"Fireproof" Shows Technology's Impact On Religion, Courts

Basically there's this macho firefighter, doing macho heroic deeds: saving lives, hanging out with all the other macho guys, being a super all-round person. Then there's this kind of porcelain china doll wife, working at the hospital. They fight a lot. He's saving for a boat and watching porn on the internet and she's feeling humiliated and belittled by both of those behaviors.

So his dad gets him to try this 40-day program that eventually involves him having a religious conversion and getting back to his wife. As part of his improvement, he takes his computer out into the yard and beats the hell out of it with a baseball bat. After he gives up everything to his wife -- his money, his computer, his free time -- she comes around and decides he's worth sticking with after all.

The computer sacrifice shot, however, really disturbed me -- it was a perfectly fine desktop system! And there he was, fighting his pornography problem, by taking a bat to it in his backyard. To take the place of it he leaves a big vase of roses on the desk with a note for his wife "I love you more"

That was probably a muticore system with a nice graphics card! And it didn't look like cheap crapola, it could have been a Dell or an HP! Destroying it with a bat!

The problem with this entire scenario, and the problem with court system as well when it comes to computers, is that it views computers as being kind of like souped-up VCRs: something you play. An external entertainment device. Instead, we hackers know that computers are extensions of our minds; amplifiers of our thoughts and memories.

The reason we have such problems when discussing the legality or morality of how we use the computer is that some of us view the computer as an external device and some of us view is as a prosthetic. I want any tunes I like for free on my computer because after all, I can whistle and sing any tune I like to myself and what's the difference? Others want to control what goes on my computer because it's a device that repeats a performance, and repeat performances should always give some kind of credit back to the creators. We "watch" the computer like we used to watch TV.

It's a major difference in worldviews.

In the movie, our macho-jerk-becoming-sensitive-guy discovers that "anything that you put your time and energy into above your marriage is a parasite on your marriage, and must be eliminated"

I'm not going into the many flaws of that -- I just hope my neurosurgeon is thinking solely about me while he operates, and that he's spending a lot of time dedicated to medicine. But what fascinated me was the idea that spending time on a computer was somehow taking time away from somebody else. I think it might be channeling your time through the computer, and I think that might not be a good thing, but I don't think it's necessarily taking time from anybody.

I guess to an older generation it seems more obvious than to a younger one that grew up with cell phones and email. After all, I've made the case on this blog that we need to unplug more and that technology is becoming more and more addictive. At the same time, however, I firmly believe that technology is just a mind-amplifier. I keep tunes because I like singing and listening to music. (I pay for them). Joe keeps porn because he has a libido and as a normal human male would use it from time to time. Mary keeps recipes because that's what she would normally think about.

People keep things and use the computer based on the way they naturally think. It's a joining of mind and machine, far beyond the simple involvement of watching TV. As I've noted before, parts of that are bad. Current peripherals cannot take the place of social context, body language, exercise, cultural stimulation, etc. But parts are good. I can email my mom in Florida with pictures of the grandkids. My wife and I can have a long-distance heart-to-heart talk using email. My great, great grandkids can read things I thought long after I am gone. The good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad.

Computers are addictive, I don't think there's any question about that. From the standpoint of normal social interaction, they are taking the place of other important stuff we would be doing. But they're addictive in the same way food is addictive: it's stuff we need -- only we have no social norms on how to consume it when we can have all we want. Our technology outstrips our morality and social mores.

But destroying your computer seems like going way too far. It would be like "if your eye offend you, pluck it out". And I'm not really big into eye-plucking. One of the interesting new problems we face with computers is that because they are extensions of our minds, our previously private thoughts are becoming public. Some people are okay with being the flawed primates that we are. Some are horrified by it. Whatever the case, before all of this used to be internal to each person. Now our thoughts are also external.

So it's good to see religious institutions beginning to come to grasps with technology. As with everything else they've faced, their initial reaction is way overblown. But perhaps in a hundred years or two as a global society full of many beliefs we can grow new social norms for acceptable versus unacceptable technology use. Religions have always wanted to tell us what to think anyway. Now is the chance to them to come up with something practical that the rest of us might be able to use.

But don't hold your breath.