Last spring, one of my students wrote a somewhat pedantic but nonetheless interesting essay on the disaster we are busily creating for ourselves with all the “smart” technology we are pouring into new cars. Despite an OCD/mild Asperger’s fixation on detail, he made a compelling case for an emerging crisis of excessive maintenance costs, accelerating obsolescence, and worst of all, the rising potential (and therefore likelihood) of malfunction. He deftly demonstrated how this practice relative to new cars can be extended across nearly every category of manufacture. The conclusion he reached is that unless we radically overall our obsession with technology, we are, sooner than we think, going to reach a point of extinction by paralysis. I was thinking about this issue again this morning, sitting out on my balcony grading papers. For no apparent reason, the high-pitched alarm on the electronic lock of the door to my complex’s pool went off and wouldn’t stop despite my best efforts. This happens with shrill, annoying frequency. The potential for malfunction. But here’s the thing. Why do we even need an electronic alarm? What would be an occasion where it should go off? Intruder in the pool area? That seems hardly likely. And what are you supposed to do when you hear the alarm? There’s no complex supervisor to call. How likely are you to do anything (other than try to ignore the sound) when the alarm so consistently goes on the fritz? There was no electronic key card system at my other condo. We just had conventional keys, and that worked out just fine. The technological aspect only creates the possibility of more problems, more repairs, and more frustration all around. I feel the same way about car alarms. What are you supposed to do when one goes off? Do you call the cops, or do you instead assume a pigeon is responsible, or that someone brushed against the vehicle, walking past? Or, do you just think, once again, malfunction? Smoke detectors can make me see purple and start speaking in tongues. House alarms are even worse. Years ago, when I was in grad school, my girlfriend at the time and I were caretakers of this crazy mansion that was for sale, on the shore of Lake Washington in Seattle. The wealthy couple that owned it had divorced and both just walked away, putting it on the market in a sodden local pre-Microsoft and Amazon economy. It was a great place to entertain my fellow students and friends, most of whom were living in moldy cinderblock apartments with milk crate bookshelves. We threw epic, mad, drunken parties, where everyone had to dress up in the former lady of the house’s wild fluro colored Picadilly Circus outfits from the ‘60s that she’d left behind. I barbecued a whole steer on the back lawn once. We played hallucinogenic masquerade badminton in the automatic sprinklers, and staggered around the ballroom in smashed costumed exuberance. But, nearly every single major party, one of the alarms the house was rigged with, would chose that particular moment to go nuts. I can’t tell you how many times, blitzed on the fabulously expensive vintages left on the racks in the wine cellar that I’d managed to infiltrate, groups of sopping wet intellectuals and aspiring artists, in white Twiggy bubble hats, neon yellow mini skirts or ill-fitting irradiated turquoise cat suits, could be found wandering those endless halls, treasure hunting some daft hidden alarm speaker that desperately needed to be disconnected before it drove us all insane. There was no map, plan or key guide to where the damn things were. They weren’t connected to any master security system. I disabled what there was of that Day 1. No, you only knew about them when they malfunctioned, which more often than not occurred when I was carrying a giant drumstick and a goblet of Bordeaux, dressed somewhere b/w James West and Emma Peel, and more Emma Peel. I think fondly of those festive occasions, inebriated with wine and poetry, in the company of my fashion zombie friends. And then I hear those insidious alarms piercing our party mood with their inane shrieks of random doom….just as I hear the damn pool gate siren going off still. Potential for malfunction? Let’s upgrade that to Pattern of Malfunction.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 19:02:14 +0000
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