I live in an older apartment building. From a distance it looks entirely unremarkable, in line the rest of the block, but moving closer you can immediately tell the place has been around a while. The exterior brick has long since faded, the carpeted hall floors are just a bit too worn, and the interior white paint is cracking in more than a few spots. The basement laundry room is another notable example of this tired structure’s seniority. The building’s ancient white machines, probably scavenged from a failed laundromat or the extra stock of a college dorm, only accept coins. So every month or so I drive to the bank and buy a few rolls of quarters for cleaning my clothes. My bank is nestled within the center of a nearby high-end shopping district, and no matter what time I go the place is usually packed. To make matters worse, parking is sparse at best and it’s metered only.
But this week something changed; the ancient grey parking meters I had grown accustomed to were gone. In their place was a row of brightly colored signs with spot numbers and instructions, along with one shiny large electronic kiosk for each section of spots.
The old meters had been retrofitted with credit card readers, so they were already a little more advanced than your average coin-operated old timers. But this new installation is what I suppose one could call top-of-the-line. Each spot is assigned a location number, you type your license plate into the kiosk, then pay and you were all set. You can even pay or add more time remotely, either on a website or through a newly connected parking app. Easy peasy!
At face value there is nothing wrong with updated technology. The kiosk still takes cash and coins, so we aren’t looking at issues such as economic inequality or access like you see from businesses trending toward cashless operations. Likewise, the new interface is more efficient, legible, and fast than the old meters with their painfully slow card readers. But there was one (hopefully) unintended consequence that stood out to me from this newly introduced technology. This new parking meter system assigns payments based on license plate numbers instead of the traditional, perhaps old-fashioned, meter system where every spot had a meter and any payment was applied to that spot. So as soon as you drive away any leftover parking time leaves with you. It takes me maybe 15 minutes, tops, to walk to the bank and buy my quarter rolls. Usually I exit the neighborhood with more than ample time left in my one hour minimum. I can’t share those leftovers anymore, provide a thankless and anonymous donation to whichever fellow human being happens to take over for my spot as I pull out. Instead those forty-something minutes just disappear into thin air, or the city’s coffers to be more accurate. I found the loss of this minuscule human connection and chance at goodwill more upsetting than I would have imagined.
It’s no great insight to proclaim technology can be used for good or evil. But I think beyond the question of intent and the debate surrounding it, there’s a much more interesting question: what are the unintended consequences of these technologies? We’re long past a time where the introduction of new inventions and the resulting shifts happened in the span of years or decades. The rippling effect of technology has changed to a torrent in the new millennium. New innovations can now release, explode, and fade to obscurity all in a matter of hours. Touching and potentially destabilizing every facet of society you can imagine: politics, global affairs, economics, pop culture, religion, the list goes on. Cultural paradigms are being redefined on a global scale in the blink of an eye, all brought on by digital abstractions made from 1s and 0s. And I think there’s a trend in tech to focus solely on intentions, turning a blind eye to anything else that falls outside that notion.
Tech & Consequences is about exploring these technological ripples: direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional, sprawling or focused. Past, present, and a hint of what may be yet to come in the future. We’ll be exploring the physical and tangible as well as the digital, but the focus will always start and end with technology.
I’ll leave you with an interview David Bowie gave in 1999 which somehow wandered onto the topic of the internet and what its impact might be in the future. The entire thing is worth a watch, but I’ve tagged a section I think encapsulates what I want to talk about within the focus of Tech & Consequences. In a very brief span of time relative to the scope of humanity, we have already seen drastic changes from the introduction of new digital technologies. I know my own life looks exponentially different compared to how it was the previous decade, year, even month. And I see no sign of that pace slowing down any time soon. Who knows, maybe one day soon I’ll have to stop buying quarters entirely.
ADDENDUM!!
Not too long after posting this I ended up listening to an episode of the Waveform podcast where Marques Brownlee interviewed Hasan Minhaj. The two of them discussed many of the same ethical questions surrounding technology that were in the forefront of my mind while writing this post/setting up the site. Two-hour long podcast episodes are abominations in most cases, but this one is an exception and worth the listen! (Hasan Minhaj is an artist when it comes to distilling down complex ideas for audiences)