85 lines
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Plaintext
85 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
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Technology
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Tech-nol-o-gy n. According to Webster's: industrial or applied science.
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In reality: the ensemble of division of labor/production/industrialism
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and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations
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between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations
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mediating us from each other. it is all the drudgery and toxicity
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required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we live
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in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of
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hierarchy and commodification.
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Those who still say that technology is "neutral," "merely a tool," have
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not yet begun to consider what is involved. Junger, Adorno and
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Horkheimer, Ellul and a few others over the past decades - not to
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mention the crushing, all but unavoidable truth of technology in its
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global and personal toll - have led to a deeper approach to the topic.
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Thirty-five years ago the esteemed philosopher Jaspers wrote that
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"Technology is only a means, in itself neither good nor evil. Everything
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depends upon what man makes of it, for what purpose it serves him, under
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what conditions he places it." The archaic sexism aside, such
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superficial faith in specialization and technical progress is
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increasingly seen as ludicrous. Infinitely more on target was Marcuse
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when he suggested in 1964 that "the very concept of technical reason is
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perhaps ideological. Not only the application of technology, but
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technology itself is domination... methodical, ascientific, calculated,
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calculating control." Today we experience that control as a steady
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reduction of our contact with the living world, a speeded-up Information
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Age emptyness drained by computerization and poisoned by the dead,
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domesticating imperialism of high-tech method. Never before have people
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been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything;
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as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our
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souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of
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wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive
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division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the
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liberatory project in all its depth.
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Of course, the popular literature does not yet reflect a critical
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awareness of what technology is. Some works completely embrace the
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direction we are being taken, such as McCorduck's 'Machines Who Think'
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and Simons' 'Are Computers Alive?', to mention a couple of the more
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horrendous. Other, even more recent books seem to offer a judgement that
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finally flies in the face of mass pro-tech propaganda, but fail
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dismally as they reach their conclusions. Murphy, Mickunas and Pilotta
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edited 'The Underside of High-Tech: Technology and the Deformation of
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Human Sensibilities' , who's ferocious title is completely undercut by
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an ending that technology will become human as soon as we change our
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assumptions about it! Very similar is Siegel and Markoff's 'The High
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Cost of High Tech'; after chapters detailing the various levels of
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technological debilitation, we once again learn that its all just a
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question of attitude: "We must, as a society, understand the full impact
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of high technology if we are to shape it into a tool for enhancing human
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comfort, freedom and peace." This kind of cowardice and/or dishonesty
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owes only in part to the fact that major publishing corporations do not
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wish to publicize fundamentally radical ideas.
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The above-remarked flight into idealism is not a new tactic of
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avoidance. Martin Heidegger, considered by some the most original and
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deep thinker of this century, saw the individual becoming only so much
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raw material for the limitless expansion of industrial technology.
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Incredibly, his solution was to find in the Nazi movement the essential
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"encounter between global technology and modern man." Behind the
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rhetoric of National Socialism, unfortunately, was only an acceleration
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of technique, even into the sphere of genocide as a problem of
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industrial production. For the Nazis and the gullible, it was, again a
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question of how technology is understood ideally, not as it really is.
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In 1940, the General Inspector for the German Road System put it this
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way: "Concrete and stone are material things. Man gives them form and
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spirit. National Socialist technology possesses in all material
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achievement ideal content."
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The bizarre case of Heidegger should be a reminder to all that good
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intentions can go wildly astray without a willingness to face technology
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and its systematic nature as part of practical social reality. Heidegger
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feared the political consequences of really looking at technology
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critically; his apolitical theorizing thus constituted a part of the
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most monstrous development of modernity, despite his intention.
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EarthFirst! claims to put nature first, to be above all petty
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"politics." But it could well be that behind the macho swagger of a Dave
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Foreman (and the "deep ecology" theorists who also warn against
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radicals) is a failure of nerve like Heidegger's, and the consequence,
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conceivably could be similar.
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