Technology is supposed to save us. Save us from disease (vaccines), from loneliness (Facebook) and from ourselves (car airbags).  

Pills can prevent exhaustion, congestion and even birth. Virtual reality games provide an escape from our mundane existence. Skype makes it so you almost never have to miss seeing someone ever again.  

Do these technologies make life easier? Unquestionably, but is an easier life a better life or a life more “worth living”? Not necessarily.  

If everything goes right, manual labor will be a thing of the past and the fat pudgy people on that spaceship in Wall-E will be us. The trek of life will no longer run uphill but rather downstream. This river of gadgetry and comfort will propel us along our long and pleasurable lives.  

We will have the capacity to regulate not only our bodies (nose jobs) but also our emotions (Prozac) and then what’s left? Our reasoned thoughts? With all this technology to make us healthy and happy, we’ll finally be able to THINK! Right?

More realistically, this technology keeps us addicted to being happy and healthy, and therefore wealthy since wealth buys the things that make us happy and healthy, precisely so that we don’t have to think for ourselves.  

This addiction to comfort and ease renders us docile, dependent and, above all, simple.

The very act of thinking, especially critical thinking at its core implies a kind of uneasiness, a feeling of uncertainty and confusion. If there are a lot of roads in life that lead to vastly different places, we have to take our time and choose what to believe in, what to do and who to be with.  

Now, our culture’s addiction to comfort via technology renders those first two questions moot. Technology’s overriding purpose of making life easier means we are never forced to examine its unintended consequences because it’s seductively easy to go with the flow.  

Religion used to comfort people by helping them deal with the indifference of nature, but now that we’ve conquered nature (if climate change doesn’t kill us all, but wait: technology will save us!), religion itself needs technology to flourish (televangelism).  

God has been replaced with Google and the Id is satisfied by the iPod.

Given the desire to lead comfortable lives, careers seem to be just a means to that end. What job will make me lots of money, allow me to retire early on that pile of money, so that I can sleep on 400 thread count sheets? Is that the central question of a college student looking at life after graduation? I hope not.  

Now, perhaps I’m exaggerating but maybe that’s important to illuminate how our actions, our thoughts and our desires have been radically altered by technology. Instead of Jesus as our savior for our immortal souls, we have genetic engineering to make our immortal bodies. The last time you lost your cellphone, didn’t you feel a little naked? Weren’t you painfully aware that you couldn’t call or text, even if you didn’t want to? Don’t get me started on the trauma of being stuck without wireless.

I’m not saying we form a fight club and destroy everything made of plastic. ASWC wouldn’t give us funding. I’m saying that we need to be aware of how plastic things have almost inseparably attached themselves to our lives.  

So, let’s step outside our cave of plastic and glass and look at our cyborg selves.  

We can ask Google what happened yesterday, and what’s happening today but shouldn’t even try to ask what’s going to happen tomorrow.