Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Smart Phones Turn their Users into Assholes, Researchers say

Dateline: BERKELEYWhile many Americans are reeling from the news that the NSA is spying on their locations by tracking their mobile devices, social scientists are concerned about a more existential threat: those devices are turning people into assholes.

Ordinary users of smart phones, eReaders, and the like are noticing the change. Said one, “A decade ago, you used to be able to have a friendly chat with a stranger. But now everyone’s always wired in; they’re looking down at their mini computers, texting or tweeting someone, googling this or that, or playing a game app. You’ll be asking someone a question and he’ll be multitasking, giving you only half his attention while he’s checking his email.”

Social scientists at UC Berkeley have a theory to explain what’s happening. They call it assholization. It began long ago, they say, at the dawn of technology. Tools made us more efficient and powerful and that started turning our ancient ancestors into assholes. “It’s largely just a matter of being corrupted by power,” says Dr. Stanley Pishposh, the lead researcher at Berkeley studying this phenomenon. “At one point, long, long ago, we must have been settling disputes with just our fists. Then we invented the ax and those earliest ax users were perhaps the first full-fledged assholes to walk the planet. They bullied those without axes, you see. Again, we used to have to run from here to there. Then we domesticated horses and you had the rise of the nobles who could afford them—again, big-time assholes, thanks to that advance in technology.

“Then the car replaced the horse and you saw this exponential increase in assholization. Now there’s road rage and street racing and running through stop signs and monster truck rallies. There are the drivers that cut you off and drive slowly in the passing lane and give you the finger and sell you a lemon of a used car and key your car doors and listen to assholian talk show hosts on the car radio. Cars have made us even bigger assholes.

“Finally, there’s computerization, which really tips the scales. Technologies like the internet and mobile devices make us incredibly more powerful than our ancestors, which naturally corrupts us all the more. You have anonymity on the internet which turns people into trolls terrorizing cyberspace. You’ve got curt emails, intelligence-draining tweets, and assholes showing their penises in video chat rooms. You’ve got computer viruses and spam and popup ads, all brought to you by monumental assholes.”

We used to have to rely on morality or the law to defend us when we couldn’t ensure our security because we had so few tools, but now we have an army of machines that makes us feel invincible. According to Dr. Pishposh, “nine times out of ten, a primate with nothing to fear acts like an asshole.”

The researchers hypothesize that we’re adapting to an environment that contains more and more machines, which makes us more robotic in our thinking and behaviour. “Computers don’t yet have much emotional capacity,” explains Dr. Pishposh. “There’s something about programming a computer with a lot of math and logic; you don’t get much intuition or feeling out of that machine. So assholization itself begins with the advent of technology. An ax is an asshole. Just try dropping one on your foot and you’ll see what I mean. The ax won’t get out of the way, let me tell you. And a car is a big, whopping asshole. Cars kill people all the time, the buggers. And computers, too—assholes, the lot of them. They cost an arm and a leg, they always crash on you, and you think your porn is well-hidden, but no it turns out you forgot to password-protect one of the directories and then your wife finds it. I hate it when that happens.

“Anyway, the assholeness of machines rubs off on their users. It’s like hanging around a pessimist all the time. Sooner or later, you’ll think less highly of things; you’ve got to adapt to your surroundings, after all. Now, our high tech world is chockfull of computerized bastards and sons of bitches. We’re standing neck-deep in them. Our work chains us to them. We carry them in our pockets and on our belts and soon we’ll be wearing them for glasses and we’ll bury them under our skin. We’ll have little asshole nanomachines swimming through our veins.

“What will become of our humanity then? What will be left of us when we’ve fully merged with our technology? No more manners, no more morality, no more emotions. Whatever happens, you can be sure we’ll have been so thoroughly assholized that we won’t be offended by ourselves. We’ll encourage the worst from us and that’s what we’ll get.”

11 comments:

  1. I'm a Christian who thinks your Christ-myth leanings are an embarrassment to whatever academic institutions gave you square pieces of paper. Shame on you.

    I'm also a huge fan of satire and find your works to be far superior to even the satire-for-profit machine known as The Onion. Good for you.

    Now deal with it.

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    1. What a fascinating comment! Thanks for that. I should clarify that my Ph.D. is in philosophy, not New Testament studies or theology. Still, I follow the mythicism debate and I think the consensus view of NT scholars, that Jesus lived as an historical person, is due more to the fact that most such scholars were Christians before and after they became academics, than to any scientific judgment of the evidence on the matter. Anyway, I'm agnostic about whether Jesus lived. I don't think it should matter much to critics of Christianity, because the mythologization would have set in pretty early.

      I'm glad you like my satires. I have fun writing them. I've hit upon a sort of formula actually, but the real trick is to make them laugh-out-loud funny rather than just amusing or witty. I've got a lot to learn about writing comedy, but some of my satires made me laugh as I wrote them, so I figure that's something.

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    2. Hilarious article, Mr. Cain. Now that I'm done with finals and relatively close to finishing the giant novel I'm reading, I'm about to start God Decays. Looking forward to it.

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    3. Thanks very much, Ryan. I've got a couple more amusing satires already written and plenty of ideas for more. They're great fun to write, especially since they're relatively short.

      I hope you enjoy the novel. I've stared writing the sequel. By the way, there's a subforum for my novel on Scott Bakker's forum. I'd be happy to talk about the book there. And I hope you'll think of reviewing the book on Amazon. Here's the link to the forum (I suppose I should blog about this too):

      http://second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=1078.0

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  2. I would have thought it's that popcorn makes you inclined to sly flip the bird in photographs...lol!

    Anyway, power doesn't corrupt - it merely magnifies the corruption already present.

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  3. If the poor and stupid would stop having children, there would be less poverty.

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    1. Um, poverty is caused by the 1%, a few greedy men who rule multinational corporations such as Goldman Sachs and the International Monetary Fund. Thanks to them, there is less jobs; jobs are sent overseas; people who work in those corporate jobs are paid less despite working long hours and in poor conditions.

      Without much jobs for the people, people end up poor, they do not get paid much, domestic violence occurs, people turn to fascists like the Christian Right to be saved; even if the fascists want to create a totalitarian dystopia.

      Have sympathy for those you consider poor and stupid, and remember to see the flaws in yourself; no human, not me or you is, perfect.



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    2. Anon, are you sure you posted this comment to the write article? If so, I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.

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  4. Anon1 here, I meant for this comment to be for the "Love or Disgust? A Christian debates a Misanthrope," not sure how it ended up here. Does anyone has a real refutation of my comment, or just romantic drivel. Poor people who continue to have children they can't support should be sterilized. Perhaps you Canadians would like to adopt some of our ghetto babies?

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    1. I'm no expert, but I'd assume poverty has numerous causes. I can see how overpopulation might increase poverty, though.

      I actually have a satirical piece coming out soon that points out that human parents have multiple offspring for the same reason adults in other species do, to ensure that at least some will succeed, since the assumption is that some won't. Rich people don't need to have as many children since their wealth rigs the game in their family's favour, while poor people have to rely merely on genes and luck: the more kids poor parents have, the higher the chance that at least one will rise out of poverty. This has the unintended consequence that the whole family must sacrifice all the more, since there are obviously then more mouths to feed.

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