Inventions: the Good and the Bad.

 

Funny thing, progress. Done right, it makes all our lives easier, more productive, more rewarding - both financially and mentally - and gives the entire human development a kick forward. Done badly and it can lead to disaster and regression. It's all subjective, of course, and I have no doubt everyone has a different view about what's been good and bad for both them and the rest of us.

For what it's worth, here is a little list of 8 developments that could come under the label (perhaps misleading in itself) of inventions that I could quite happily live without as in my view they are more trouble than they are worth, plus an even smaller list of similar things that I simply could not. And why....

Remember: it's all subjective and I'm guessing few people, if any, would agree with me. So - here goes:

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Inventions I could do without:

Politics and Religion.  A biggy to start with, and calling it an invention is perhaps stretching things - but someone, somewhen, somewhere must have had the original ideas. Now I know some people would argue that, without either, human society would not be able to properly function - the obvious question here being what, precisely, is meant by "function". An advanced (er.....definition please!) society would probably insist that both activities - for want of a better term - are Must Haves to enable people to co-exist happily in an organised and peaceful manner, helping each other when life gets tough (as it always does) and draw comfort when facing the worst of all human problems: severe illness and death. Further, politics is needed to bring definition to right and wrong, to maintain order in society and bring order to chaos. Native tribes in the Amazonian jungle and elsewhere that have been decimated and had their lands appropriated in the name of progress may well disagree.

All of which would be perfectly fine if it wasn't for the fact that more people have died, or been injured, or lost everything they value in life - homes, health, money, families - in the name of politics and/or religion than for any other reason. Whether the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the two World Wars, Vietnam, not to mention the present slaughter in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, Thatcherism, Brexit, Trumpism or Trussonomics - which thankfully has died an early death (as should her dreadful premiership) - they are all nonsense. I have no time for either (but to my despair cannot help myself from becoming terribly wound up about both).

Social Media.  For all the blather from Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Musk and all the other alleged idealists who have created this monster, Social Media is not the panacea for all ills they claim it to be. Sure, linking people up through a selection of on-line platforms to discuss stuff, for ex-pats of whatever nationality to stay in touch with Friends and Family in their homelands, swap recipes and cute pictures of kids and pets, birthday and Christmas greetings, is all very well and good. But when those same platforms act as a means for spreading all kinds of hate, from teenage girls body shaming to terrorist recruitment tool, via racism, anti-gay propaganda and political lies and deceit of all shades, then I'm afraid it loses a lot of its appeal to me. The platforms seem incapable of policing themselves, content to say all the right things about cleaning house and blocking "bad" users, then doing no such thing. Politicians talk about legislating to force this but, again, seem reluctant to do so, perhaps because it would make their own lives more difficult by making it harder for them to distribute their bullshit to their electorate. The horse has bolted through the stable door left gaping when this beast was invented, and for good or ill we are stuck with it.

E-mail. When I first got married, getting on for 50 years ago now, an uncle who lived in Canada inducted me into the family letter writing society. We corresponded with each other - my uncle and I, my mum, my sisters, my second cousin in Lancashire, and first cousin in Australia - through a circle of mostly air-mail letters. We all wrote them using proper fountain pens (none of this Bic ballpoint rubbish) and swapped news and gossip and exam results, births and deaths, all the usual stuff people talk about. I can remember the excitement when a letter postmarked Ottawa or Sydney or Warrington dropped through my letter box. It all died, sadly, partly as some of the older participants passed away, but also with the advent of e-mail. This meant that your gossipy epistle would be received immediately and a reply possibly come within minutes rather than weeks, and you would be able to read it easily in Times New Roman or Sans Serrif font on your computer screen rather than have to decipher sometimes poor handwriting - I know for a fact my own has deteriorated terribly since I started doing everything on a keyboard and screen rather than pen or paper. I tried to revive it last Christmas by enclosing a handwritten letter with the cards, inviting them to write back, by hand...... I received not a single reply that way, just a few e-mails...... I find that very sad: what used to be an art-form dying out. I'm sure the convenience and speed that e-mail brings is simply not worth it.

The Internet. Which is in a sense at least partly to blame for the previous two inventions, as neither would be possible without it. The World Wide Web is another those "fantastic on paper" advances that very quickly outgrew the original aims and visions to become an all-conquering uncontrolled force for good and evil in equal measure. It changed the way humanity interacts, does its business, communicates, shops, books holidays and tickets for trains and boats and planes and every other form of transport and trading. It controls airspace and sealane traffic and finds you the best route from A to B without spreading a bloody great map across your windscreen. It provide a means of taking thousands of photos and movies, most of which will be crap, and a means of storing them instantly, safely and mostly for free. It also guides missiles unerringly to their targets hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles away, and shares information on troop movements, where in the delivery chain the tv you've just bought on-line is in real-time, and where is the best place to buy a pizza at your destination before you even leave h ome. And if it breaks down, for whatever reason, whether through conflict, power cut or natural disaster, there is panic....... We are too reliant on it, the old skills like map reading and journey planning and shopping declining, as indeed are attention spans. This is called progress, apparently.

Telly. Ah, the good old television. Ubiquitous for 70-odd years. Every home should have one (at least: in America and increasingly Europe that's just your starter). One channel, then two, then three,,,, Now literally hundreds beaming onto a screen near you, the vast majority of which you never even look at. News channels, drama channels, true life and entertainment channels. Comedy channels, car channels, cookery channels. Kid's channels. Shopping channels. Sport channels by the dozen. Free to air and Pay On Demand and Subscription. Movies old and new. Gold channels (for which read old 1970s and 80s repeats that appear more dated by the day). The Parliamentary Channel. God TV. Background noise, mostly, with pictures, while we eat, do homework or work from home. Talentless idiots with celebrity status whichever way you look. Nothing has had a bigger, more detrimental, effect on attention spans, especially those of children - apart from the internet and social media. The biggest conversation killer and family disruptor ever invented. Give me radio any day of the week.

Fossil fuels. They are killing the planet, and us with it, unless we wean ourselves off them, with a no-return tipping point set to be reached within my lifetime. We've used coal for hundreds of years to heat our homes and cook, and oil, both refined and unrefined, for cooking and power, in particular refined as petrol to run the internal combustion engines that power cars and trucks and buses and motor bikes and ships great and small the whole world over. The more power we generate, the more power sources we develop, the more power we insist we need. It's a vicious circle and we as a species are struggling to break out of it. Granted, it's only recently, within less than a century, that we have come to understand how much damage the gases produced from fossil fuels is actually doing to our atmosphere and hence our planet and our health, but despite this new-found knowledge we seem unable to leave the stuff in the ground. More needs to be done in educating ourselves about what we, as individuals, can do to help, and how we can force our politicians to make the difficult choices that are needed on the larger scale - something many of them are conspicuously not doing. It's not (quite) too late, but the clock is ticking and time passing very quickly.

Plastics. If Fossil Fuel was a terrible (but unrecognised thus) invention, plastic is arguably worse. It's another recent invention, but an estimated 9.2 billion tonnes of the stuff manufactured between 1950 and 2017 - add on a billion or so more to cover the past few years.(400 million in 2020 alone). Most of it ends up in land-fill sites and in the seas as trash. Unless specifically re-cycled or incinerated, the stuff takes years (no-one is sure exactly how many) to break down naturally. Of all the plastics made so far, just 14% has been incinerated, and a less than 10% re-cycled...... Just think about that for a moment.....

Micro plastics (tiny, microscopic balls of the stuff) are now finding their way into our food, via the meat and plant crops we are eating. No-one knows what the long term effects of that are going to be - I imagine not good. It's used in food packaging, soft drink bottles, consumer goods, clothing and footwear, cars and household goods. It's dangerous stuff: seas and rivers, lakes and reservoirs are already choked up with it all over the world and efforts to clean them never seem to keep pace with the inflow of yet more.

Smart phones. Mobiles phones have only been around for 25 years or so, and smart phones for not much more than 15. And yet they dominate communication all over the place - I only know of two homes that still have (and use) a landline, and they are my elder sisters' (both in their 80s, new technology being beyond them). The original mobiles, so-called feature phones (or dumb phones) were simple enough, good for voice calls and text messaging, but not much else. The better ones had rudimentary cameras and radios for entertainment. That was about it. Then Apple brought out the iPhone, and suddenly you didn't need a keyboard with buttons and letters to type with: they were on QWERTY keyboards on-screen. The cameras were better, the radios replaced by slots to hold memory cards with your own choice of music saved on them. They even came with calculators and calendars and notebooks and internet connectivity, and access to apps that gave you, eventually, pretty much any service or tool you wanted. Essentially, no matter which one of dozens of manufacturers' model you own, you now have a combination telephone, global atlas, web browser with a full set of productivity tools, a sound system and tv and games console in one package that fits in your pocket. It's a technological miracle and a pain in the arse, because unless you switch the thing off you are "online", "in touch" constantly, 24/7. If the telly is the conversation killer, then the mobile phone can be the life-killer (unless you use it in a disciplined manner - which most people don't, especially kids).

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And others I couldn't:

The Internet. Yes, yes, I know I said I wish it had never been invented and I stand by that. But like it or not, the web is here to stay so I have to accept that and use it to the best of my ability. For all its faults - and I only mentioned a couple: I'm sure you will have other ideas - it also has its good points that have made it a permanent fixture in all our lives. In health care, it enables prescriptions to be renewed by phone and held online at my local pharmacy without my having to queue up at the doctor's surgery: he can spend his time helping patients who need help more than I do and I can collect my meds at my leaisure. It also enables teams of surgeons in different locations to co-operate on major, complex and ground-breaking surgery by web-cam. In commerce, it allows shopping on line at chain-store websites with door to door delivery: handy for someone living along and unable to get to the store, or simply too lazy to do so. Similarly with luxury goods, clothing, books and whole universe of other commodities. It enables me to research, write and publish this blog, and keep up with the news that interests me, at any time, in real-time, anywhere in the world. I could do the same with my books, if I could only find the energy to finish the bloody things, and finish setting up my Amazon Kindle publishing account.....

Streaming services and internet radio. Another internet innovation with faults but still, for me, priceless. I know the arguments about platforms like Spotify and YouTube Music and Tidal and all the rest ripping off artists on a scale never before encountered, and I truly sympathise with content creators because they are absolutely right. I know too that the free versions with their adverts popping up every so often, sometimes in the middle of an intricate and superb piece of music, or, worse, freezing until you log in again, is a complete pain in the arse, and that I can stop it happening by subscribing. But the thing is, I don't actually listen to them all the time, and when I do it might be Spotify for an hour so, then YouTube Music for while, then a burst of Scala Radio and back to Spotify again. Subscribing to them all is, for me, an expense I can't justify, so I happily put up with breaks. Internet radio is similar and the only way I can listen in to Radio 2, Classic fm, Virgin, Scala Radio or hundreds of other stations scattered around the world from the comfort of my armchair in Warsaw. It's great. Then you have Netflix and Disney and Apple tv and all the others that produce often superb content, 24/7 to a telly or computer near you. Given the paucity and repetition of content on the majority of the channels on my Orange and Canal+ satellite package, these streamers too are a boon (though an expensive one).

Supermarkets. Even without online shopping, these beasts have changed the way we shop, and I'm not sure if that is entirely a Good Thing. In my home town, as a kid back in the 1960s, there were no supermarkets as we would recognise them today. But in the High Street, fresh meat and sausages, freshly cut on site from carcasses hanging in full view of we shoppers, could be bought in two butcher's shops. They even offered a delivery service: no DHL or UPS for them, instead there was a lad, a schoolboy, who was entrusted with a big heavy bike with a massive basket welded to the handlebars that was filled with packages wrapped in greaseproof paper (no plastics in sight...) to be ridden around town to the customers' houses. I did it a couple of days, when the lad (a good friend of mine as it happened) was unwell, and it was bloody hard work.

There was also a fishmonger and a couple of greengrocers for your fruit and veg (my dad grew all ours in the garden), a couple of bakeries for fresh bread, cakes and meat pies and an ordinary grocery store for things like tea and coffee, flour, sugar, washing powder and all the other household stuff. It was the closest we had at the time to a supermarket, but on a very small scale. In the 70s the International Stores and the Co-op came to town, opening places that were much closer to today's supermarkets, and the little stores, the butchers and so on, as small family businesses, were unable to   compete and over time all closed. It's a common story and has happened all over the world.

I could just as easily place supermarkets in the Could Do Without section, because I always find shopping at a small store - and there are many scattered around, if you want to seek them out, especially in Poland - much more rewarding, and generally lower prices and frequently fresher and better quality produce too. But, to be realistic, going shopping every day is a bit of chore (though one that I still have) and it's often easier and cheaper, when you count the special 2 for 1 offers, to do a big weekend shop and top up as needed. So we need supermarkets: again, like it or not, they are here to stay.