Technology as Addiction

Abstract

A few moments before I sat down before computer screen to compose what eventually became this essay, a tree branch fell across a power line near Oregon-California border, causing a chain reaction in matrix of power lines that cut off electricity to seven Western states and triggered an avalanche of problems across nearly half country. The physical chain reaction reverberated chaotically through a parallel web of social and psy chological interconnections, as freeways without timing signals jammed into great parking lots and drivers smashed into each other at street corners where traffic light grammar of red-yellow-green had gone dead. In Los Angeles, with air conditioners stilled in midst of summer's record-setting heat, people suffered dehydration and heat exhaustion, and many families were impelled to leave rooms that had become like chambers of an oven, to cool each other off on front lawns and backyards with garden hose. In business after business, phones, computers, and electronic cash registers became hunks of useless plastic and metal. Internet junkies fretted at being denied pleasures of on-line surfing, and great web of electronic transactions at gas stations, supermarkets, banks, and busi nesses went silent. What Karl Stahlkopf, vice president for power delivery at Electrical Power Research Institute, called the largest machine that man has ever made had failed, creating a cascade of other mechanical fail ures and challenging public's faith in infallibility of technology.1