“Filling to fullness is not as good
as stopping at the right moment.
Over-sharpening a blade causes its edge
to be lost.
Line your home with treasures and you
won’t be able to defend it.
Amass possessions,
establish positions,
display your pride:
Soon enough disaster drives you to your knees.
This is the way of heaven:
do your work, then quietly step back.
—The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (translated by Brian Browne Walker), Passage # 9
‘Tis the Season for RED…..
Red Santa costumes. Red & white striped candy canes. Red-leafed chrysanthemum. Red-berried mistletoe. Red stockings hung on the mantle….
Red is the color of passion and appetite. It is judiciously used in fast-food restaurants, junk-food packaging and shopping malls to stimulate customers into feeding and shopping frenzies.
Red represents temptation and the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden (think Red apples). Red is the color of the lights used to advertise pornography and prostitution in “Red-light districts”.
Red is also the color of sacrifice and the spilt blood of Christ. This is why the Pope wears red shoes (so we are told). Satanists also wear red shoes to hide the blood drips from their sacrificial alters (or so that story goes).
Infamous tech lobbyist Tony Podesta (the “King of K Street”) also loves to wear red (Prada-brand) shoes, as does comedian Bill Maher (both in and out of his wizard costume). For Tony’s 65thbirthday party he asked that all of his guests wear red shoes in his honor.
Tony also runs a shoe-donation charity called “Soles4Souls”, but does his work as a tech lobbyist lead to trading Souls4Soles instead?
Are we trading our own souls for the soles of the red shoes; the glittering shoes that enticed, entranced and entrapped our tragic folktale victim (from The Red Shoes fable) in a death dance?
Are we being steered like self-steering missiles or sadistic-psychosurgeon-cybernetician José Delgado’s remote-controlled bull (stopped in its tracks in the act of charging Delgado’s red cape through his radio-frequency-emitting “stimoceiver”) by our enchanting technology,[1]with our appetites stimulated and weaponized against us?
This Christmas will you let yourself and your loved ones be seduced and trapped by the color Red, by the red shoes of technology?
Will you blindly line up for the latest tech toy—fully oblivious to the (red) blood sacrificed in the Congolese mines where men, women and children are forced to work at gun point, and the lives of approximately two children are sacrificed for each iPhone[i]?
Or in the factories where the high employee suicide rates led to the installation of “suicide nets” (to catch jumpers), because suicide is often the only escape from the torturous drudgery and slave-like conditions in places like Foxconn, in China, where iPhones are assembled[ii] [iii] [iv].
(These hidden deaths and worker exploitations in faraway places are seen as collateral damage by tech companies, because were iPhones to be assembled in the US, they would carry a price tag of at least $30,000 each.[v])
Will you allow the red-shoes dance to sweep you away, unaware of the costs, both hidden and overt; such as the environmental costs of AI (with each AI GTP-Chat prompt requiring 500 milliliters of water)[vi], and with AI exponentially increasing the never-ending sprawl of data centers (eight million and counting),and data-center energy use and waste, threatening the destruction of public parks and wilderness areas[vii] [viii], generating over two million tons of e-waste annually, containing hazmats like lead, mercury, ammonia, and chlorine, requiring vast amounts of energy (projected to reach 10% of global power consumption by 2030), and water (3-5 million gallons of water per data center per day, totaling 174-billon-gallons of water in 2020)[ix] [x]needed to support the never-ending digital consumption?
And while wireless transmissions may be invisible to the naked human eye the invisible internet information highway is not ephemeral; it is a network on a scale vastly exceeding that of any “asphalt and concrete analogues”.
It is “comprised of about 3 billion miles of glass cables” in addition to “the equivalent of another 100 billion miles… of invisible connections forged by 4 million cell towers”. Riding this virtual information super highway, watching only one hour of streaming video content exceeds the share of fuel consumed by one person riding ten miles on a bus.[xi]
And the effects of the electromagnetic radiation poisoning are well-documented (over 50,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies) and far-reaching (as detailed in all of my books).
Will you ignore the pain and disablement caused by tech addiction in yourself, your friends and family members?
Or, will you instead, step back, reconsider, and begin to make conscious choices about tech use and consumerism?
As the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu states (in the Tao Te Ching passage quoted at the beginning of this post), “Filling to fullness is not as good as stopping at the right moment.”
As the Okinawa and other “Blue Zone” peoples (those who have, up until modern times, consistently lived long, healthy lives, many well into centurion years) demonstrate, by practicing this wisdom in daily living, by eating only until 80% full at each meal, long healthy, sane living can be achieved.
Other commonalities in Blue Zone centurions include spending a large percentage of their days out of doors, gardening, moving their bodies, “forest bathing”, meditating, and practicing moderation in all things.
One thing is certain, they were not tech-tethered, not spending the greater part of their days with their eyes glued to screens and their bodies hunched over, bowing in submission to smartphones.
*******
My recently departed 85-year-old Aunt Lucy loved the color red.
She loved to wear red sweatshirts and sweaters, red robes and red slippers.
She also loved to walk around her neighborhood untethered to tech.
Without a screen barrier between herself and her neighbors, she touched many lives through authentic, undiluted, uninterrupted connection, in a way that is sadly rare in today’s tech-dependent world. Here are some comments from neighbors reacting to the news of her passing….
“An amazing act of kindness just by a wave…” “Lucy was a bright light every time we crossed paths. We will miss waving to her in the neighborhood…” “No matter how many cars, she’d stop and wave to each one. Such a simple thing, but it made me smile every time…” “Our family loved her waves and smile when passing by…”
In one post, the neighbor admitted to having never met my aunt yet still benefitted from my aunt’s indiscriminating, boundless connection… “I never met her personally but will miss her waving to me every afternoon on my drive home from work. My kids will also miss her waving to them on the school bus.”
One such child told his friend on the bus (after Lucy waved to him), “That’s my Grandma.” Yet Lucy was not his actual Grandma. Hearing this made me wonder, did this boy not have a Grandma of his own, or did my aunt pay him more attention than his own Grandma did, because of disconnected tech addiction?
Others wrote about Lucy…
“She left her mark on the hearts of everyone she met and waved to…” “I’ll truly miss her bright smile and warm waves – she had a way of making everyone feel seen and loved… Her passing leaves a huge void in our neighborhood…” “I’ll miss her waving and smiling through Bristol Lake. She was always a bright spot in my day when I needed it…” “We have lived in Bristol Lake for 30 years and in those years not once did Lucy not take the time to stop and wave as we passed. No matter what mood we were in she always made the day brighter…”
And as two more posts testify, simple connection, taking the time to smile and wave to others on a daily basis is a powerful act of kindness, one in which too few are engaging in today’s tech-dependent world…
“…she was such a positive and refreshing occurrence of our day! My boys would come home and say ‘I saw and waved to the neighborhood lady today.’ I would stop and talk to her while walking our dog… she was just so happy and made me feel great after just that 5-minute chat. Will certainly be a big hole in our hearts not to see her. There are not enough people in the world to touch others so deeply with just a smiling face and waive…”
“Lucy was the best part of my afternoon when I was coming home from work, I would always see her walking. It never failed that she would stop and wave, and I got just as excited to wave to her. When the kids were with me, they would yell out ‘Hi miss Lucy’ and that always got the double wave and a big smile! She will be very missed. Lucy is a great reminder of simple kindness to others and most importantly small acts with GREAT love!”
As Aunt Lucy’s life demonstrated, the color red is not bad in and of itself. Outside of appetites and lust, it can also represent the warmth of love, hearth fires and friendship.
This season, if you wear red, may you wear it wisely, as my Aunt Lucy did, and seek out more connected, rooted, analog, real-world-based gifts and activities—ones that support humanity and all biological life forms—that sing hopeful songs of a better future, free from the grip of the Red Shoes, and digitally-driven planetary destruction.
Please also consider supporting my continued writing and research by buying my latest book, The Red Shoes; Our Devil’s Dance with Technology and How We Can Stop it, and/or by donating via PayPal (wifirefugee@nym.hush.com) or clicking on the donate button on my website (www.wifi-refugee.com)
And if you have read and enjoyed this latest or any of my other books, please remember to leave a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads.
And most importantly please remember that each day, each moment we have on Earth is a gift, meant to be cherished and shared, not to be robbed from us by our tools of “convenience”; better called tools of enslavement.
As a final note….
Time is our most precious gift, let us not waste it. Remember to put your screens away when you encounter one another. Stop, wave and smile, because as the great poet Mary Oliver wrote, when life is over she hoped to say; “all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement/ I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms”.
She also wrote of each life being like a flower; “as common/ as a field daisy, and as singular/ and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending as all music does, toward silence/ and each body a lion of courage, and something/ precious to the earth”.[xii]
We are all precious to this earth, each life matters. Let us remember this by showing one another our love and appreciation each day, and by remembering to stay “married to amazement” by being present so we can truly “take the world into our arms”.
As one of author of Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv’s interviewees said, she realized she was not suffering “ADHD” as diagnosed, but rather suffering from a “distance from beauty”, because of technology use.
How many of us with a similar diagnosis might be suffering the same distance from beauty?
Beauty is here, all around us, but few of us notice, as we are continually distracted from it by our many portable screens. We have to take time out to intentionally stop to notice it. The natural world wants to be seen and appreciated. It wants to benefit us.
It is my sincere hope and wish that we all disconnect more from our tech and reconnect more with the beauty of the natural world and within each of us, in the coming year.
With heartfelt, deep gratitude for all of you.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
[1] With the word technology being a compound of techne = “method, tool, sill or craft” and logia= “knowledge from the gods”. But we should ask, tools and knowledge from which gods; are they benevolent or sadistic?
[i] David Love, “The Mining of Coltan: Chances are Your Smartphone Was Manufactured With African Blood”, September 25, 2017, Atlanta Black Star
[ii] The Rate of Exploitation, the Case of the iPhone, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Notebook No. 2)
[iii] “My gadget guilt: Inside the Foxconn iPhone factory, Wired magazine, April 2011
[iv] “Life and Death in Apple’s Forbidden City”, RSN, Brian Merchant, Guardian UK, June 19, 2017.
[v] The Rate of Exploitation, the Case of the iPhone, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Notebook No. 2, iPhone would cost $30,000 to produce in the US, Medium, Sept. 23, 2019
[vi] Steven Santamaria, Jan. 22, 2024, Data Centers and the Climate Crisis: A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight”, Dataversity
[vii] National Parks Conservation Association, “Keep Massive Industrial Data Centers Away from our National Parks”
[viii] American Battlefield Trust, “Don’t Let Data Centers Destroy the Wilderness”
[ix] Steven Santamaria, Jan. 22, 2024, Data Centers and the Climate Crisis: A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight”, Dataversity
[x] June 2, 2020, DCR/Data Center Review “Are data centers destroying the environment?”
[xi] Mark P. Mills, “The ‘Energy Transition’ Won’t Happen: May 23, 2024.
[xii]Mary Oliver, Poem 102: When Death Comes