The version used is KJV

About Technology - Part1

A primer for plain people to navigate adoption of technology into their communities

Raj Balasubramanian iyer@brahminbeliever.com

Summary: In this post I setup the basis for a series to come on technology, cautions and warnings for fuller walk with the God of the Bible.

About

I was asked recently by few plain communities on specifics of smartphones, applications and what would be some dangers. In addition, I have been watching the plain communities drift in various ways around the phone and technology issue that has hit almost all communities.

This is my attempt to document my understanding of this space given my secular work role as the lead for various mobile technologies (my nickname for a long time was mobileraj within various tech companies) and then cloud technologies, and my ongoing walk with my Messiah Jesus Christ, who is the only begotten Son of the Most High, who saved me from my sins and continues to make way for my walk to be acceptable before the Most High.

This will be a series of essays and notes. I do not want to provide specific recommendations or answers, but this is meant to showcase my thinking and what I have been struggling with myself in trying to answer the questions around smartphones. Please treat these as suggestions and lines of thinking, for you to apply it in your plain community church following prayer and fasting.

Defining a smartphone

There was a day in early 2000s where one could say whether you had a smartphone or dumb phone. This was possible even in 2010s. But in the last decade with the convergence on the technology front - from phone design, various innovations in sensory devices, increased bandwidth availability, ubiquitous connectivity and general increase of computing power, has made defining the distinction between phones to classify them into one of the above smart or dumb category almost impossible. I also think, we need to ask the question differently since the classification is not a binary one.

Therefore I propose we look at aspects of form and functions in a grading scale to answer this, while classifying if a device, a brother in the plain community or a church as a whole is looking at, meets church guidelines.

Here then are the questions to ask:
- Potency: what all can you do
- Speed: what all can you do faster
- Ease: what all can you do more easily, conveniently
- Location: where all can you do this
- Price: what all can you do for free or lower cost
- Portability: all-in-one, can you do all the above in one device

Note that, although there are six dimensions or areas, they all work in harmony to create the benefit or destruction, one views. Just like a plowshare can be turned to sword to attack, it can also be used to plough fields. We need to balance the good these devices do using the above areas to the actual detriment it causes, but more so, the spiritual destruction I see, that I have observed in my own life and others and what I see to come.

Each of these questions will be setup and then used in subsequent posts to analyze various devices. But in this post I will provide some examples to qualify each of the six dimensions or areas.

Potency

The power of these devices can be qualified by the number of things we can do now in one device or multiple integrated set of devices instead of having separate special-purpose devices. For example, the first Palm Pilot, you could keep your to dos, manage calendar and email and keep your meeting notes, but could not make a phone call. When the first iPhone came, you had a phone, music player, camera and the functions of Palm Pilot in one device.

Although, the operating system (OS underlying these devices) have grown in functionality, which is what provides the device's potency, we cannot use just the OS as a distinguishing mark to differentiate if a device is smart or dumb. This space has consolidated itself into two prominent OS - iOS (that Apple devices run) and Android (the rest run). There have been attempts since early 2000s to make open source variants of this or other proprietary versions by companies, but all have resorted to using Android (which was made open source) and all of the phone invariably has one of these, even if the phone does not expose the fact its running an OS.

There are two foundational elements in which a device derives its potency: hardware and software.

The hardware sensors in the device is one of the two, of what makes it that much more powerful or potent. Here are some key hardware related functionalities that have increased in each of their potency themselves:

• rich display: from OLED and crystal displays, compact and lightweight, which provides rich displays on the screen.
• audio and voice controls: both speakers and mic systems built in which makes making calls, listening to video and audio and such
• multi-modal interaction: from visual input of using touch screen to haptic sensors to actual QWERTY keyboards to peripherals that provide additional modes of interactions
• geolocation & movement detector: ability to track the location and altitude
• bluetooth and NFC (near field communication): two different protocols to help inter-device communication
• camera(s): most smartphones in the market in 2022 has atleast 2 cameras, some have 3-4.
• fingerprint reader used now for authenticating users but also has the power to detect other things in the future.
• extensions supported for other functions (home security system; utilities like cook stove, washer, dryer etc.; TV and music players and other entertainment devices)

The other is the software, which is enabled via the OS that powers the phone. With the monetization strategy of the companies, every entity needs to have an app via the app store of the OS provider, akin to what commerce did in early 90s when every company needed to have a web site to show their presence online. Its these apps that have the power to fully unlock what the underlying devices can do. Apps themselves fall into various categories from games, banking, social media, music and video playing to specific ones like using camera to measure distance or GPS to track and guide routes.

Therefore potency of the device is enabled by the hardware it contains and harnessed by the software it runs. The hardware leverages the investment in cellular and wifi infrastructure which provides connectivity to Internet and software leverages the app ecosystem that provides various ways to leverage the functionality that is exposed by the hardware. The device design also accommodates various peripherals and accessories like TV, projector, keyboards, printers and any other bluetooth enabled devices.

Speed

Moore's Law (which predicted computing power to double roughly every 2 years), although not a law of science, is generally used to indicate how much the computing power has increased and will continue. This has then enabled all sorts of automation, augmentation and assistance possible through computers in general and these devices in particular, that was not even in the imagination of people just a decade earlier. Due to the increased demand, corporate competitions to stay on the edge by creating innovative products and general spirit of the age, I do not see this ever slowing down, left up to man, without the Most High's intervention.

From sending and checking email, to recalling what I ate for dinner two nights ago, to where all I travelled last month can now be pulled up with just few swipes. In addition, what used to take several minutes or hours is now just matter of milliseconds due to the bandwidth and faster computing power.

The hardware and the software mentioned above unlocks this speed, which makes all of the functions that much faster, supported by the infrastructure, with a swipe or gesture or a voice response. Instead of typing the question, you can ask the question or shake your phone to perform some action.

How fast the information travels and spreads due to the web, bandwidth and access has significantly increased the overall speed in which things can be done on the device.

Ease

The next area is around ease and comfort: how much friction that the device removes in doing the said thing faster and with ease. Since the onset of industrial revolution and our culture in particular has been conditioned for comfort and ease, and trained to view comfort and ease as a metric of progress, this aspect is especially seen as positive and desirable. Why walk over to check on the temperature in the barn, if your device can talk to the thermostat in the barn and inform you on your screen. Why travel to the library to research a topic, when by text search or by voice asking (Siri or Alexa) your device can bring all the relevant information on the topic.

I believe the difference this time from the predecessors of technology that made our life easy or comfortable, is around how much more it alters our behavior in training us to come to expect this ease and comfort as a birthright. Therefore when this ease is taken away, as when there is an outage of certain web properties on the Internet or a cell tower outage, people loose their calm and start to clamor as a drug-crazed individual might when they do not get their drug fix.

Location

The main aspects of where the device(s) can be used is an important area, as this is one of the major distinguishing characteristics that aide in portability. The locations the device can be used to perform the desirable functions may not always need connectivity. For example, a game app on the device can be used in disconnected mode or with limited connectivity to Internet for a person to play the game on the device and waste time. Due to the deployment of 5G towers and lowcost bandwith options and many public areas having free wifi, there is always connectivity available for the device to not only perform the function, but also leverage the context of the location to do additional things.

I had in my previous life designed a an app for truckers that not only downloaded maps of their routes to guide them on long distance travels (when it was still 3G and 4G was just coming along) but also used nearby attractions to send promotions based on their driving direction. If Loves wanted to advertise to them over Pilot, then the said company can broadcast promotional materials based on the direction they were headed and offer deals at the next nearby location enroute.

The ubiquitous nature of connectivity and widespread cell tower deployments has made location of the device immaterial for it to still be useful. There are still parts of midwest (like my barn and garage) and mountains that have no connectivity or dead zones in terms of coverage, but the apps can be designed to still function to provide whatever service they need to fulfill their creator goals even while disconnected. Similar to the above example, I had designed some apps that synced data before going offline and pipeline workers could have all the data on their local device when they went underground to remain functioning even when they were 2 hours from any form of connectivity. The combination of offline mode and ubiquitous connectivity makes the functioning of device uninterrupted for the users of the device.

Price

There was a time when you had to not only pay for the device, but also pay for minutes used in using the device, bandwidth used and pay for any special functionality like apps offered on the device. With the convergence of technology and incentive programs, devices and monthly plans have become so low that you can get them for a days McDonalds wage if you sign up for the plan, you can get the device for free and unlimited bandwidth.

I used to say that if some company is offering free service to you, then you are the product. This has been proven out with social media platforms like Google, Facebook and the like, which are all free from a price standpoint, but there is a cost you pay that is not in dollars and cents. Google was the first major internet company that fully monetized what the users were doing on the free search service they offered, so that they were able to offer more free things like a browser, operating system, mail and calendar services and further harness the activities of the users.

Although, we would think twice when a deal is offered in the real world for free to check if its a gimmick or if there were catches, we get annoyed if there is a fee for something offered in the virtual world. This phenomenon of expecting things for free in the virtual world itself has been driven by the technology monetization on the internet in the last two decades. This behavior change where the younger generation is willing to trade their privacy and security for free service will be covered in a subsequent post.

Portability

The biggest area that makes the perils of these devices is how much thought has been put into their design that makes it not only portable in your pocket, hip or jacket, but how much of a status symbol they have become. Gone are the days when you wear an expensive watch to showcase your status, now, you just flash your device with the latest model, case and harness and any other accessories that is in vogue. From wired head sets to bluetooth ear pieces to inset ear pieces to watches that connect to the device to glasses that can serve as a third eye working with the devices, each becomes a symbol in itself to boost your social score in a group or public setting.

The portability aspect will become more pronounced as the devices get smaller or purpose built and many of them working together deliver increased functionality and ushers in more ease and comfort. This enables an always on mindset as something you wear (watch, eye glasses, ear piece etc.) can work with something you have/carry (phone, keychain, wallet etc.) to be connected and active even if you are not engaged in the use of the said device. We have a bit of that already in the current landscape - a runner wearing an Apple Watch with a bluetooth headset (ear buds) can be listening to music while running, on a route that was planned and suggested by the app and then interrupt his run to order food from another app talking via his ear buds.

Devices

As you have noticed in the prior section, I have used the word device as the generic term to include phone and other technologies. The choice of using this word was deliberate, as this is the general word used in the world to describe these technologies. In KJV, if you do a word study on device(s), you will see the the full context of the evil connotations that this word conveys, although it is not the same physical meaning it has today.

The modern dictionaries in Hebrew use anglicized word teknolojia for english word technology. But the word for technology for the longest in the spoken and written Hebrew for the last several decades was makshaf and is from the same root word kashaf which means witchcraft, conjuring, sorceries (as used in 2Kings 9:22).

I plan to do a word study in subsequent posts on the various origins of these words.

Immersive experience

When I ran the mobile product, we looked to ensure the companies building apps could keep the attention of their users - like the banking app was good enough to outdo a competing banking app by making the customer more engaged.

The social media, game and other entertainment apps on the other hand wanted to provide an immersive experience so user is fully engaged on their device. The measurement for how well a company did moved from profits from actual products to how one can monetize the user engagement from these devices. There has been several articles and book written about the attention economy. Since one can take these devices the immersive experience can happen where ever they went.

User attention became the currency and the measure was to increase user engagement using these devices.

This resulted in companies hiring psychology, sociology and ethnology graduates to build technology that was more appealing, more connected, emotional and relevant to culture.

The other major advances in these devices resulted in some of the peripherals/accessories now able to provide a immersive reality using VR goggles. VR is virtual reality and has been around several decades, but with the glasses and goggles, once can be among a group of people but live in their own world totally disconnected from the surroundings, as their sight now is also device driven. The advances in glasses also provides options for extending and augmenting reality itself, using augmented reality (AR) techniques. Although, both AR/VR can be useful in learning and bettering oneself, the most prolific usecases are in games, pornography and other forms of entertainment.

Privacy and security

We will cover this topic in subsequent posts, but the main challenge many technology experts in the early 80s and 90s started to speak out against the Internet and the devices was around loss of privacy and weakened security. Therefore I wanted to tee this topic up here. The plain communities have always been private in how they have conducted themselves, in being called out of the world. In addition, the lifestyle itself is hard for the general public to follow, since its simple and hard without conveniences. But the technology adoption around these devices will erase that. Now every movement, swipe, access and call can be monitored, tracked and used to learn general patterns of behavior or specific targeted behavior.

A personal story to drive this point home. My wife was with our sons in a 4H camp in 2016. This camp was in the middle of nowhere Texas and there was no cell reception. So she put her iPhone in airplane mode (no internet or cell connectivity), and would only come online, when she was at the main office to call me in the evening. One evening, she had a long dialog with another mom, as that mom was planning wedding for her oldest daughter. Then the camp ended and she set out with our sons back home. As she entered the next big city, when her phone went online, she started receiving ads in her web browser for wedding dresses, she started getting promotions on bridal events and such.

There have been numerous stories in the new media on this sort of thing, from how Alexa (from Amazon) has been used to catch a thief in the neighborhood, since Alexa was listening to the sounds of the surroundings, even when the home owner was not home, to, how a father found out her daughter was pregnant from an ad he received for diapers and baby products based on his daughters search and online activity.

Summary

Summarizing this post, the device then becomes the channeler of what the creators of the device and the apps, want the users to be able to do. The various dimensions we looked at that qualifies and quantifies the device is made possible by the hardware it has and the software it runs. These in turn are powered by a growing ecosystem of apps and accessories/peripheries that can be used to engage the user more. All of this is made possible by the connectivity to the Internet and the power that is harnessed from it. This is where the power of AI (artificial intelligence) and Blockchain technologies (powering Bitcoin and crypto currencies) is being brought on to these devices.

This post will be followed with Part 2, where we will review some suggestions on guidelines based on the dimensions of a device we have looked at. I will use biblical principle to illustrate what is the detriment to each of the dimension we have covered. I am still new in my walk with Christ Jesus, being saved in mid 2017, so take these with your discernment filters on. I will take some specific examples to walk through this as well, to provide how I look at the devices, which may be of interest to some.