Squandering human brilliance on useless bright ideas

Opinion

A brown cardboard box, about the size of shoebox, is proffered to me across the supermarket checkout counter.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“I think it’s like, smart light bulbs? I honestly don’t really know. Spend $300 on groceries and you get this for free.”

I did not want to spend $300 on groceries, and I do not want these Wi-Fi light bulbs. We can always use spare light bulbs, though, so into the cart they go. I will use them as plain old light bulbs, and when I get home I set to installing them in the garage, in which three of four light bulbs have been burned out for some time.

They burn brightly, and I’m momentarily pleased at my small act of home improvement. But after a few moments, they begin to blink on and off at one-second intervals.

I stand in disbelief as our bikes and camping gear come into bright light and then vanish again and again. The strobing bulbs hold me hostage, demanding my Wi-Fi network as ransom.

In the flashing light, I wonder: is this the culmination of human aspiration and ingenuity? Is this what we have been working toward as a race since discovering fire?

Is this the culmination of human aspiration and ingenuity? Is this what we have been working toward as a race since discovering fire?

This brilliant invention of light and industry, the humble and reliable light bulb, now functionally held at arms length unless I download an app and consent to the tracking of my garage lighting habits?

Oh, but this bulb can change colour! It can be dimmed or brightened by verbal command! It is borderline wizardry! Edison would fall to his knees to see his invention reborn thus!

We have come so far and achieved such heights of intellect to invent this thing that uselessly blinks on and off and cannot provide the one thing it was designed to provide nearly 150 years ago.

Here we have a specimen to populate the museum of the future. One artifact that points us toward where we squandered our brilliance and ability to enrich the lives of others toward either surveillance capitalism or instantaneous obsolescence. In its future display case, it continues to blink, for the packaging assures me it has years of luminescence.

In this future, the sun grew dim behind the clouds of smoke, but we rolled out pallets of voice-activated light bulbs to compensate. And we consented to devoting precious hours of our single shining lives to connecting these things, downloading apps and forever needing our phones to do so much as turn on the lights, we kept our heads down, distracted, and poured our energy into improving the light-bulb experience.

Green leaves shrivel in the heat of a warming planet, and flash floods wipe summer campers away as easily as baby birds from a nest, but our creativity was spoken for, our time spent communicating with our dishwasher, washing machine, doorbell and thermostat, strategizing their co-ordinated efforts toward basic functionality that was taken for granted even a decade ago.

All of the time-saving, life-changing innovation of previous generations has come to this.

Teenagers no longer start garage bands to create counter-culture narratives. They don’t even leave their homes. Books, and book reviews, are written by machine.

We scroll through reel after reel of online nonsense because it promises us something it never delivers, yet we carry a faith in its promise of distraction and connection that we seem to be sapping directly from our faith in one another.

We fill our lives with useless things that give us momentary joy, like a voice-activated colour-changing light bulb, because the reality of the things that actually need fixing is too daunting.

And we fill our lives with useless things that give us momentary joy, like a voice-activated colour-changing light bulb, because the reality of the things that actually need fixing is too daunting, and we’re losing our ability to imagine, to play, to create a different future museum in which our endeavours are looked upon with gratitude and wonderment, instead of bafflement and regret.

I’m now destined to ruminate on the dubious ambitions of modern humanity each time I’m out in the garage.

I’m keeping my blinking light bulbs as a shrine and reminder to stay engaged, stay curious and be part of the change toward better, brighter ideas.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca