By Eyeview

CHARBONNEAU: The computer age let me down

Mar 28, 2019 | 9:38 AM

AS SOMEONE WHO HAS WORKED IN ELECTRONICS all my life, I had high hopes for the digital age. But it turned out to be yet another disappointment.

The first was when flower power went sour.

The hippie movement promised to bring love, peace, and understanding. There was a yearning to get from under the thumb of the man and back to the land. Joni Mitchell summed up the longing of the era: “We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion year old carbon / And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Ah, back to the garden.

Some hippies took the message to heart and abandoned their comfortable lives in middle class homes to establish communes. Ill-prepared, with no practical survival skills, they longed to set their souls free. The results were often disastrous. They soon discovered the bitter hardships that early pioneers of this land lived on a daily basis.

My dreamy illusions of giving peace a chance came crashing down when Charles Manson, an unemployed ex-convict, formed a quasi-commune in California in 1969 and directed a series of nine murders at four locations. So much for the hippie commune and the love vibe.

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However, my optimism didn’t die completely. As the hippie movement sputtered, computers were on the ascendency. They promised to bring about a new connected world that would distribute understanding peer-to-peer. It looked like the McLuhan-esque utopia of a global village was shaping up.

The Whole Earth Catalog was a kind of Rosetta Stone that provided a guide from hippiedom to the new digital world. Despite its name, the catalog did not actually sell anything. Instead, it collected recommendations for tools that might be useful to people headed back to the land. Apple’s Steve Jobs, who had spent some time on a commune called All One Farm, would later call the catalog, “one of the bibles of my generation… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” (Harper’s, January, 2019)

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg echoed hippie optimism. He envisioned a world in which individuals, communities, and nations create an ideal social order through the constant exchange of information through staying connected. “Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.”

My fascination with email and bulletin boards has wilted like flower power. Instead of a world of connectedness, we have the largest surveillance industry in history in which the minutiae of our daily lives is harvested.

The bad actors, the trolls, have their own agenda and it isn’t love, peace and understanding. We are stuck with a digital dystopia. For all their sophistication, Facebook’s algorithms can’t weed them out. Resurrected Charles Mansons have brought down the hopes of the digital world.

After two disappointments in grand ideas, what’s left?

We need to stop relying on trendy movements and technology get back to what truly connects us. The Athenians invented it in the Fourth Century and called it democracy: the word derived from demos meaning “common people” and kratos meaning “strength.”

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.