Today, I heard the best Cornerstone speech so far.
The speaker was Bill Rankin with the speech "Does Technology Unite or Divide Us?" He started out with a video, claiming that he couldn't make it to the presentation today, but a good friend of his who is big in technology and wears jeans, tennis shoes, and a black turtleneck would be speaking instead (Steve Jobs). I did believe him for a fraction of a second, hoping that Jobs would speak, not considering that ACU would have made a huge ordeal of it, announcing it and making him speak at chapel and whatnot. Nevertheless, Steve Jobs did not speak. Rankin did, dressed like Steve Jobs.
At the beginning of the speech, Rankin asked us to consider if technology unites or divides us. He talked about how technology can be used in two ways: competition or collaboration, showing examples via his power-point of the Native Americans and their spears being slaughtered by the Europeans and their rifles. He then showed us a clip from the 1992 film "Baraka," where a time lapse effect is used to speed up daily occurrences of people. We see humans in a factory rapidly constructing dozens of pieces of technology; we see people flooding in and out of subway stations, out of business buildings, so quickly and fluidly that it seems like a human river; we see thousands of eggs filtering through a conveyor belt, and we see baby chicks on a similar belt, being dropped from level to level, having their beaks burned off, and being crowded in a room with thousands of other chicks and chickens, all for the purpose of feeding our consumption.
It was at this point that Rankin phrased an idea that I will never forget. He said, "our lives are built on the blood of others." He talked about how we all have either an iPhone or an iPod, and that these wonderful devices were created by people in a factory with such terrible working conditions that some workers there thought it would be better to kill themselves than to continue working. He said that Americans consume 32 times more than the rest of the world (the stuff we consume that he was talking about, I'm not sure). And we do things just because we can. Our lives are built on the blood of others. We have so much, and most of us don't consider where it came from, who made it, how it got into our possession. To us, it began its real existence on the shelf of that store from which we bought it. Where did my bed come from? Where did the computer I'm typing on come from? Where did the food I eat come from? It's difficult to think about this because I have no starting point--I don't know how to make a shirt, so I can't picture someone making one. Maybe we've fallen so far because we no longer know what it takes to create the things we consume. I'm baffled--how do you even make a shirt?
Rankin showed us the dilemma of our consumption, and with that he showed us our responsibility. We can not merely consume and refuse to consider how it came to us or what affect it has on the rest of the world. For symbolic purposes, he had us turn our phones off for two minutes in honor of those who killed themselves at the price of our consumption. I had to remember how to turn my phone off because I don't do it often enough. While silent, I tried to imagine that I was one of the workers at the Apple factory who was about to kill themselves, to put myself into their mindset. I thought, "all this, so Americans can have something they don't need. Something so they can have fun." We have more money than most people in the world, and we need more things than most people in the world to make us happy. That's why Jesus said money and possessions are dangerous. Because the more you have, even more you feel you need.
However, Rankin showed us that there was hope. Technology is used for competition and consumption, but it can also be used for collaboration and restoration. He then showed us three clips illustrating how technology was used creatively to bring the world together, to share hope and beauty. The first was Playing for Change, where street musicians around the world played and sang "Stand By Me," which was recorded by a man who combined them all to make a beautiful song. Then we saw another clip, this one was of different youtube videos that had been spliced together to make a song, again beautiful. The third was a virtual symphony of voices, all singing one song to their individual computer screen. All of these videos had the theme that technology can unify to create something wonderful. Each left me feeling hopeful about art, as well as humanity.
This was the best Cornerstone speech we've had so far, because it both unmistakably reveals a problem, shows both hypothetical outcomes, and presents an optimistic hope in the future. I am left with a desire to do something, to take hold of the responsibility that comes with my lifestyle, and live responsibly. How do I do that? I think if I consider it long enough, and even ask God, I'll find an answer. I think God supports those trying to live with others in mind.
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