Technology That Will Get You Depressed
Tags: Spirituality, Jesus, Faith And Work, Catholic Business, Catholic

A reflection of a Catholic worker.

I started programming back in 2002. I have made more than 100 applications all my life. I spent my free time making a DOS application, Windows Application, iOS application, and more and more. Yet, people are so obsessed with using technology without knowing the impact. They quoted Bill Gates or other famous people, but they had no clue how it actually affects people. In this article, we will teach you the spiritual impact of technology.

Technology

Please read the following information from Wikipedia multiple times. Unless you understand this, you can’t understand the impact of what you don’t know.

Technology (“science of craft”, from Greek τέχνη, techne, “art, skill, cunning of hand”; and -λογία, -logia[2]) is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, or it can be embedded in machines to allow for operation without detailed knowledge of their workings. Systems (e.g. machines) applying technology by taking an input, changing it according to the system’s use, and then producing an outcome are referred to as technology systems or technological systems. The simplest form of technology is the development and use of basic tools. ~ Wikipedia

Technology delivers an objective. If you want to make your spouse happy, we can make technology to help you do that consistently. If you want to commit a crime, we can also make technology to help you. The key here is that:

Goal and How precede technology. Without them, it is trash anyway.

Customer Products

Unlike corporate solutions or manufacture, consumer products like Facebook, Tea Maker, Pillows, House, Car, and the rest focus on creating lifestyle and values for billions of people. What does it mean? That means product makers must create what people want. What does society want?

While there are other reasons but naturally human wants to: stay alive, fulfilling responsibilities, rechannel danger and suffering, commit 7 deadly sins, and potentially receive 9 cardinal virtues.

When the phone was created, it was meant to help sustain distant work. Later, when cell phone came, people put addicting snake game in there to entertain others (rechannel their anxiety) in the name of entertainment. Later, Steve Jobs, who had depression, wanted people to focus their entire minds on iPhone.

Depressed people, whose brains like mine, like to stay low and run away by using their frontal lobe, this is what you feel when looking down on your phone too much.

He later used his convincing marketing method by overshadowing audiences with his heavy word and long speech, which is also out of those anxieties. Making people focus on their own “down-state” of depression to get money.

And what did programmers make? They focused on solving problems, anything that makes money, all the problems that weren’t necessarily a problem, making everyone hoping iOS has all the solutions, not God, not freedom in psychology. Without getting too technical in psychology, I hope it covers what most readers need to know. I was part of iOS Cocoacamp 2009, the 2nd iOS Bootcamp Apple ever did, and Scott Forestall talked a lot about what Jobs did when creating the iPhone. The spirit of the story was not much from what I wrote above.

This traps our minds. It traps everyone, especially with the rise of other tech companies that translate real relationships and free speech into digital media without real-life experience or values. For example, Facebook was a tool to find friends but has become a tool to digitize free speech and marketing. Without real-life experience, digital opportunities are just like a society that creates a new country without rules.

As a tech background person, I emphasize a lot on the thing to digitize, especially at the ideological and design level.

If they are not healthy or justifiable with a good reason, we should not make it.

People probably did not understand when Jony Ive talked about philosophy when making a design, but moral and spiritual factor comes with it. Because at the end of the day, a product is just a tool made to accomplish a goal and automating how.