“Most of the meetings of Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous take place online, which is more sensible than it sounds. Colloquy via a web-based conference call might help tech burnouts clear the first hurdle in recovery: asking for help.”

– Virginia Hefferman in “Breaking my Phone Addiction—Via My Phone“ in Wired

Having been born mid-century, and then having become an antique, I can recall the spread of the technology plague from the workplace to the home to the body, growing ever more demanding and invasive and isolating. For my ninety-something in-laws, this spread centered on radio and television. Movies like Avalon and writers like Russell Baker described the transitions from a time when families and neighbors gathered around a new radio to a time when families endured the togetherness of Depression-era poverty and then took refuge in TV. Now nearly every family—no matter how poor—has a big-screen TV, computer, and cellphones at the least. My in-laws quickly distanced themselves from their large extended families, whose places have been taken by the television that is always blaring in the living room, whether anyone is in the room or not. They are often angry with it, and always anxious with it—or without it.

My husband and I got our first PC in the early eighties. His fellowship program office had acquired a Macintosh, where he sometimes took the graveyard shift. Stomping in at ten pm on the way home so that he could word process, I would fall asleep on the floor and he would wake me around three am to go home. This was our ticket to success. Computers made our papers and grand proposals look good. And, even as data and information intensiveness inflated our work for good and bad, secretaries and other people were being cut as too expensive. We were caught in the high-tech rush to job security. We were early adopters, and we brought it all home. We had no qualms about this. We ‘knew’ electronics were safe. We believed our technology was good through and through.

So of course we—and everyone we knew—went whole-hog to give our kids the advantages of being tech-savvy. Like a young friend’s mother who worked at H.P. and got him a computer as soon as possible, we had our kids playing educational games. Soon they were not so educational. The schools were just as ‘smart’ at turning our kids into computer accessories in the rush to cementing the economy in the co-dependence of all co-dependences—the late modern addiction to useless and misleading virtual cues. In other words, we all but forced our kids to pin their futures on high tech. We did notice that our Microsoftie neighbors relied heavily on the video baby-sitter, and that their kids were wandering the streets in the wee hours. We also noticed—as did SNL—that some families only got along when watching TV. And now it is watching us, and the planet is dying, and we can’t be bothered. Except for me, my body was too smart to let me get away with it.