A delicate dance of technology
I was looking at my bright, artistic, sensitive daughter bringing me tea after I watched her play the latest seasonal event in Animal Crossing, and thinking that the caregiving relationship already started to shift direction without even me realising it. I don't remember when it was that she started cooking for us more often than I do; then, at some point, it had just become the norm. At some point she was caring for me when I’m sick and giving pep talks when Ḯ’m sad, as if mirroring back our caring of her. I mean I still expect that at some point she'll leave the nest since she's an adult now and the capitalistic nuclear family has undermined the natural order of things, but we still experience it like this, on the edges.
And what this made me think of is of when she was born. This tiny red little thing, unable to cry or breathe. Of her first 15 days of life in these vaguely dystopic-looking but literally life-saving incubators,¹ her skin now bright yellow from jaundice, her face stuffed with plastic-metal tentacles. What a delicate dance of flesh and machine it must be, to calculate the precise parameters to pump a newborn's lung. To engineer breath in, breath out.¹
She's like this entire person. All of her would not exist if it wasn't for public healthcare, for the labour of the nurses, for whoever it was who was responsible for developing and engineering and assembling these machines. Medical researchers and industrial engineers and factory workers who saved my daughter's life.
If there's a point to technology it's that. And I don't know the names of any of these people.³ I know the names of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates—charlatans who don't actually create or program or engineer anything, but merely imprint their names on trendy baubles developed by other people. The most famous technologists choose to appropriate toxic, addictive technologies which made everyone’s lives unambiguously worse. Contrast that with what it must feel like, to reach retirement after you have worked on the medical principles or engineering parameters of ICUs. Even an otherwise thankless job of putting them together in some Shanghai plant. You think of your work and multiply it in your mind by how many lives will be saved through it, present and future; how many mothers smiling instead of crying. Contrast that with the unfathomable amounts of effort, money, and natural resources burned up to put more ads on screens, make depression-inducing apps more addictive, or forcibly pushing entirely useless spam generators (“AI”).
There’s a spiritual violence done to workers by a market that forces them to waste their lives perfecting poisonous baubles.
1) The image of a newborn baby in a machine is striking, grotesque, moving:
Another factor that contributed to the development of modern neonatology was Martin Couney and his permanent installment of premature babies in incubators at Coney Island. A more controversial figure, he studied under Budin and brought attention to premature babies and their plight through his display of infants as sideshow attractions at Coney Island and the World's Fair in New York and Chicago in 1933 and 1939, respectively. Infants had also previously been displayed in incubators at the 1897, 1898, 1901, and 1904 World Fairs.
2)
In 1964, pediatric radiologist William Northway – while conversing with neonatologist Philip Sunshine at Stanford University Medical Center – noted a consistent pattern of cystic changes in the lungs on the radiographs of premature babies. Northway found that all of the babies had received high concentrations of oxygen and mechanical ventilation, causing damage. His 1967 paper in which the term bronchopulmonary dysplasia was coined described the disease and comorbidities. This led to worldwide reductions in supplemental oxygen levels and ventilation pressure, improving the health outcomes of premature infants. The paper has been called “one of the most important, most cited, and influential articles in the history of neonatology”.
Delicate indeed.
3) A small fraction of names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonatal_intensive_care_unit#History