Digital Denial
Even at an individual level, non-participation in the digital world is very difficult if not becoming downright impossible. The transactions of life that used to involve a personal visit or a phone call are now migrating to the digital ether, e.g. bank accounts, bill payments, tax, medical and dental appointments, professional consultations, travel bookings and fares, energy consumption and monitoring smart meters, and the use of social media platforms and apps like WhatsApp instead of making standard phone calls. To that add that mobile phone with data contracts incorporate an automatic incentive to consume the data quota paid for and that in turn normalises this ‘always connected’ behaviour for the consumer.
Lost World (AI generated image)
The analogue systems that do exist are much shrunken and manifest de facto disincentives to using them, e.g. impossibly long waiting times on phone hold to speak to a human agent, local bank branch closures, differential prices for paying non-digitally, digital payment only retailers, differential pricing based on retailer loyalty card schemes, and the price of making a phone call in comparison to establishing a WhatsApp or Facetime connection. That disadvantages those who have difficulties — for whatever reason — in interacting with digital devices, e.g. the physically or cognitively impaired, those with language difficulties, the technically challenged or phobic.
At a community level some established groupings may deliberately try to eschew technologies that they perceive as detrimental to social cohesion and family life, e.g. electricity, cars, radio, television, telephones, and the internet. The best known are, arguably, the Amish, the Christian community founded by Jakob Ammann (1644-1730?) who migrated to North America from Ammann’s birthplace Switzerland as well as Alsace (now eastern France bordering Switzerland and Germany) in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Amish were seeking land to farm and to enable them to live separately from mainstream society. Amish communities are concentrated in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in the US. There are also smaller Amish communities in Canada. The Amish, however, are not one homogenous group. In reality there are a number of Amish variants, e.g. Old Order, New Order, Beachy. Consequently, some Amish communities make exceptions for specific tools or technologies that they perceive as not threatening their values, e.g. gas-powered generators, solar panels, or a single telephone box for emergency use. Decisions about technology and lifestyle are guided by the specific Amish community’s Ordnung, a set of unwritten rules. Because the Amish prioritize face-to-face interaction and communal bonds they believe the internet can weaken these ties by encouraging individualism and reducing time spent with family or the community and it is a potential distraction from their focus on faith, manual labor, and simple living. The internet is viewed as a gateway to outside influences that could undermine their cultural and spiritual identity. Yet, even in this most techno-sceptic of communities, the digital world has been impossible to resist, albeit requiring some ideological gymnastics to do so. The employment of non-Amish intermediaries for online communication and marketing or ecommerce is one approach. Accessing the internet in public libraries or other non-Amish settings for research, business or ordering supplies is another. In Amish communities that adopt this compromise approach the internet is used where it is deemed necessary, but — by separating its presence from their immediate living environment — they seek to limit its impact on their values and lifestyle.
Encroachment 1 (AI generated image)
For most people their perceptions of the Amish are of a rather eccentric but peaceful group perhaps first brought to their attention by the 1985 film Witness starring Harrison Ford. Jakob Ammann et al founded an apparently sustainable — and apparently growing — ideology upon the concept of at least some technological advancements being a distraction and disrupter of social cohesion (as they defined it) and from that perspective he was somewhat prescient. Ammann, however, could never have conceived of just how penetrative these technological advancements could become. The ultimate irony of course being that preserving the Amish way of life actually relies upon being embedded within a broadly free and tolerant society who accepts their right to either eschew, constrain, or pick and mix what technologies they will use. As this outer ring of mainstream society continues to digitize its processes and practices, however, the Amish and groups like them may find it as difficult as what they call ‘The English’ (non-Amish) to function without some persistent level of engagement with digital technologies. At the same time they also provide a useful corrective to our ‘all technology is good’ mindsets and offer potential lessons on how sometimes techno-angst slowing down adoption — or forcing deep and prolonged reflection on consequences— is not necessarily always a bad thing. Unfortunately, for the Amish, the momentum at the moment is all in the mainstream and that is a momentum they — and other ideological or religous communities who look with alarm at the pace of change — will not be able to ignore.
Encroachment 2 (AI generated image)
At a nation-state level not adapting to the reality of the digital juggernaut quickly enough has significant economic and social consequences. Even countries with previously highly successful export-driven economies but which remain grounded in analogue infrastructure and manufacturing technologies, e.g. the German car-manufacturing sector are finding nimbler new competitors, e.g. China who have embraced digital manufacturing technologies and techniques are outperforming them in sectors that what they once considered their exclusive bailiwick. In response German manufacturing behemoths like Volkswagen are for the first time having to close factories. Equally, the fossil-fuel dependent energy infrastucture of Germany has made it vulnerable to past political decisions that until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it dependent on Russian energy provision. But it is the fossilisation of the mind that is perhaps the greatest challenge.
Memory is much, much more than an archive of the past; it is the prism through which we see ourselves, others, and the world. (Charan Ranganath, Why we Remember …, 2024)
Identity is formed by the recollections we cling to but also by what we choose to let go. Recollections of a past shaping not just individual identities but — in aggregate — also that of a whole nation. So then comes the understandable human inclination to cling onto — or return — to an idealised nostalgic past. Feeding the assumption that what has been perceived previously as successful will continue to be so in the future. That future, however, is not necessarily decided by incumbents but by those who perceive an opportunity to either disrupt or re-engineer how things are, or could be, done. The ‘move fast and break things’ motto used by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook until 2014 pretty well captures the reality for those previously comfortable industries, institutions, organisations, and governments who now indeed risk being broken by their clinging to the ways and thinking of the past. Despite the express train of change coming down their track they still remain inclined to impede or not invest in innovations or are intolerant of — or blind to — opportunities to change the status quo. And so research and development in, say, AI or energy creation and storage technologies, e.g. nuclear fusion or battery research, gravitates elsewhere. Or the failure to invest in digital infrastructure moves beyond mere inconvenience to becoming a national embarassment.
Past is a Foreign Country (AI Generated Image)
In Kaput: The End of the German Miracle (2024), Wofgang Münchau describes how in 2020 a photographer who wanted to get his images printed rode a horse with a bag containing the images stored on DVD to a business situated 10Km away. Before his horse ride he had also started an upload of the images over the German internet. He was back home with his printed images and the horse fed and watered while his computer informed him that it would take at least another hour to upload all the images. Germany is, arguably, incredibly resistant to digital change — with fax machines (a 1964 technology) still a very common feature of business communications — and so it provides a useful case study in this regard. Yet Germany is not alone. Those inclined to schadenfreude should perhaps reset to empathy.
For example, in 2020 the British NHS campaign “Axe the Fax,” embarked on a programme of reform to digitise its data and communication processes. Despite this high profile campaign fax machines — which peaked as a technology in the 1980s — still remained in use across the NHS in 2022.
Axe the Fax (AI Generated Image)
Despite the government’s pledge to phase out the “archaic” devices from 2020, it recently was revealed that more than 800 fax machines were still being used by the NHS, as of August 2022 … Moreover, a freedom of information request in 2020 by eFax found that there were almost 1,000 fax machines still in use across local councils, police forces, universities and fire services. (Engineering and Technology, 2022)
As a small technical aside it is worth nothing that whilst traditional fax technology depends on the transmission of analogue audio-frequency tones over an analogue telephone network that analogue network itself is now being superseded by a digital internet-protocol-based network. Because there is now a multiplicity of ways of sending and receiving a fax over the internet it is likely, however, that this residual 1964 fax technology could stagger on for a number of years yet.
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