As the writing process helps me to become somewhat more conscious of my anger, I notice that I am often angry with inanimate objects.

My cellphone is too slow. WTF!

I wash a cup and place it in the over-crowded dish-rack and cause dishes to fall. God damn it!

As I yell at these objects, I’m reminded of Ivan Illich’s point that only a slave-holding society would have thought to invent robots. Illich called modern gadgets “energy slaves.”

I mean that, at some deep level, my socialization into whiteness has made me prone to assuming that technology exists to serve me. I have an ingrained, entitled sense that my surroundings should automatically comply with my will. Or if not, they deserve my wrath.

I mean that there is something racist about me yelling at my cellphone, as if it were a non-human or sub-human energy slave.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.