Growing up Low-Tech: How my 1970s Semi-Feral, Free-Ranging Childhood Helps Me to Resist Big Bro
It wasn't just shag rugs, ABBA and bad mustaches
Image: The author and her best friend, Suzie, by Carolyn Jevelian and John Beske
It’s
Man, that was an itchy dress.
A wider, fairer lens needs to look at an era, though. In retrospect, while some impressions are certainly well-earned, there was a lot that was really worth celebrating about the era as well. Women and our allies worked tirelessly for equal rights and set an unprecedented, creative and imperfect model of working together for social change. (I highly recommend the book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller and the 2019 documentary 9to5: The Story of a Movement if you can find it.) In 1972, Title IX and its protections against sex discrimination in education and federally funded programs (which is currently being unraveled by the Trump administration) was passed. In 1974, the first out LGBTQ person to run for and win office, Kathy Kozachenko, served on Ann Arbor’s city council, and in 1977, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man to run for office in California, where he served on San Francisco’s board of supervisors until his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullets. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress became the first Black woman to run on the Democratic Party ticket for President of the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency was confirmed under a Republican president in 1970, and the Clean Water Act was signed into law in 1972. (Again, tragically, this is progress today’s Republican party is undoing.) I’m not saying the time was perfect, no decade is, but I am saying that real advancements were happening in the 1970s that don’t get acknowledged.
Credit: Barbara Freeman/Getty Images
Credit: American Statesman
Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan
I was three in 1970, so I cannot tell you the adult experience of the era but I will say that I am utterly grateful my childhood was in the era of Big Wheels, not Big Tech Bros. Growing up when I did, I had a real childhood, climbing trees and scraping knees, no helicopter parents where they weren’t needed. There was kickball every summer night on the culdesac, endless games – Mother May I, Simon Says, Red Rover, Ghost in the Graveyard, Charlie’s Angels – and adventures to embark upon after breakfast, then a quick refueling at lunch, and finally outside again until the street lights came on. We learned how to get along as kids on Romona Road just left on our own, and when we couldn’t get along, a short but intense crab apple battle between divisions would help us defend our honor and territories. For the most part, though, we just did our feral thing.
It was certainly not perfect, of course. Honest conversations about uncomfortable subjects, like addiction, spousal abuse and homosexuality, did not happen easily and were often swept under the mustard shag rug. Because there was so much that was still taboo – adults who grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s were raising children of the 1970s, after all – things like child sexual abuse was often either not noticed or ignored. For abused children, it has never been easy, but it was very hard in the 1970s to find an adult advocate about something that just wasn’t acknowledged. During the time, racist humor was not “racist”: It was just humor. There is a lot about the 1970s that was thrown into the dustbin of a bygone era, thankfully. There is also a lot that would probably make us collectively happier if it were reintroduced, though.
I am not an anti-technology person. If not for modern medicine and surgery, for example, my husband would not be alive after being diagnosed with leukemia and I would have died giving birth to my son. Technology helps us to predict extreme weather conditions, reduce water waste, hear better and walk again after an amputation. It keeps my treasured photographs safe after a number of losses in basement floods. Technology, including a problematic app from a notorious bro, has helped me to stay connected to my childhood and college friends as well as extended family. It’s helped me to broadcast words and ideas that I believe matter and exposed them to a wider audience than I ever thought possible. It helps activists find one another and work together on important causes.
I also understand the allure of screens and am not immune to them myself, nor was I as a child. Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the Electric Company and Zoom as well as Scooby Doo and, yes, my treasured Saturday morning cartoons, were stitched in the fabric of my childhood experience so tightly that you could not pull on one thread without changing what it was and my love for it.
While I am definitely nostalgic, I am not idealizing the generation in which I grew up because, as I said, there were plenty of problems that shouldn’t be brushed aside or excused. A lot of times when people speak of an era glowingly, it’s romanticizing and whitewashing a time when not everyone had similar opportunities and experiences, and, in fact, were actively excluded. What I am drawn to in my adventures in re-humaning is noticing where and when I default by habit into a data-mining tech product that makes me feel depleted or lesser than and instead consciously realigning with my flesh-and-blood humanity, not reliving an old era.
This can look like stopping scrolling. This can look like reading a book, gardening or drawing a picture when I’m looking for something to do rather than zoning out on a streaming service. This can look like getting together with friends. Returning again and again to this embodied, present moment and what feels better rather than what has become habituated is the practice I have been trying to cultivate over the last year. Putting tech, meaning digital and information technologies, in its proper place – a useful tool to consciously choose at times, not an external product with an outsized control over my daily life and thus my whole life – means that I am returning to myself, my relationships, my senses, my uninterrupted thoughts and noticing that when I feel human again, not robotic and chained to a techno-surveillance device, I am happier. Over time, this practice has become more habituated. Now, instead of scrolling through social media when I am waiting at the grocery store checkout, I am usually using that time to re-human and feel embodied again. It’s not the most thrilling thing, I’ll admit that, but it’s better than numbing out, and it’s active training in being present again. We all need to opt out sometimes with mindless delights. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s healthy even. It comes to be a problem when we are addicted to opting out and not noticing.
Being present in the world, minimizing distractions and disconnections, is exactly what the Trump administration and the Big Tech Titans do not want from us because they need for us to be as checked out, indifferent and unaware as possible to accomplish their goals. Resolutely and intentionally returning to our core humanity, which includes care and action for one another and the planet, is the single greatest threat to their agendas.