An arts atelier may not be the best indicator of technological inclination, but I couldn't help but notice the technology that people were using. iPhone 4, which was eight years old, PCs instead of Macs, or old Macs, instead of new Macs, cabled headphones and websites that look old enough to vote. So when Iris wanted to have a conference about my project and I proposed a Bluejeans® conference or Skype® because I needed to be editing for George, her aversion to connect to VoIP just reiterated my observation: Austrias aren't at the cutting edge of consumer technology. Ultimately she acquiesced and allowed me to be her first bluejeans meeting host. The art of existing two places at once is made possible by voice over Internet protocol.
Within this question of tech is at least a highly sophisticated manner of restraining the members of an affluent country from consuming techno-trash at the rate of New Yorkers, including myself, and generating techno-waste. At most a question of what exactly does “affluent country” mean. The trend of higher standards of living being synonymous with rates of consumption/waste production seems to not be true in the case of Graz (I noticed a similar de-teched presence outside of Schaumbad). The most obvious answer is that higher taxes have curbed a rate of consumption by lowering expendable incomes. This is social welfare society in which desires are suspended by a prescribed way of living that offer social and urban infrastructure instead. If this is the case, then the Murkraftwerk is even more dubious, using tax money for a prescription that is not only reprehensible to the paying citizens, but aimed to cheapen electrical consumption, which is already a decade behind consumer levels.
But it's not as simple as the Grazers just keeping up with the Joneses. Graz has a parallel technosphere. In some ways its boldly local. For example, everyone has a @mur.at email address, which was described to me as a company that supported the arts but was today an actual business. Later I learned that it was founded by a group of net artists during the 1990s who now rely on annual donations in order to offer this exclusive (isolated?) service.
In another aspect, the tech world hadn't fully reached Graz. Google maps failed to give accurate directions in Graz, outside of walking and biking routes. Qando was an alternative maps app that encompassed the extensive public transportation system, but it was wonky. Uber didn't operate in Graz. One had to call 878 taxi to get picked up. Lime, Bird and Tier scooters, which were extensive in Vienna were absent in Graz. There was no Apple store in Graz.