Extinction on My Mind /2
Women and Machines

Technology is the single most successful means of separating us from reality

By Randi Hacker

July 25, 2024

I have a dear friend who believes that women and machines will save us.

“Women and machines will save us,” he says, often enough that either one or both of his closest woman friends and/or his wife often ends up saying, “No women and machines talk now.” He’s very good-natured about it and, in fact, I based a character in my climate fiction novella on him and his conviction, but my friend says I didn’t really present it the way he would.

By us, of course, my friend means humans but, also, just more incidentally, the earth because that’s where we live, and, as it happens, he lives on a particularly beautiful piece of earth in Northern Vermont.

My friend believes that humans are sure to come up with technologies that will change everything for the better…

By machines, of course, my friend means technology. My friend believes that humans are sure to come up with technologies that will change everything for the better and fix it so that no one will have to work and no one will have to give up any of the things that make earth the comfortable, convenient, and entertaining planet we humans want and expect it to be.

On this point, my friend and I could not disagree more. Under my perspective (as one of my EFL students once said), far from saving us, technology is the breaker of the camel’s back. Under my perspective, technology is the single most successful means of separating us from reality that we, as a species, have ever come up with, and that includes liposuction, penile implants, plug-in air fresheners, and tooth whitening strips.

And when I say technology, of course I mean cyber technology.

And when I say cyber technology, of course, I mean cell phones.

Cell phones give us our own personal realities, and they put them in our hands so we can carry them with us. We look at our cell phones when we’re walking. We look at our cell phones when we’re at a play, or a museum, or a movie. Our cell phones are beside our plates when we eat in restaurants and beside our beds when we go to sleep at night. They’ve replaced the cigarettes we had with our morning coffee and, if movies are to be believed, the cigarettes we had after sex.

‘So save us? Hell no. Technology is going to remove us so many degrees from registering our extinction that it’s going to hasten our extinction.’

And when we’re not looking at our cell phones, we’re thinking about them and where they are and whether that text we’ve been waiting for has come in.

Our viewpoint has narrowed so much that almost anything that happens beyond the edge of the screen might as well be peripheral if not apocryphal.

And so we keep on mining lithium, and making batteries, and moving up to 5G, and pulling on our Quest3, and putting on our Bluetooth headphones and tuning out the ambient sounds of roaring of leaf blowers, and switching to Augmented Reality on our Smart glasses and walking down a street in Manhattan or Mumbai or Sydney or Helsinki or Siberia on a sweltering, muggy, yellow day but seeing someone – maybe our own avatar – swimming with a sea turtle in the aquamarine waters of the tropics.

Image: courtesy of Randi Hacker

So save us? Hell no. Technology is going to remove us so many degrees from registering our extinction that it’s going to hasten our extinction.

And you know, there are days, days, for example, when the Supreme Court makes a president a king, days when another turtle shows up at a rehab centre with a wasp-waisted shell from a six-pack ring, days when I am in the Museum of Natural History dinosaur room, and a kid in a stroller is playing a game on his tablet, and days when I come across things like this in Wal-Mart that I think they can’t hasten it fast enough for me.

And as for women, well, I think we’re beyond what even we can do.

Feature image: cottonbro studio – Pexels

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Randi Hacker has been a writer and editor since the 20th century, and she’s been writing about the environment for more than thirty years, mostly to empower young people to take agency in their future. Satirical essays written with a partner appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Punch and Spy, among other publications. Her YA novel, Life As I Knew It, (Simon & Schuster) was named one of the Books for the Teen Age by the NY Public Library, and her TV show, Windy Acres, written with Jay Craven, was nominated for a New England Emmy for Writing. She just retired from her position as the resolutions copy editor for the State of Vermont, a job that has forever damaged her relationship with the comma. randihacker.com