As has been pointed out previously, one of the most salient reasons that people want to create an increasingly technologized living environment is to develop a greater and greater sense of control over nature leading to a heightened sense of immortality. People are no longer content with the preserved imprints they create in the form of children, books, works of art, trees, businesses and fond memories among people they left behind. They want to really be immortal or at least experience some of the qualities they associate directly with immortality.
One of these qualities is the sense of mastery they can obtain over the inanimate objects and machines they use in their daily lives. An increasingly strong mastery can be said to give people a sense of playing God. So imagine how happy they should be to discover that the near future is going to be filled with dramatically increased technological mastery within one’s daily life. According to the article “Home Depot expands stock of smart phone gadgets”, written by Wendy Koch for the July 7, 2014 edition of USA Today, Home Depot is going to be marketing sixty different gadgets that can be controlled and manipulated through an app that is downloaded onto mobile devices. Among these gadgets are light bulbs, lawn sprinklers and water heaters. Open access software has been created by a company called Wink. The software is downloaded as an app for free onto both Android and iOS. Then there is Wink Hub, an automation platform which costs about eighty dollars, although there are big discounts if one also purchases one or more gadgets at Home Depot. According to Home Depot, Wink-controlled appliances shouldn’t cost any more than other appliances, and, in addition, it is thought they should lead to savings on energy use.
Not only do these products lead to an experience of real immortality by giving a person seemingly infinite control over his living environment. They also give a person an experience of real immortality by giving him a sense of infinite frictionlessness. Everything a person has to do becomes so effortless. It is like one is floating in a cloud above all the friction from organic perishability that exists within the more traditional organic living environments. One is living in an infinite high floating in this cloud.
The only problem is that there are some significant side effects living in this cloud. The cloud is basically an experiential vacuum which creates emotional numbness in a person. This is the effect of entropy, where a person begins to crumble apart experientially.
Typically, a businessperson or an inventor asks “Where is the pain?” in coming up with new technological products for market. The businessperson or inventor is trying to solve a real problem that people experience in the course of their daily lives. But increasingly the so-called “pain” or problem ends up being a normal life activity in which there is a certain amount of normal healthy organic friction. It is a normal life activity in which a person can have rich vibrant life experiences; make, receive and preserve organic imprints; and prepare for death as a result of the accumulation of preserved organic imprints to create a surrogate immortality. However, as we fall into increasing numbness as a result of our increasingly frictionless living environments, that normal life activity increasingly becomes experienced as overstimulating painful static. This is another angle to explain why the public will fall for remote controlled devices created by businesspeople and inventors to supposedly ease their pain in an area of their lives.
However, on a deeper level, more and more remote controlled devices contribute to the loss of the human narrative. People sink into a deeper and deeper experiential vacuum as the remote controlled devices prevent the kind of ongoing interaction with the external world that creates a coherent story. Without the story, there is no incremental unfolding of a continual imprint over time that allows a person’s whole life to leave a preserved imprint on the minds of the people that surround him. Doing everything by remote control curtails a person’s sense of life. Without any friction to accomplish his tasks, a person may have the experience of total control, but it is a control without making and preserving imprints. It is a total control that makes a person feel more and more numb inside. Such a great sense of control in the external world leads to a growing numbness inside oneself and ultimately a loss of a sense of control from within.
The easy life ultimately ends up being not so easy. The easier life gets, the more numb people get. The more numb people get, the more they experience the normal primary experience life tasks that remain as uncomfortably abrasively stimulating. As more and more life tasks are technologized, people sink deeper and deeper into an experiential vacuum, thus causing them to find ways to withdraw from more and more interactions in the external world to avoid what they experience as the increasingly overstimulating qualities of everyday life activities.
And the life of perfect control over one’s environment ultimately leads to a life where one experiences little or no control. With remote control, one is not making any organic imprints. It is with organic imprints that one truly has a sense of shaping or sculpting his environment through direct tactile contact. This is a kind of control that stimulates more control as one works to incrementally make and preserve imprints, and feel a direct sense of dominion over his living environment. It is not a magical control through technology, where the experience of the magic wears off as a result of growing numbness. True control is one where a person experiences the whole continual flow of the control process. This may not lead to a sense of real immortality in this life. But then again, the sense of real immortality diminishes as one gets more and more numb from the lack of real connection while using remote control. The most secure sense of immortality in this life is the surrogate immortality that comes from one’s preserved organic imprints. Playing God through the remote manipulation of objects in one’s living environment does not lead to a lasting sense of omnipotence. Quite the contrary. It leads to a growing sense of numbness and impotence. The loss of friction leads to a loss of control. What you try to achieve in life is not always what you get.
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