elsagold: the WUMBLOG

On Asians and their Fucking Technology

Today I got yelled at by a man on the street. Standing outside of my office in SoMa, innocently texting, I heard an angry voice loudly say, 

“Asians with your technology. Ruining society. Fuck you, you bitch! Yes you, you BITCH. Can you find a man in Asia like me? Bitch, fucking go back to Asia! We’re gonna send all you back like we did the Japanese, you fucking bitch!” 

And on and on and on, as he walked past me and across the street. I just stared at him, wondering if he was going to actually attack me physically or just exert his freedom of speech within a few feet of where I was standing.

It also got me to wondering. Is it a commonly held perspective that Asians ‘inflicted’ technology on America? I’m genuinely curious. I hadn’t heard it before, but from someone who felt so obviously victimized, it somehow made sense.

When did ‘technology’ come into existence as a term? And how is that different from how we think of technology today? Do technological, political, and economical systems get built up in similarly complex ways as a society “civilizes”? An easy way to visualize such a thing would be to create time lapses composed of machinery as it evolved through various editions (such as the development of cars, factories, energy generation technology), a countries’ series of written laws, and the country’s various markets and financial abstractions. Obviously I’m thinking of 20th century America, but what if you could chart these things for the Byzantine era? For Ancient Chinese dynasties? Greece and Rome? Or the Khmer Empire?

At its core, how do civilizations grow, develop, and dissolve? … and as a side thought, how much of what we consider “technology” can be attributed to us fucking Asians anyway?