Tech

Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands.  ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.

A wise meme once said that you should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. If you want to know who said that, you can look it up online. But you don’t need to look it up online, because the internet has freed us all from the bonds of copyright law and common decency. If you did look it up online, you will find that this aphorism was originally popularized in the 1980s in The Jargon File, a computer programmers’ handbook. So needy were the nerds to avenge themselves on the physical world, source of their steamy-spectacled, spotty-faced humiliations, that they tossed this aphorism around without tracking down its source.

So, here’s a proposition — an idea, a notion that might be worth exploring: the computer revolution has saved the small city. Four decades into the digitizing of our lives, some of the unintended and unexpected consequences of computerization are coming clear. And one of those consequences may be the possibilities for success found by some small Midwestern cities. The truly great cities of the nation — New York, Los Angeles — are among the most powerful economic engines ever created. The computer revolution proved to be jet fuel for the economics that brought them out of the doldrums of the 1970s. The large Rust Belt cities — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit — have either succeeded or failed to find a way out of the collapse of American manufacturing.

Regional inequality is perhaps one of the hardest social issues America faces – the sense that a select few prosperous metropolitan areas increasingly dominate the rest of the country economically, culturally, and politically. Every election, the consequences of this inequality become more evident; it was crucial in electing Donald Trump president in 2016. When Amazon announced last year that it would embark on a mission to find its next headquarters, the (naive) hope was that by spreading around its largesse, some of this inequality could be stemmed. From Birmingham, Alabama to Pittsburgh, cities were teased with the prospect of a once-in-a-lifetime influx of economic stimulus.

The tech sector, we are forever being told, has a gender problem. Recently, for example, Women in Technology International reported that only a quarter of US information technology workers are women – something which it was quick to claim was a result of ‘unconscious bias’. How else, it invited us to ask ourselves, can the proportion of women in technology be so low when women receive 57 percent of college degrees and nearly half of professional degrees in law, medicine, and the physical sciences? Worse, we are led to think, the bias is inbred in the machines themselves.