The Best Thing I Learned At SXSW Was From the Unabomber

Now that I’m back and mostly recovered from South by Southwest, my friends, editors and fellow reporters keep asking me about the most interesting thing I saw in Austin.

Some things I have already written about.

Others, I haven’t been able to get out of my mind, like the chat I had with David Skrbina, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Mr. Skrbina, a polite, mild-mannered man, is not your typical SXSW attendee. He doesn’t use Facebook or know what it means to Snapchat someone. He checks his e-mail a few times a week because he has to for his job. For the most part, he manages to stay away from the devices and services that saturate many of our lives. For example, I was running a bit behind for our meeting so I texted him to let him know. Several minutes later, I received his terse, succinct reply: “Call.”

When we met, Mr. Skrbina showed me the battered flip phone I had sent the  text to, and admitted that he didn’t really know how to use it. In fact, it was his wife’s.

“She makes me bring it with me when I travel,” he said with an embarrassed shrug.

Mr. Skrbina was in Austin to debate the merits of technology, and you can guess which side he came down on. He thinks we would be better off without any of it, and has no interest in exploring reasons  we might need more of it. After he finished his talk, he planned to duck into a talk by a political cartoonist and then head out of town to catch his flight home to Michigan.

Mr. Skrbina was heavily influenced by the lengthy manifesto written in 1995 by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, which cast doubt on the benefits of technology and raised questions about unforeseen consequences of technology in modern society. Mr. Skrbina, began corresponding with Mr. Kaczynski, and helped to publish a collection of essays a few years ago. But he is quick to say that he does not condone or endorse the violent actions of Mr. Kaczynski.

“But just because he is a criminal doesn’t mean he’s not a rational, intelligent, thinker,” Mr. Skrbina said. He is a firm believer in Mr. Kaczynski’s principles, and Mr. Skrbina’s two daughters grew up calling the Unabomber Uncle Ted.

Mr. Skrbina says that many modern ailments and conditions â€" attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and aggravated stress â€" are the direct result of cognitive difficulties exacerbated by the influence of technology. ”We aren’t evolved to live that highly interactive of a lifestyle,” he said. “We don’t adapt well to it.”

Mr. Skrbina understands that most people don’t agree with him. He just thinks they’re wrong. Technology “is taking time away from the more important things in life,” he said.

Talking to Mr. Skrbina while surrounded by people animatedly showing off their apps and Web sites to other people clutching smartphones or tablets was disconcertingly surreal. Our conversation started with me talking about my own love affair with my iPhone, jokingly calling it my boyfriend. Mr. Skrbina leaned forward to interrupt me. “You know that’s not good for you, right” he said.

At the time, I laughed it off. I was amused. How could I not be I love technology and it loves me. It was the beginning of the conference and I was giddy, ready to hit the streets with a fully charged phone and a Mophie juice pack.

But by Monday afternoon, I had had peaked. My eyes were glazed over, after hours of  looking at apps and hearing people talking about how their new social thing was going to be the Next Big Thing. It didn’t feel neutral and it didn’t feel optional. It felt inescapable. Admittedly I was worn out by then, and had eaten more free Doritos tacos than I’d like to admit publicly. My brain felt warped. Mr. Skrbina’s words bobbed to the surface of my mind and made a lot more sense than they did a few days earlier.

At SXSW, the culture of pervasive technology becomes so overwhelming you don’t even notice it. It seeps into everything. While watching a crew of rogue construction workers aimlessly beat a discarded length of pipe in my hotel’s parking lot, I joked that they were players frustrated by the snags in the new SimCity game. Later, when a weary exercise troupe started working out next to them on the hot asphalt, I wondered aloud if they had gotten a bad Groupon deal. It is an extreme place. The real world doesn’t have people giving demonstrations of a gesture-based controller next to a barbecue pit, or feature talks by Shaquille O’Neal raving about his new star-up company. But it points to a future that we are barreling toward, one where tech culture is pop culture, not a shadowy niche or the hobbyist obsession of a bunch of nerds.

But Mr. Skrbina’s and Mr. Kaczynski’s ideology is also extreme. It’s too late for reform, they say, so the only solution is to excise technology from our lives and society as a whole. For most of us that’s not an option; it’s not even an option for Mr. Skrbina if he hopes to keep his job. Still, he said, it was important to think more critically about the role of technology in our lives, and attempt to control it. In a few decades, will we look back at our freewheeling digital days as the digital equivalent of the era of smoking in movie theaters and airplanes Will it become clear that our current habits are harmful, and that they wreaked havoc before being reined in

I’m the first to argue that technology has improved my life. I cannot imagine my existence without it. It has formed the basis of my career, enriched my friendships and relationships. I’ve watched with pleasure as the distinction between the online and offline worlds has narrowed. If I could hitch a ride on the next SpaceX vessel leaving Earth, I would. I’ve had more fun Snapchatting with friends on a recent Friday night than I have at any bar. I will take it, flaws and all, because this new industrial revolution is the most exciting thing I know I’ll see in my lifetime.

Save yourselves; there’s no hope for me.

But talking to Mr. Skrbina underscored the importance of thinking about these things, because they aren’t going away any time soon. At the moment, that conversation “is a nonexistent discussion right now,” he said. This rang especially true in Austin. But after we spoke, I noticed an undercurrent at the conference of a few panels and hallway conversations that touched on Mr. Skrbina’s points. Nev Schulman, the man behind the Catfish movie and MTV show, shared some of his observations of watching children across America realize the person they had been communicating with was not who he seemed to be. Carl Sandler, one of creators of a dating application called Mister, sat down next to me after a panel and said he had been thinking more about how mobile dating apps can be reductive to the people who are hoping to find true connections wthin them. App developers, he said,  can make design choices that help people slow down their usage.

Critical introspection isn’t always a popular stance. After a Google Glass demonstration, I raised some skeptical points on Twitter about the social and ethical complexities surrounding the device â€" and was almost immediately called a technophobe by a well-known pundit.

Sure, I get it. No one wants to be left behind. But maybe it’s better to take that risk now than regret it later.