. Many will be able to come up with one or two reasons why they prefer a new piece of technology over older ones. Many others will be indifferent. Early adopters are at the forefront, ready to embrace something new despite potential problems in the short term. Others follow suit only after the benefits have been proven. Some will never be convinced, sticking to their old ways for various idiosyncratic reasons.
Independence is much more important
If necessity is the mother of invention, convenience could at least claim to be the stepfather. Necessity is uncertain, while convenience is subjective. Neither of these is a good yardstick to evaluate technologies. That would be like asking parents to provide an objective opinion about their child.
Independence, in my opinion, is a far better measure. Technology has a bad tendency of forcing us to rely more on entities who do not depend equally on us. This includes depending on manufacturers for honoring warranties, allowing repairs and supporting products into the future. More importantly, in the long run this entails forming behaviors where the technology becomes an indispensable part of the lifestyle.
Far from being criticized and discouraged, this tendency is being actively exploited. Several Silicon Valley startups have used it as part of their pitch to investors. It goes as follows:
- Pay upfront to offer a low-cost service
- Lure customers in and become essential to their lives
- Become a necessary middleman and control prices
- Profit
The Radiolab podcast did an episode on this phenomenon, citing the example of food delivery apps such as DoorDash. The basic idea is to become a monopoly (or an oligopoly, at best) and dictate the terms of participating in the market.
This should put a damper on the celebration of technology as a force for the betterment of humanity. How can something so profit-driven be good for us? Its key contribution is to enable and encourage certain lifestyle choices (such as ordering takeout instead of going out to eateries or cooking at home). It adds nothing of substantial value and concentrates control in the hands of a few.
This is why I prefer independence as a tool to evaluate new technology. The more independent it makes you, the more equitable the distribution of its benefits, whatever they may be.
A more objective measure: wastefulness
Here’s the catch: like necessity and convenience, it is also possible to view independence through a subjective lens. Some people might claim that services such as Uber and DoorDash are good because they reduce dependence on burdensome things like owning and operating cars and doing groceries. Indeed, this is how tech companies sweeten the pot and attract users. Paying a fee for reduced responsibility and increased convenience is not an alien concept in this age of capitalistic enterprise.
Let us return to the example of wireless headphones. One obvious disadvantage is that they cost more, especially if you want good ones. A second one is that they require batteries, which are built-in and usually not designed to be replaced. You have gained freedom for wires by losing the freedom of power source. Is it a good trade?
Neither of these downsides may be a big deal to those who are in the habit of frequently changing gadgets. But most of us buying a new product expect to hold on to it for an undefined length of time until they need something else. Nowadays, this is made difficult by the strategy of planned obsolescence, which intentionally limits the useful life of products. The YouTube channel Veritasium has a video essay on this practice, which is an actual documented policy, rather than being just a conspiracy theory.
The upshot of this an excess of unrepairable (and barely salvageable) products that end up as e-waste at a dump like on the one in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Clean recycling methods for this e-waste, if possible, may not be be the fastest and cheapest. More environmentally hazardous methods, such as burning insulated wires to extract copper (pictured below), are usually used.
The wastefulness is not limited to physical products. Providing online services reliably to millions of users incurs huge costs of buidling and maintaining servers in the cloud. A lot of electrical energy has to be spent to prop up these services. Recent applications such as Bitcoin mining are especially energy-intensive. If these services provide no genuine value, the watts being dumped into them are just as wasteful as the electronics being dumped into scrap yards.
Technology is getting better
Contrary to the title and general tone of this write-up, I do not believe that technology is getting worse. It is simply that a host of opportunists have cropped up to make money by repurposing existing technologies. As Derek says in his video, technologies may become obsolete to make way for better ones. But that is not a matter of policy or finance. Independence, and anything else that fits into our ethical framework, should be the main driver of these changes.