Blogg-Ed Indetermination

Folklore suggest that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” is combined of two characters, “danger” and “opportunity.” While this is untrue, it’s still a great concept.

Recently, a colleague sent me a wonderful column by Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forrestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. The entire article is worth reading. But I want to focus on one particular point he makes:

“Perhaps the financial crisis will teach us to live more simply, with less consumption. Materialism, psychologists report, is toxic to happiness, and our hyper-consumption is one of the main drivers of environmental decline. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there is less to spend) can help us rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.”

This sentiment is close to my own heart, but I will admit to a high amount of personal discontinuity between my beliefs and my job as a technology director in an elite college prep school.

Technology is arguably one of the most materialistic, consumerism-driven (not necessarily, consumer-driven) enterprises on the planet. Just today I was sorting through piles of perfectly functional equipment dropped off at our school for an electronics recycling fund raising drive. And while I am delighted that the equipment will be responsibly recycled, and that a worthy charitable organization will receive the proceeds from the drive, I am also appalled by the waste.

I suffer from my own “techno-lust” and its related waste, having purchased an iPhone this past year well before the contract on my perfectly good LG phone had expired or the phone shown and visible wear and tear.

For years my school has had an “evergreen” policy for “refreshing” computers before they got too “old.” And why did they get too old? Not usually because they wore out. Rather, they got slow. And why did they get slow? Because software companies created new versions of products that consumed more CPU cycles, laden with new features and bug fixes that also occupied more RAM and hard disk space. But optimizing the code to make it smaller and perform more efficiently mattered little to them because hardware was getting faster. And so this unholy alliance between software and hardware companies led to phenomenal growth in each sector. And as educational technologists we bought right into it, always complaining about how our schools did not have enough money to keep up, how our computers were antiquated, our networks slow, and our file storage capacity meager. And, by comparison to business and industry, we were right.

Time out! King’s X. Or as Quick Draw McGraw used to say to Baba Louie: “Ho-o-o-old on there!”

What’s so “green” about an “evergreen” policy? It’s not particularly good for the environment, and it’s expensive. Color me red with embarrassment to be so slow on the uptake about this. Or covered with red ink. Take your pick.

“But wait!” says the angel (or devil) sitting on my shoulder, “what we’ve been doing is actually showing how schools could and should operate in the 21st century, this digital age that we live in. It’s not conspicuous, mindless consumption, it’s leadership. It’s innovation. It’s what these kids need, and what society demands.”

Perhaps so. Our western minds aren’t very good at holding something as completely true and completely false at the same time. (I wonder what the Chinese character is for that idea?)

We do consume too much. As individuals, as families, as institutions. And the technology adoption cycle is crazy. And technology holds the key to solving many of the world’s crises, from increasing communication between people, to better managing our scare resources, to finding cures for diseases.

“But, but you can’t have it both ways!” yells my devil/angel provocateur.

Yes you can, and yes we must. We must consume more, but mindfully. We must waste more, but mindfully. We must use more power, but mindfully. And we must also consume less, waste less, and use less – mindfully.

Our economic recession has created a great deal of anxiety among millions of people. And each day I thank my lucky stars that I am employed, have reasonable house payments, and despite a frightening hit to my retirement funds I am relatively okay. And so it is perhaps easier for me than others to try to treat the recession as an opportunity rather than as a crisis. It is both, and by simultaneously holding that dualism and that tension within ourselves perhaps each of us can deal with it more effectively.

Like most Americans, perhaps all Americans including our leaders, I don’t understand the economic mess we’re in or how to get us out of it. But I do understand that all the leading economists are saying the we need to get consumers spending again; that consumption is the key to getting our economy back on track, our workers working, retailers retailing, idled factories factoring, and Detroit producing crummy (sorry, better) cars again.

Our capitalist economy is built on the assumption of constantly expanding markets, creating demand where there was none, tapping into unserved markets (China, anyone?), getting kid version of adult products and adult versions of kid products, ad infinitum.

Does anyone really think this model is infinitely sustainable? Surely the smartest people in the room, including the Oval Office, have read the same research as I that suggests bringing the entire population of the earth to a “Western” standard of living will require several times the amount of resources currently available on our planet.

In the long run, the very basis of our economy may need to shift from consumption as the cornerstone of growth to sustainability. Products with the longest shelf life, the longest mean-time-between-failures, and the longest planned obsolescence cycles will be the ones that win in the market.

Meanwhile, getting us to spend, spend, spend seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns and the ice melts.

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

As a committed environmentalist, I have often pondered the tension that exists between technology and global climate change. The frenetic pace in which new technologies are produced, consumed, and then discarded contribute to the exhaustion of the earth’s resources. The pollution and social justice problems associated with e-waste are well documented. Our server rooms become more and more crowded, consuming more and more power. Cloud computing simply moves the responsibility for unbridled technology consumption off-campus, where  “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” thinking may come into play.

And yet I recognize that technology also lies at the heart of many innovative solutions that can help address the energy crisis, lead to greater efficiencies, and create a more sustainable planet. Our children, perhaps the first generation in America in which there will be more scarcity of products and resources than in the past, and who certainly are inheriting a mountains of debt, and mountains stripped of their forests, minerals, and snow pack, must learn to use not only use new technologies but to invent them.

Living in the heart of Silicon Valley one is awash in the exultation regarding the latest Web 2.0 technology, server virtualization, and perhaps most of all, the optimism about a future in which technology can and will help us solve the most pressing issues of our time.

Thus it is that within this framework that I wonder if the current economic recession and its resulting slowdown in technology dollars and spending might cause all of us to become more thoughtful about our technology acquisitions. We’ll want to stretch out the useful life of existing equipment. We won’t necessarily go for the next software upgrade which consumes more CPU cycles and RAM than the last one. Perhaps we’ll even come to some understanding of that something does not have to be perfect to be good enough.

Slowing down. Becoming more thoughtful stewards of technology. Questioning “bigger, faster, stronger.” Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. And if it’s taken a recession to get us this point, then perhaps there’s something good amongst this otherwise awful news.