(this article is being updated as people's comments are received. please feel free therefore to read it and contact me via http://lkcl.net and let me know ways to improve it)
Pandora's Technology Box
Technology rules our first-world lives. The fears of a return to dark-ages that was predicted and worried about in the nineties has only become more of a risk, as ever more dependence on technology expands. First-world economies and societies, run by consumerism and led by corporations, are simply not aware of - let alone taking into account - just how much damage Information Technology does to people, nor are they considering the consequences of that damage, or their reliance on the people who are being made so ill.
So this article's purpose is to draw attention to the enormous responsibility being placed at the feet of IT specialists - both programmers and maintainers - whilst at the same time pointing out that those very same IT specialists are under absolutely crippling psychological and physical pressure, as a direct result of working with IT systems. The question has now been asked: what do we do about this?
A Familiar Story
late nights. caffeine. poor food. unbelievably bad communication skills. flickering light sources. high electro-magnetic fields ranging from 50Hz Mains all the way up to 5Ghz Wi-Max. irregular sleeping and eating patterns. obsessive compulsive disorders. physical incapacitation due to bad posture and ignorance of the effects of strain on the physiology.
You know the drill: this is your average geek.
Worst of all - there are social and economic pressures, work ethics and frightened and ignorant management that drive the individual to ignore the very things that they know they should be doing to remain healthy, thus causing even worse psychological and physical long-term damage in some cases than if the individual was ignorant of their situation!
These geeks are the people that we rely on to free the world and provide what Western Society would call a standard of living - to help avoid what Western Society thinks that poverty is (such as not having minimum wage, not having pensions, not having enforced education, not having a National Health Service in the case of some countries). We rely on these IT specialists to guide those with less skill and knowledge in computing, to make our lives somehow better.
Technology: here to stay, but at what cost?
Here's the kicker: I question whether we in the Western first-world are actually better off without technology! The 90s Sci-fi film, in which Kurt Russell zaps the world, to rid it entirely of electricity, is a concept I would never have thought I would like to see happen - until recently. And the reason for that is because I have seen people living in India and China who were quite happy with their "poverty-stricken" lives, that those in Western Europe feel such pity for.
This may not seem relevant things to highlight, in this article, however it is a general malaise endemic in First World Western society that people consider themselves to be living in poverty, when in fact that poverty is an idea imposed on them by the very society that they cling to as a life-raft! So this article highlights just one aspect of the consequences that First World Western society faces: the malaise caused by Information Technology and the reliance on Technology.
And yet it must be recognised that there isn't any way back: we cannot return the world to the Dark Ages. The Internet Information Age has so much enormous potential to improve humanity: therefore, logically and without a doubt, it must be done properly and responsibly.
Challenging First World Ideals
Computers and Information Technology are supposed to make our lives better. All of the adverts say so. "Where do you want to go, today?". "The PC is Personal, again". Do more. Achieve more. Connect more. Love more. Buy more. I challenge anyone to tell me that being at risk of constant virus attack and living in fear of using your computer, but telling yourself that you have to do so 'because everyone else does', is a good thing.
Let me tell you all a little secret: 'everyone else is in exactly the same situation as you'.
Everyone is running around, desperately unhappy and afraid of using Information Technology, pretending that they have to use it because everyone else is. The key point that you're missing is: you control your life, not everyone else.
In the meantime, we have a serious problem. We're propagating this general malaise across the rest of the world, who are copying us because our Televisions show them a better way of life. For example, the One Laptop Per Child project is bringing the first light source ever, for countless generations, into homes that in most cases don't even have a window, let alone a water supply.
The people that live in this kind of quote poverty unquote are actually extremely healthy, physically, psychologically and spiritually. I've seen it. In two different countries, both of which have a tradition of Yoga and Meditation as part of people's daily lives. Both those countries - India and China - have a way of life that doesn't involve minimum wages, pensions, forced innoculation and vaccination, forced education, "classless society" propaganda (John Major's idea), and doesn't consider teaching children to work incredibly hard and to be a useful contribution to society to be "child slave labour". All of these things, which shock First World Society when considered in this light, are all challenges that make an individual stronger: they teach an individual to fight for a better life or in most cases to fight for their lives. First World Society considers such challenges to be too painful for individuals to face, and so removes them. Without regard for the consequences on the individual or the society, and it's in light of survival and the overall strength and health of a society that many people simply cannot think about. Mostly because the kinds of decisions that need to be made for the benefit of a community tend to conflict with things like "The Rights Of The Individual", and individuals typically think only in terms of, and can typically only relate to, "The Individual".
The thing that's particularly sad to observe is when the developing countries - especially India - observe the wealth that Western Society promises, and the individuals believe that the way to obtain such wealth is to copy Western ideology and methods. However, in the case of I.T., the way of life that comes with such ideals isn't publicised as widely, but has to be copied anyway. As a result, many young programmers in India are dead by the time they are 35, as a direct result of quite obvious physiological and psychological stress, such as continuous eleven hours per day work ethics, alcohol and other kinds of well-known self-abuse. The bottom line is that the Indian heritage and culture is simply completely unable to cope with such an enormous amount of stress - and they are not the only culture to be suffering as a direct consequence of the Western way of life.
why is it so important?
if all the computers in the world stopped working, our society would collapse. no phones. no television. no electricity. no water because the filtration and pump stations are all computer-controlled nowadays. no trains (and no signal stations) no cars, because most cars have modules (that are entirely controlled by the manufacturers). no satellites, and so no inter-continental communication.
i write these things for emphasis: it is well-known that without technology, western society would degenerate into far worse than what third-world societies face, simply because there is no knowledge any more, in the "great and glorious world-leading first world" societies of how to live even a basic subsistence existence!
it goes without saying that god help us all if there is any kind of natural disaster such as global warming raising sea levels by five to fifteen metres or plunging large areas into ice-age level temperatures. but: that is a discussion that is beyond the scope of this article, mentioned only to punch home quite how important it is that we - and by we I of course refer to western society - take individual, collective, national and global responsibility for our (western society) way of life, spreading around like the disease that it is, absolutely 100% seriously.
so - to reiterate: IT gives us so much in the way of access to Information, Global Communication and Knowledge that we cannot possibly do without it. So we are entirely reliant for our very existence on IT infrastructure, and therefore entirely reliant on the individuals who program and maintain IT.
we should therefore look after them.
i therefore urge the World Health Organisation - and others, including yourselves the readers - to begin immediate investigation into these matters. urgent research is needed in order to assess the scale of the sickness that is pervasive in IT (including in the free software community and especially in developing countries that are just embarking on the introduction of IT systems).
even just beginning such research would ask the questions that must surely be on people's minds and would get people to realise that they need to get help or to help out. surely people have had the feeling that there's something terribly wrong with western society, but nobody can quite work out what it is.
but the bottom line is this: if it were a single physical disease, rather than a collection and mixture of seriously debilitating psychological diseases and syndromes; physical disease and aggravations causing physical disabilities; social disorders, social and peer pressures and social dysfunctions, my guess is that "IT sickness" would be classified as pandemic.
pandemics need to be investigated and contained.
pandora's box must be closed.