How New Tech Is Recycling The Old

Recent tech editorials have queried the problems surrounding e-scooters and their potential urban and health hazards. Reading about these accidents—some of which are quite alarming—has made me think about how new technology has become the site of two contrary sentiments: anxiety over safety and security and capitalistic enterprise. One the one hand, the use of e-scooters is not divorced from the historical push of capitalism to produce, market and sell these products to an increasingly-curious public. On the other, as is common with the rise of anything new, there is a sort of anxiety of the new and what this means for our health and our bank accounts. As we have seen in recent months with e-cigarettes, such anxiety over safety is not unfounded. But with e-scooters, recent data shows that many of the accidents would be avoidable if only the 80 percent of e-scooter riders who refuse to wear safety attire would wear a helmet.

E-scooters in the EU are now facing the same regulation as scooters such as the American company, Lime, which operates in 170s is pushing back against recent legislation in the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK where e-scooters are illegal to use on public streets. In fact, what is emerging from discussions in recent months is that these devices need to be regulated to protect both the user and the public. But what does this mean for the contradictory cultural clash emerging from the flooding of the market with new technology devices? Should there be some regulatory bodies to overseas the all-too-quick adoption of products that are leaving teenagers in the US on life-support after vaping or dozens hospitalized because someone ran them over with an e-scooter? Or are accidents just part of the well-known historical process of capitalistic ventures?

Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died c. 1003–1010), was a Kazakh Turkic scholar from Farab (Otrar) in Transoxiana (today southern Kazakhstan) who attempted to fly using two wooden wings and a rope. Leaping from the roof of a local mosque in Nishapur (today in Iran), al-Jawhari plunged to his death. Franz Reichelt, the inventor of the “coat parachute” (a precursor to the parachute), jumped off the Eiffel Tower expecting this contraption to act save him. It didn’t. And last year, Elaine Herzberg was killed by a driverless Uber vehicle in Tempeh, AZ, a case now believed to be the first case of death by self-driving technology. History is replete with errors of science and engineering failures that lead to death. However, to the degree that vaping and scooters have hit the market with products that prove to be a public danger, we have never come in touch with such alarming numbers of injuries and fatalities before. Might it be that our enthusiasm for new technology as a culture is eliding the necessary safety checks that most every other product would have to endure if it were not for the “fad factor”? 

And the paradox deepens as all these recent tragedies are the result of newly designed products that are perceived to be “not as dangerous as traditional cigarettes” and “safer than motorcycles” despite any scientific research to prove such claims. It is as if the free market while requiring drug companies to undertake extensive testing regimes before putting new pharmaceutical products on the market, has lowered the bar for any new tech invention with a promise to rewind the past. In fact, as e-cigarettes are being criticized in the US for a slew of recent deaths and severe illness, tech companies are rolling out software that monitors vaping use just as companies like Apple have removed all vaping apps from its platform.

Similarly, hemp products are being marketed at an alarmingly fast rate even though the Mayo Clinic has recently published a study on this subject stating clearly that there is a “lack of solid scientific research conducted” on these products. This means that the marketplace has served many recent new tech fads in disseminating fictions about the potential “benefits”of these new products that range from seemingly-harmless oils to topical gels that lay claim to an array of health benefits that rely on the trope of “age-old wisdom” and traditions. In the end, these new tech fads often slip past oversight agencies such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the US. 

We are witnessing the ushering forth of old-world modalities recast as fresh with a new tech aspect that keeps the markets alive. As new technology is paving the way for myriad apps and gadgets that reinvent the kick scooter of decades past, both electric and non-electric scooters are having a comeback as this millennium is marked by the reinvention of cultural traditions, cures, and transport. Many of the latest tech developments seem to mirror pre-tech machinery and social systems with a twist to earlier social and technological models using new tech to masquerade as safety or “improved” such that today people are even seeking out graduate education virtually as they pursue online degrees which elides in-class, human interactions. From education to e-scooters, we are in the throes of a societal impulse where we act immediately and ask questions later.

There is also the added dimension of how new tech has recreated the scene of employment today as IT and creative types today are currently eluding the twentieth-century “employee model.” Instead, many millennials are returning to the pre-twentieth century framework of employment, the “make a job” style of employment, as they eke out a living reinventing the self in what today could be described as a climate of sink-or-swim. As the job market shifts towards the scaled-down startup and self-employment models, we are witnessing the dusk set on the era of punch-in and -out clocks where workers were once paid by the hour in addition to overtime salary. As a result of this new economy, new-gen trailblazers lay claim to a self-employment model that encourages the dream of becoming the YouTube millionaire, Graham Stephen, who drinks ice coffee while ostensibly making his millions or of becoming an overnight sensation by trading currencies. Many of these new tech additions to the economy resemble snake oil from another era while the underlying reality is that new technology transportation is not any safer than YouTube or market millions are easy to come by. In fact, both are patently unrealistic—delusional even.

As we are sold a mediatized clean bill of health on new technology, rarely do we consider if the flooding of the market with unregulated technology is any better than older ways of doing things. While many believe that new tech is useful for advancing our culture, finances and our safety even while recycling old paradigms, the underbelly of such unproven technology is that it may actually be moving us backwards to embrace delusional economic expectations and myriad physical dangers as “progressive” when some new technology may be anything but.