V. THE TECHNO-COCOON

In recent years the technological system has engendered the ultimate in psychic distancing. Whether we are in the automobile, office, or airplane or using the television, computer, or telephone, we are ever surrounded and circumscribed by technologies and technocratic thinking. Our daily work usually involves being cocooned indoors in artificially lit, temperature-controlled, machine-laden office cubicles and locked into the technocratic hierarchies emblematic of corporate and bureaucratic life. As for our non-work hours, the average American spends more than four hours a day in front of the TV and an increasing number of hours using a computer. In the transition between home and work the majority of Americans commute to work alone, inside temperature-controlled cars and utilizing their radios or stereo systems. This absorption of each individual into what I call the “techno-cocoon” profoundly limits our experience and consciousness of anything not part of the technosphere.

As a result of techno-cocooning, huge segments of the population have become autistic in relation to the natural world. Non-human creation is almost completely ignored; when we do notice nature, it is usually viewed on television or glimpsed from a whizzing car, train, or plane. For the short periods when we are in nature, it is usually experienced as technological recreation (re-creation) mediated through the roar of RVs, motor boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, and other power toys.

Our circumscription by technology has also made us autistic in relation to one another, markedly eroding our social lives in recent years. Come twilight time, I often note the startling difference between the streets of suburban northern Virginia, where I currently live, and those of Queens, New York City, where I was raised more than three decades ago. When I was growing up, people talked on the stoops in the evening, kids played games together, babies were walked in strollers—there was a real sense of neighborhood. Now, as I walk my dog each evening along successive suburban cul de sacs, what I see are the glowing blue lights emanating from the various TVs and computers in each home as family members individually cocoon themselves into their favorite night-time techno-entertainment or work. This technologically engendered isolation and collapse of community are not merely anecdotal. Author and scholar Robert D. Putnam, in his aptly titled study and later book Bowling Alone, carefully documents the precipitous decline in all forms of civic participation during recent decades.

Many argue that rather than eroding our social lives, techno-cocooning actually expands the scope of our interaction with others. After all, people are making contacts at an astonishing rate. We are constantly communicating with others by telephone, e-mail, and “chat rooms” as well as catching up with the rest of the world via TV, radio, and the Internet. The obvious problem is that all these contacts are mediated through technology and its ever-present distancing. All of the human connections in the techno-cocoon are “long-distance” ones. There is little or no human-to-human (face-to-face) communication taking place. This creates a tragi-comic paradox for those living in the techno-cocoon: in a world of ever expanding, near universal communications, we grow ever more alone, locked into the noisy solitude of the cocoon. As activist Beth Burroughs quips, “Sex on the Internet is mostly typing.”

Ultimately, techno-cocooning makes impossible the “acts of will and imagination” that Weizenbaum so aptly calls for to restore ethics to our society and to end cold-evil distancing. Recovering a sense of ethics is permanently precluded by our circumscription into the perpetual distancing of the cocoon. Passively and with little awareness, we abandon our minds and wills to the convenience, power, and amusement offered by the technological cocoon. In fact, the technological environment becomes to us as water is to fish; we do not consciously recognize that we are enclosed in a cocoon. We do not experience the ongoing devastation of nature, society, or even our own spirit.

As we slip into near total technological autism, we cannot hear the great machines as they level the world’s forests and dig up and destroy the earth. We cannot hear the cries of animals being abused, slaughtered, or harassed to extinction. We cannot see the suffering of our fellow humans, whether they are the homeless we step over to reach our cars and offices or even despondent members of our own family locked into nearby, but utterly separate, cocoons. We do not recognize the banalization and ultimate death of our own will and imagination as we “amuse ourselves to death.” All in all, the techno-cocoon provides a kind of final anatomy of cold evil, creating a continuous buffer between each person and the many horrific wrongs of our technological system, sins in which we are all complicit and yet blissfully unaware of our complicity. We sit in our cocoons, fully alienated from nature and one another while fully entranced by and engaged with machines. This mass autism is surely unprecedented in both the scope and extent of its alienating impacts. We literally are no longer present to participate in the Creation, the social world, or the spiritual world. The diremption caused by cold evil is complete. We are deprived of the very relationships required for our healing.

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