The Distemper Of Our Times

Society’s fears and hatreds are projected onto the movie screen.

Falling Down was released in 1993, in a decade characterized by fears of gang violence and urban disorder. William Forster, a divorced and unemployed defense engineer, is stuck in rush hour traffic on a searing hot day when his final nerve snaps. He gets out, and starts walking across Los Angeles to reach his ex-wife’s house in time for his daughter’s birthday party.

He encounters the affronts and indignities moviegoers knew all too well – rude shopkeepers, aggressive panhandlers, criminal thugs. He gets into a shootout with gangsters, and fires a bullet into the ceiling of a fast food restaurant when he is told they are no longer serving breakfast items.

One reviewer wrote: “This guy is you…and if not you exactly, then maybe the guy you’re one or two bad breaks from becoming”.

Over the weekend, my family watched Thelma, first released in the summer. It tells the story of a 93-year-old grandmother who loses $10,000 to a scammer, and embarks on a journey across Los Angeles in a motorized scooter to track him down and retrieve her money.

The villains we now fantasize about putting in their place are scammers – the ultimate symbol of the encroachment of technology into everyday life. Without leaving your house, you can now be mugged by a stranger sitting in a call centre in New Delhi. And many people are – in 2022, Canadians reported $530 million in losses to fraud.

Most of us don’t think the ever-expanding reach of hyper-modern technology is a good thing. We might joke about our phones listening to our conversations to tailor the advertisements we see on YouTube, but we really find this to be profoundly uncomfortable.

The average time spent by Canadians on smartphones every day has reached 5.6 hours. If you think that statistic is unsettling, you may find yourself accused of being a “Luddite”.

The much-maligned Luddites were 19^th century English textile workers, artisans who had spent years perfecting their craft. The Industrial Revolution brought new machinery to England, and the textiles woven by artisans began to be undercut and replaced by shoddy workmanship churned out in mass-production factories supervised by bosses.

So, the Luddites broke into the factories and used sledgehammers to smash up the machinery that moneyed interests were using to destroy their way of life. Can you blame them?

Of course, not all technological change is bad; few would complain about Wikipedia, medical imaging, or earthquake-resistant architecture.

That being said, we must be willing to place limits and guardrails on technology to protect our way of life  – limits like prohibiting the sale of smartphones to children, banning robocalls, and putting a moratorium on new 5G cell towers until further investigation is conducted into their health effects.

As C.S. Lewis put it: “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

Editor’s note: My 500-word Counter Current column is published once every two weeks in the Islands Marketplace paper on Salt Spring Island. This piece will appear in the November 29th, 2024 issue.