Chapter Seven

Pause to Know Thyself

My introduction to the electronics revolution took place one Saturday morning in the fall of 1954 when I was ten. My neighbor buddy called to say his dad was taking him to his office for the day and did I want to come. I agreed, and we were off.

The father had started an electronics company in St. Paul, Minnesota just after World War II. High-tech start-ups then were not located in glass tilt-ups in suburban office parks, but instead were in big old red brick downtown warehouses, before such structures got gentrified. And because this was also before William Shockley started his semiconductor company, electronic devices then were vacuum state, not solid state.

The windowless warehouse space had glass tubes everywhere. If you wanted to sit, you moved vacuum tubes. If you wanted a writing surface, you moved the tubes again. The father went to work, and my friend and I set out to explore the otherwise deserted warehouse.

At noon, we spread out our bag lunches (after moving more tubes) and the father casually said something that left a vivid impression on me. "Boys, what we're doing here will change everything. Why, by the time you're my age you may not even have to work. Everything'll be done by computers. Think about it! You'll spend your whole day doing what you want - read what you want, go hunting or fishing, travel, hear music anywhere. Welcome to the future. It's going to be great!"

Those words over bologna sandwiches in that red brick warehouse set a very high expectation for me. And I used to think of them when, as an adult, I had a 60 mile commute from my home to an electronics company in Santa Clara, California where I worked.

My commute took me past the intersection of Interstates 580 and 680 in the East San Francisco Bay Area. To my left, on the horizon, I could see five lanes of white lights coming over the Altamont Pass from Stockton and Tracy; commuters already on the road for an hour by 5:30 am and still only halfway to work.

Near that intersection was PeopleSoft, which would eventually be bought by Oracle, and within the first week several thousand employees would receive express envelopes at home on a Saturday saying their services were no longer needed, and now send back the company laptop.

Also, nearby is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where some of the best engineers and scientists in the country spend their careers designing weapons of mass destruction, to be used against other countries that presume to do the same.

Finally, this intersection is the neighborhood of Scott Adams, creator of the popular Dilbert comic strip, whose portraits of life in cubeland are pinned to cube walls everywhere.

I might never have noticed this intersection of conflicting themes, except for that long-ago lunch which held out to me a vision of what the electronics revolution could be about.

It seems that on the way to the Promised Land we got stuck in a traffic jam. For many, the stress, uncertainties and humiliations of the new workplace aren't all that different from the manufacturing workplace of old.

• In mercifully relieving physical stress, much new technology has shifted it instead to the mind. And it's hard to switch off that mind stress at the end of the day - especially when there is no longer an end to the workday, with 24/7 on-call.
• Clearly the long-term goal is to replace humans, whether doing handwork or brainwork, with systems. The process started with John Henry, the steel-driving man of legend whose heart broke when he couldn't keep up with the steam shovel. And the process will continue until it replaces brain surgeons with nanobots. What has not yet been worked out is how people will afford the finished goods or services without an income.
• The digital and virtual are good ways to process, store and transmit information. But we are not designed to live inside that environment. Nature spent 14 billion years designing us to experience the world in an analog and natural environment. And it's not nice to frustrate Mother Nature; she bats last.

Because I had a different set of expectations about the electronics revolution, I have some unorthodox observations about what I've seen over the last half-century. Not answers so much as attempts to frame some questions. And because I have a marketing background, I call this approach The Four P's: pausing, (ap)preciating, praying (or meditating or yoga) and participating. (I fudge a bit on appreciating.)

Pause to Know Thyself

Electronic engineers concern themselves with what's called a signal-to-noise ratio, or S:N or SNR. They want to engineer products that put out a strong, meaningful signal with minimal interfering noise. The consumer wants to hear the music on the car radio, not static.

Likewise, we all need to 're-engineer' some time in our own lives to home in on the beacon of the authentic, and filter out the noise and the incessant blather. That was the original intention of the Hebrew Sabbath; to spend at least 15 percent of our time stepping back from the work and worry of daily life to reflect on the big picture: where we came from, why we're here, and where we're going.

The ancient Greeks recognized the same need and expressed it as Know Thyself.

The greatest obstacle to composure and self-knowledge now is the incessant barrage of marketing messages we receive. Something like 85 percent of the information we get every day is meant to sell us something. Every facet of our lives now carries a commercial message: sports, entertainment, politics. Even Times Square, the public plaza of the world, is Disneyland^TM East.

Ubiquitous devices, which will no doubt soon be surgically implanted, expose us to a broader world. But too often they present ever-more graphic and invasive images of violence and salaciousness to hold our attention until the commercials come on to excite our greed and envy.

And all these message have one common goal: to undermine our composure. They are intended to convince us that we can never be happy until we possess the product or service d'jour. "See all the happy people in the ads; why aren't you one of them?"

Over 80 percent of our daily information is meant to make us feel inadequate and envious. And with each year, the techniques become more invasive and more persuasive.

The lack of any social value in so many new products is evident in the term 'cool stuff' - as if to say, we have no idea what purpose these serve, just buy them so we can sell ones twice as fast next year.

It's not as if there aren't real problems to be addressed - if only hospitals could cure twice as many people each year, or schools could double the literacy rate within a year. But so much of the ingenuity goes to the trivial or the deadly - 'cool stuff' or 'smart weapons' - while so much evident pain remains unaddressed.

(There is an epidemic of eating disorders today - anorexia [the refusal to eat], and bulimia [binging and purging]. Perhaps one reason is that young people, with their exquisite inborn bullshit detectors, are sick of the consumer society they've grown up in. What better way to show contempt than to stop consuming entirely, even at the risk of one's life.)

No one believes that more stuff means more happiness. At the brain level, we know products are designed to wear out the day after the warranty expires, or be re-designed into obsolescence. That's why marketing aims at the gut level, not the logical.

And besides the stress we endure to produce and consume at such a pace, the non-degradable items we toss out (circuit boards, CRTs, CDs) take their toll on the landscape.

(I left an old computer out recently for pickup, but the waste men wouldn't take it. They left a sticker on it saying it was Hazardous Waste, because the display tube contained five pounds of lead, which is too toxic for a dump. Then why was it allowed in my home for two years?)

Those who have the most seem no happier for it. It's a cliché that money doesn't buy happiness, but like all clichés has a basis in truth. In her 'Science Journal' column in the August 13, 2004 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley notes that those on the Forbes list of 400 richest Americans average 5.8 on a satisfaction scale, with 7.0 being the highest. That is the same level of satisfaction recorded for the Inuit people of Greenland and the Masai of Kenya.

Calcutta's homeless average 2.9, but simply moving into a slum dwelling raises their quotient to 4.6. Seemingly, the gap from homeless to sheltered (anywhere) is the big leap; after that, improvements are incremental.

We can't always change our environment, but we can change how we relate to it.

Data sabbath: Since antiquity, one reason for the Sabbath -- whether practiced by Muslims on Friday, Jews on Saturday or Christians on Sunday -- has been to remove what English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called 'the film of familiarity' -- the cataracts of complacency that blind us to what is around us. And if it took a divine commandment to make people step back from the mundane to see, hear and feel the extra-ordinary-ness of the ordinary, then so be it.

But now the weekend is the time to shop after working a six-day week. We need to get our signal-to-noise ratio back in balance, the better to know who we are so we can better understand, and be at peace with, the world around us.

For that reason, we should rekindle interest in something like a Sabbath - a day a week to pull back from the noise of the incessant, ever-present marketing machine and its alphabet of distraction: TV, PC, CD, DVD, MP-3....

Call it a data Sabbath if you're unchurched. Shop early; turn off the electronic appliances, and especially stay away from advertising in all its forms. It's only then that you begin to see how pervasive marketing is - like the dealer promo framing the license plate of the car ahead.

Drop out of the digital one day a week and luxuriate in analog: read a book, enjoy a massage, take a walk, eat a good meal, get reacquainted with the family and with yourself. Don't try to fit it in; fit the rest of the workweek around it. For all our global communications, we need to stay in touch with ourselves, too.

Those who left religion for whatever reason shouldn't let that prevent them from experiencing a secular Sabbath. Mental health is too important to be discolored or misshapen by men who wear funny hats for a living.

Especially stay away from the three pounds of ads in the Sunday paper, and the magazine section. Nothing is more disconcerting than seeing images of the world's wars, famines and natural disasters next to ads for furs, jewels, denture adhesive and 'oat cuisine. It either trivializes the suffering, or causes moral numbness knowing there is little we can do from a distance.

Andrew Weil, the wellness guru and Harvard M.D., suggests in his "Eight Weeks to Optimum Health," a one-day "news fast" every week, expanding over time. Between the greed and envy generated by the ads, and the compassion fatigue from the news pages, our senses get fried.

Certainly, we need to be informed about the state of the world -- tragic as it is -- but not to the point where it numbs us to the beauty and the hope all around us. Likewise, some marketing is good; it makes for an informed consumer. But the perfect storm of glitter and grief is unendurable.

This isn't to argue for disengagement, but it takes a composed mind to be compassionate. ("We have thousands of opportunities every day to be grateful: for having good weather, to be able to sit in such a beautiful room on such comfortable furniture, to have slept well last night, to be able to get up, to be healthy, to have enough to eat. When you begin to think about just those most basic and obvious things, then you begin to think of the other people who don't have any of this -- of the people who are blind, who are lame, who are sick in bed, who are dying. But even before you start that, you should learn to enjoy those things which you have and be grateful. There's opportunity upon opportunity to be grateful; that's what life is."

(David Steindl-Rast is a Christian monk who has spent the last 40 years in dialog with representatives of the Eastern monastic tradition seeing common ground. He divides his time between living as a hermit and speaking around the world to academics, indigenous people, New Age communes, Green Berets and Naval Cadets, missionaries and UN diplomats.)

Composure is not achieved overnight and isn't completed in a lifetime; that's why it's called a practice. Buddhists teach that anyone who seeks nirvana will never achieve nirvana; the act of seeking frustrates the search.

There is so much technology-generated noise incessantly urging a feeding frenzy of self-absorption that it takes a heroic effort to pull back and hear the signal of self-composure.

Visual literacy: When you do go back to the media-saturated world after a data Sabbath, develop a critical eye to how sound and images work you over. We spend years learning verbal literacy in school: the ability to read and write the letters and numbers that appeal to the logical, analytical front part of the brain.

But our schools spend no time teaching visual literacy: how to critically judge the images and sounds that appeal to the parts of the brain where greed and envy are centered. This, in spite of the fact that most of the information we now get to decide what to buy, what to wear, who to vote for comes in this media-rich form. And this is increasingly the case as broadband communications becomes more available to facilitate the greater data flow. Even the most basic understanding of visual literacy is a secret to many. When two images are edited together and screened, a third image is created in the mind to segue between the two.

If a commercial shows an unhappy man, followed by an image of toothpaste, followed by the scene of the man walking happily on the beach with a beautiful woman, a cause-effect image is created in the mind that never appeared on screen. And because it's my image - I created it all by myself - I'll recall it next time I see the brand name at the store.

A lifetime of viewing such commercials, and creating our own images based on them, has led us to conclude that the wants of the present outweigh the needs of the future. We are trained from childhood to want it all and get it now, and to act as if we inherited the earth from our parents rather than borrowed it from our children. But infinite consumption of finite resources is not sustainable. Do the math; there is no future to this course we're on.

A Hippocratic Oath for engineers: The English poet Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, meaning the works of poets and novelists shaped people's ethics. That was then. Today, marketers and engineers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Marketers know this; engineers are learning it. But both enterprises believe they conduct their work in a value-free context.

We're told to think outside the box; maybe it's time to think outside the box factory. Engineering is about making things better. In that respect, it's a subset of the moral order.

Those who know enough about the new tools to write the user manuals, should also comment knowledgeably on how to use them humanely, so we don't find ourselves and our communities absorbed into a digital, virtual environment where weapons are smart, our products merely cool, and anxiety is a way of life. The products of our ingenuity dominate the center of society; we can no longer claim, under the doctrine of ethical neutrality, that we are divorced from their effects.

We ask physicians to swear, "First, do no harm." We ask our elected leaders to swear to uphold the Constitution. But we ask nothing of marketers and engineers who are the unacknowledged legislators of our world now; there's no Hippocratic Oath for them. There should be.

Zoom Lens Mentality: Information is the gathering of various data points to learn how things are made up. Knowledge is the ability to connect this-here to that-there and see a coherent picture. Wisdom consists of zooming back and forth as required - between the bit-level and the 10,000-foot view; from the micro to the macro level and back again - in order to act appropriately under the given circumstances. We need a zoom lens mentality regarding all the devices we are creating:

• For all the cool factor, let's also zoom back occasionally and remember that consumer electronic devices are means to an end, not the ends themselves. They are a method of communicating, not the message.
• For all the convenience of digital devices - gathering, storing, manipulating and transmitting information -ultimately they can't replace the authentic analog world. Nature spent 14 billion years designing us to experience the world in waveforms (sound, light, heat). We are woven into the warp and woof of Nature's web.
• For all the cachet of the virtual lifestyle, we're embedded in nature, and we're all involved in humankind. When our devices facilitate community, they're a blessing. When they deluge us with images of violence and salaciousness, amid ads that excite our greed and envy, they're not helpful.

The first step is to pause and be still. And find the stillness speaks volumes.