“Technology is a queer thing.
It brings you great gifts
with one hand and stabs you
in the back with the other.”
- C.P. Snow
Think of technology as a Lipshitz.
The word comes from my Uncle Sol who was in the jewelry business. To Uncle Sol, everything big that happened was a Lipshitz, always pronounced with a twinge of caution and a tinge of encouragement. If you got a good grade in school, everyone was proud of you but to Sol it was simply a Lipshitz. When someone got married, that was a classic Lipshitz. Find a bag stuffed with money and the only response from Uncle Sol would be, "Oy! What a Lipshitz!"
I had no idea what it meant but when I was old enough – probably about 14 – I asked Uncle Sol exactly what a Lipshitz was and this is what he told me.
One day a very fancy woman came into his jewelry store. Her name was Mrs. Lipshitz. Sol immediately noticed a huge diamond on her finger. Ever the jeweler, he gingerly took her hand and studied the ring through his loop.
"My god, what a stone!" he said.
"Yes. It's the famous Lipshitz diamond," the woman said. "A wedding present from my new husband."
"Mr. Lipshitz must be loaded," Uncle Sol muttered, "You must be the luckiest gal on earth."
"I'm afraid it is just not that simple," she said.
"Why?"
"Because with this famous Lipshitz diamond comes the famous Lipshitz curse!"
"Lipshitz curse? What's the Lipshitz curse?"
"Mister Lipshitz," the woman said.
Okay…old joke but not without insight.
To call technology a Lipshitz is not to say that it has good and bad aspects. It is not that simple. It means that technology is both good and bad at the same time. The benefit is the drawback; the blessing is the curse. In philosophy this kind of contradiction is called teleology. In my family, this is wisdom.
The blessing of technology is that it is revolutionary and gives us a chance to expand and evolve, to create a new world. But the curse is exactly the same...that it is revolutionary. It shakes us up, rattles our foundations, threatens to change and even destroy what we have worked so hard to build in the first place. This is not only true for modern technology but for all the tools we have made, right back to the first stone that we used to kill a moose or a neighbor.
This paradox answers the believers and the doubters, that debate between those who think that machines give us new opportunities for better ways to live versus those who believe they are simply destroying everything human that they touch. The truth is not that simple. We do not have the luxury of sitting back and appraising something so intrinsic to our human nature.
Besides, the hype always outstrips the hope and the promise of newness is never fulfilled. That is not the fault of technology, it is a problem with the nature of promises. Possibility is boundless, expanding at the rate of our desires, but results have to take the bumpy road through reality. So even as the world of our making fails to live up to our dreams, it becomes the raw material for new dreams.
Thus the cycle of change.
As the Gizmos grows, we have to be smart and accept both the pluses and minuses of our innovations. We have to be critical and flexible at the same time, take the long evolutionary view as well as the short peek through our cravings. We do not want to be philes or phobes. We need to become Lipshitzeans, perfectly schizological, firmly of two minds.
Fret and fuss we must but what we create will always reflect our own dual nature. Nothing we make is simply good or bad; everything is both. Luckily our talent for balancing opposites is also instinctive. No matter how new, we have always adapted to the changes we have initiated and come out pretty much the same... just like human beings.
For better and worse.
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