The automobile is undeniably the most significant invention of the past century and a half. It has completely rewritten our sense of time and distance, to the point that what used to take the better part of six months, you can travel from Independence, MO., to Portland, OR. in a mere 17 hours. However, the automobile is not without fault– it has created generations of sedentary people and has made the expansion of corporate retail possible, as well as energy motivated wars around the planet. Is it possible to continue using this essential technology as we move into the 21st century? Or must we take drastic measures and completely revolutionize the way we live?

The automobile problem is a complex one. It involves nearly all corners of American life and society in some way or another. From manufacture of cars, transportation of cars, transportation using cars, the logistics and shipping industries, and even getting to an office job in the morning, these things are all a large part of what automobiles have done to our society. So what, then, can we do to end our dependence on an outmoded form of transportation? Should it be an alternative fuel? Perhaps a completely different way to design our communities? Maybe we should invest large amounts of money into public transportation? A reversion to rail transport? The complex question of automobiles has an equally complex answer.

Certainly the most important thing to consider when examining the problem of automobiles is the question of sustainability. With the sharply declining oil reserves in the world, the automobile is becoming more than just a carbon dioxide factory. It is quickly becoming an ecological nightmare. The influence of the auto industry leads governments to approve massive drilling projects in Alaska, ruining the pristine nature of one of the few Earth locations untouched by human hands. Oil-fueled initiatives to deface the Earth are undeniably perpetuated by automobile technology. We can be sure, then, that if we fail to make more economic cars or innovate alternative fuel options, the problems with the automobile will continue to get worse.

So if we cannot continue down the path of oil, what should we do? Many scientist are proposing hydrogen as a means to fuel cars. In a short answer, hydrogen is not a viable solution to end our dependence on fossil fuels. Hydrogen uses electrolysis to extract hydrogen from a source like water. This process requires large amounts of electricity to accomplish, and a massive majority of the electricity that is generated comes from sources like oil, coal, and natural gas. This means that the electric car is, too, an unrealistic suggestion. In order to completely eliminate the harmful effects of the automobile, we would need a better way to generate electricity first and foremost; then discover a better way to power the engines of our automobiles.

Reducing the impact of the automobile should be a primary goal of any community. However, they continue to zone structures and locations that are less conducive to this goal. Strip malls are unreachable by any other means besides automobile. The same goes for suburbs outside major cities. These places are rarely linked up with any kind of public transportation of the cities they surround, once more perpetuating the problem. Many suburbs are mazes of concrete, Starbucks’ and Wal-Marts dotting the cookie-cutter wastelands. These communities are built for convenience and access instead of sustainability or environmentality. This problem with the middle-American psyche is the very base of the car problem itself. If we cannot give up cars that get merely 8 miles to the gallon simply so we have something that resembles safety, then we are resigning our Earth’s fate to a dark future.

It seems so ironic that a group of individuals (i.e. Mothers) that are so infatuated with the idea of safety for them and for their children would drive devices that are completely opposite to the idea of the “children’s future”. Without dipping into a tangent of parent psychology, these desires really represent a need for power, for independence in a dependent family situation. Drivers of large, pollutant vehicles don’t care about the environment all that much, despite what they say, and justify their driving by half-heartedly tossing things into a recycling bin and planting a sapling at the park on Earth Day. But these same individuals perpetuate the automobile industry by buying corporate goods and services that come from miles and miles away. This, too, is a major problem with automobiles– logistics.

Most of the shipping industry is serviced by tractor-trailer semis, especially within the United States. Raw goods travel from around the world to processing plants in the continental U.S. and are then made into processed goods like, for example, a bottle of soda. The soda is loaded onto a semi and travels from a plant in Wisconsin to a distribution center in New York City. Then, a fleet of trucks travels all over the city and loads the bottles into coolers and machines so you, the consumer, can buy these items, day after day. This is the central problem with the dependency issue– not being able to give things up that we don’t want or need. Until we as a culture can overcome the bourgeois, we can never overcome a dependence on anything.

“Technology as magic” is a concerning concept. We look at technologies that represent this fad– worshiping technology and using it as a magic fix, an instant liberator from the forces of boredom. Many ad campaigns show SUV’s climbing mountain terrain, glistening in the sun as their fresh paint and unscuffed tires as if it had rolled right off the lot and into the Sierra Nevadas. This kind of imagery preys upon people– the companies will even admit to as much. The marketers know that people are insecure and bored and whimsical, so they build and market a car directly toward these kinds of people, and that car becomes the sport utility vehicle. A magic pill in our increasingly magical world.

So what, then, would we have to do to eliminate cars? We would have to rethink as a culture what we value in terms of material possessions and branding. We would need to once again realize what the concepts of distance are. We need to outlaw strip malls and become more locally focused instead of forever keeping our interests set on sights far away. We need to extend city public transportation further into the suburbs, allowing more and more people to take advantage of the services offered by the public trust.

The personal automobile needs to become a thing of the past if we are to secure a brighter future for our society. We need to find more sustainable energies if we are to power cars in electric or hydrogen means, and it is simply not possible to generate enough power to sustain an entire society based on electric or hydrogen-powered cars as well as all the current power needs, as pretty and idealistic as the ideas seem to us.

When examining a cellular phone, at first one may think that it is an unnecessary device aimed at being frivolous and looking like you’re constantly busy. These are not, however, the limits of the cellular phone in any respect. The cell phone’s use outweighs even its cultural negatives. It allows the portability of personal communication at a level never before seen by man. It facilitates the spread of the Internet into mediums never imagined. It makes easy the storing of vast quantities of telephone numbers into the database of each phone. The usefulness of the cell phone dwarf the implications that it brings to our consciousness as a culture and as a people.

We must examine not only our own lives, but the lives of others who do not possess the technologies we do. We will use, for the lack of a better example in our current world climate, Africa. Most countries in Africa have marginal percentages of the levels of penetration we have of the cellular phone. Many of these countries are barren even of the computer, and by proxy the Internet Even landline phones, in some parts of the continent, are rare or even nonexistent. So how, then, would we explain a cellular phone to an animistic tribe in the deepest jungles of the Congo? How would we tell a destitute woman that we can call our friends halfway around the world with a piece of plastic and silicon that costs an amount of money equivalent to her yearly wages? How does a starving child know what a text message means, or how he could use it? It seems so absurd to think that such a device exists in such an absurd world. Seems to be an issue of priority.

Cellular phones were not always the marvels of miniaturization, innovation, and communication that they are today. When cellular phones were first developed, they cost several thousand dollars, were bulky and unreliable, had almost no coverage, and were a massive eyesore. This is in concert with many technologies of the past– the first automobiles, the first firearms, the first televisions, the first landline telephones– but still, the proponents of these technologies soldiered on, garnering the needed publicity that these needed to succeed. Often mocked by the public for spending massive amounts of money for useless items, these people became the norm once everyone rushed out and bought the next generation. Smaller, cheaper cars, televisions, and computers all led to the ubiquity of these items, forever locked within the public psyche as just another part of daily life. The cell phone was no exception.

Every day, millions of Americans awaken and leave their homes, cellphones in tow. They are easily reachable, connected into the grid of society, inseparable to the network of airwaves and accountability. Cell phones, however, are becoming even less of a simple communications device and more of a status symbol. Small phones, flip phones, phones with keyboards on them, phones that take pictures, video, and sound. All these are qualities of the best phones on the market and the individuals that posses them are top-rung on the social ladders, especially in college and high school. But unalarmingly, the older generations do not have any need for such immersion into such an illogical world. My grandfather has a simple, battered cell phone that doesn’t have a camera, doesn’t play music, and doesn’t even have a full-color screen. Utility is far more important in a technology, and this seeps into other technologies besides the cellular phone.

I think that it is fair to say that there is a certain allure, both aesthetically and intrinsically, of the cellular phone. It is not a light investment to make, financially or emotionally, to purchase a $300 device that permanently connects you to the modern culture the moment you give your number away. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine how connected people become to these items. The constantly use them, perhaps not even out of necessity but out of desire to get a large volume of use out of something so expensive. Soon, they become part of a person. It’s something they always have with them, not unlike their watch, their wallet, or their keys. In a way, we become subliminally connected to these devices in ways that we don’t comprehend or even think about. It is the same phenomenon with television, computers, iPods, and even something so basic as credit cards or watches.

The very idea of a neutral technology seems at first to seem a bit ridiculous, but then one comes to realize that all technologies, at the basic level, are neutral. A technology by itself has no power to act upon or affect a culture or a people– such is the curse of a construct that is absent of consciousness. It is the constructs that do possess consciousness (i.e. Humanity) that influence technologies to have negative influences upon a culture or a group of people. The harnessing of electricity was surely never imagined as a form of capital punishment. The television was not invented to give birth to two generations of children who are bombarded with media and rarely get the exercise they need. Few things are created and left to be for a single application. Technology is not the culprit in any sense of the word– the true hijackers of our culture are the victims themselves, perpetuating the problems by reapplying old technologies into roles ill-suited to them.

Human interaction has changed so much in the last thirty years, first with the Internet and then with things like instant messaging, e-mail, and cellular phones. Now, in our modern and progressive digital age, cellphones have taken those three individual technologies and made them the nexus of functionality for these devices. A person can now hold a conference call, text a friend in New York, and be instant messaging her mother in Asia, all at the same time from a device the size of a candy bar. While this would be certainly boggling to Marconi– who only imagined a world where we could talk to one another across an ocean– such things are ubiquitous with our everyday lives. We give no second thought to what these technologies mean to us because they’ve simply always been here. We take advantage of every feature with ease and bravado, throwing caution to the wind and roughly tackling technology and throwing it to the ground triumphantly.

So herein lies the coup de grace, of you will. While we as a culture, especially in America, have dropped the ball on erring the side of caution, we have developed a device that is incredibly useful. We have abused this device beyond the imaginings of its creators, not unlike most technologies. I’m looking at you, Enrico Fermi, Karl Benz, Tim Berners-Lee, Thomas Edison, Marconi, Davinci, and all the other inventors whose minds never fully grasped what their creations would mean for the world they lived in, for better or for worse.

It is not true that in this country the voting population carries all the power. It is not a shadow government, it is not Congress, it is not forces of conspiracy against the people. The single most powerful group of people in the United States today are the canvassers for political figures.

You’re sitting at dinner with the family, minding your own business. The telephone rings, and you, in a moment of absent-minded foolishness, answer it. On the line comes an anonymous voice, the voice of someone far away from you who thinks they’re doing something fantastic for their country; “Hello, Mr. Johnson? I’m with the McCain campaign and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions…” Your wife gets up to answer a knock at the door and over the ramblings of foreign policy views in your ear, you hear: “Hello, Mrs. Johnson, I’m with Huckabee for President… I’d just like to ask you about some issues in America that concern you…”

This practice is a form of citizen advertising called “canvassing”. This refers to the bombardment of registered voters with what seems to be a pleasant conversation but is poorly disguised within actively pushing and promoting a product– namely, the candidate. The idea is that the canvassers fish for a problem you see that needs to be fixed– just like a salesman– and offers their product up for sale. The idea is that you’ll think to yourself “jeez, this candidate’s a great guy! (or gal) and your vote will change based on that. Just like making a sale, except with ballot checkmarks instead of dollar signs reflected in the eyes of the canvasser.

I decided to expose how this sordid and annoying activity takes place due to my own personal experience canvassing (as a favor for a friend) for a presidential candidate in August and September whom I have chosen not to name due to his contrast with my own views and his dropout immediately after the Iowa caucus.

My duties included telephone calls, door-to-door, and campaign literature mailings. For a few hours a day, I would sit at a laptop computer with a phone next to me. I would use what’s called the “Voter Activation Network”, or simply VAN, a draconian database of all the registered voters of any party in any voting precinct. It included their adresses, telephone numbers, age, people they lived with (so you could sell to them if the other party wasn’t present) and a list of the elections in the past they voted in. With all this information at hand, you could pick people to call and target them based on these demographics with information on the candidate, not unlike television advertisers. For example, if I was calling an old lady, I made sure to speak clearly and talk about medicare or the economy in my “pitch.” If I was calling a middle-aged individual, the hot buttons were economy, the war in Iraq, universal health care, and environmental issues.

However, those were just the ones that I spoke to. Out of the hundreds of calls I made, only about thirty people actually talked to me about the candidates issues. Many of them simply hung up when I told them I was with a campaign, and some of them argued with me about the candidate’s views. Door to door was not much different. People who speak with you warmly and greet you cheerfully at first will give you an icy stare when you mention you’re from a campaign. Nobody seems to want to talk politics. Who can blame them when the media and canvassers are so aggressively pushing opinions on them?

What I took away from my time as a political activist and canvasser is a view from the inside. A chance to be the person on the other end of the line that is interrupting your dinner. It’s made me realize how not only the people who are responsible for the calling are at fault, but the disinterest in the public pushes political “advertisers” to new lows by using things like the VAN. The door-to-door campaigns of yesteryear are remnants of a different time– a time when people felt that they had a voice in government– or cared enough to sue the one they know they have. With a new dispirited and disinterested population, advertisments are the only thing the people understand.

What a sad state politics is in, isn’t it?