Techno-Disembodiment
These are just a few of my sheroes and heroes in the struggle of what it means to be a good animal in this world—These folks offer articulate challenges to the various technologies and acts of dominance in the human realm of reality.
REBECCA SOLNIT
The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency destroys free time by maximizing the times and places for production, and minimizing the unstructured travel time in between. We are more productive and less free as the world accelerates around us. Electronic transmissions make real travel & real connection, unnecessary. All the false urgencies and speed of the machine culture is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Walking is not an analytical, but rather, an improvisational act. Walking, solitude, and wilderness help overthrow impediments of machinery life. Walking is the experience where we understand our body in relationship to the world. We live a largely passive existence within highly insulated circumstances in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments, offices, and cars. Hurtling forward in airplanes or cars, or over wireless cables and satellites makes the body a parcel in transit—not muscular, active, or ecologic. It doesn’t move but IS moved, rootless and in flux, and totally ungrounded. Dematerialized by abstraction— no action, no eroticism— all our sensations, processes, and desires flung wider than our bodies can inhabit.
How to return the body to its original limits again? To being something supple, sensitive, vulnerable and extended into the world. Engaged and knowing is crucial to experiencing reality.
Suburbia—built to car scale—is an infrastructure for driving. People shuttle from private interior to private interior— the diffusion and privatization of spaces like islands in a sea of asphalt. And what of gated communities? Both criminals and the rich agree to living in hiding. Suburbia abandoned the space of the city without returning us to the country. Just high-priced bunkers and beefed-up segregation and disembodiment.
Progress is about transcending time and space and nature. The primary experiences of the life of the senses severed from the organic world of perception, expectations, and action. Alienation from nature is alienation from both the body and space and time. Planes at 35,000 feet are the ultimate disconnection. Are our bodies becoming obsolete? Just inadequate parcels?
Where does our power reside?
The car, the cell phone, the computer are now our prosthetics for our conceptually impaired bodies, in the mechanical world where space and time are juiced, and life is no longer scaled to real human life. It’s becoming something else. Moving along on the scale of our machines is not liberating! Not free! The disappearance of random, musing, unstructured space, daydreaming time, seeing, being, now gone with the speed and prevalence of our machines.
The gym is our new wildlife preserve for bodily exertion, abandoned into a vanishing habitat.
The gym rationalizes and isolates, just like the suburbs. Just like the factories. Rationalizes and isolates each separate muscle group to efficiently burn calories. The monotonous steadiness of the treadmill. Repetitive labor has been punitive since the gods punished Sisyphus. Throughout most of history, food has been scarce and physical exertion abundant. Only when the status is reversed does exercise make any sense. Muscles, like tans, are an aesthetic of the obsolete. Jobs no longer require us to be outside or call on bodily strength.
The gym is the factory for the production of fitness, and it looks like a factor—the stark industrial space, the gleaming machines, the isolated figures toiling, the repetitive tasks.
People now go in for recreation in their Free Time. Where is the splendor? The straining of arms no longer pumps water or moves wood— its an industry of consumption—of fear, equipment, trainers. And the resulting muscles may not be useful for any practical purpose. Efficiency in exercise means calories are consumed at the maximum rate, which is exactly the opposite effect that workers (and animals) aim for. What’s the point of this semi-public performance, these empty gestures? We have machines now to move our wood and pump our water, and we go to other machines to engage in those acts, not for the sake of wood or water, but for the sake of our bodies, theoretically liberated by technology. When the relationship between our bodies and the world vanishes, who and what do we become?
The body now has the status of a pet that must be exercised. It doesn’t work, but it works out.
The treadmill and it steeper cousin, the Stairmaster, stimulate walking as though space itself had disappeared. The multifaceted experience gone, replaced by climate controlled, t.v. invaded artificial spaces. These are devices in which to go nowhere in places where there is nowhere to go. Or no desire to go. The suburban mind is more comfortable in climate controlled indoor space, with quantifiable activity rather than seamless engagement of body, mind, world. The gym is just another of many devices that accommodates a retreat from the world—disinclines us to participate in making the world more habitable, or to participate in it at all.
Treadmills require whole infrastructures of power generation and distribution, transforming the landscape with networks of cables, workers, coal mines, oil wells, nuclear power, hydroelectric dams on rivers, as well as factories somewhere else. And so treadmills require way more economic and ecological interconnections than walking, but way fewer experiential ones. Unlike early treadmills, they don’t produce energy, they consume it. A revolving rubber belt, 6 feet long, is the terrain. Space has vanished; subversive encounters and chance, vanished too.
Walking is subversive—against entirely privatized space and controlled crowds. Walking provides entertainment in which nothing is spent or consumed. Yet, no one’s promoting the free activity of walking in preference to the lucrative industry of cars. There’s no money in it. Nothing happens in the wild— except seasons, light, weather, creatures, migrations—and the marvelous working of your mind and body. Musing takes place in a part of the imagination that hasn’t been plowed, developed, or put to any practical use. Without that time, which is not work time, the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. Otherwise, the individual imagination will be bulldozed-over for the chain store outlets of consumer appetite.
THEODORE ROSZAK—On Technological Imperialism
Urban industrialization dictates how life must be lived, everywhere, and yet it’s only been 2/10 of 1 % of our experience on earth. The world of wind & wave, beast & flower, sun& stars is our most prolonged intimacy. Nature mothered us into existence before this sick delusion of separation and superiority, before we grew so fat and so uselessly stupid, mistaking a lifestyle for a way of life. This is the hermetically sealed and sanitized lesson in vanity where nothing nonhuman survives our adjustment, domination, and improvement. The more artifice, the more progress, and the more progress, the more security.
Our technological imperialism tells us our survival has nothing to do with soil, with air, water, plant, or animal. We forget that beyond the technical membrane is a world that mediates our life needs. All resources arrive to us at the end of a long line of processing. Agriculture is mass industrial production worked up off a soil that’s a chemical blotter…the violent anxieties of the animal we eat. We’re convinced that there are human substitutes for everything we exhaust or contaminate. We can live on pure chemicals and machines, programmed genetics and surgical immortality—redesign the great rivers, control personalities, order the weather, fly to Mars.
What are the costs of this increased artificiality? Spiritual, rhapsodic, magic and dreams, alchemy, visionary poetry, transcendent energies are all in crisis with the ecology and our blighted psyches. The environment is the outward mirror of our inner condition and the advanced disease within. The final radicalism could be spiritual renewal—a ground-tone so constant that it is perceived as silence.
This is the greatest and fastest cultural transformation in human history. Millions agreeing to divide themselves off from the natural continuum and relationship to the earth. Civilization sucks every hinterland into its technological metabolism. Its investments and technicians force themselves into every back of beyond—bulldozers, oil derricks, methyl mercury, lead, radioactivity, industrial exhaust—the world becomes our garbage can. No wilderness left that’s not piped and wired through with civilizations necessities or crisscrossed with visible airplane sky-lanes or invisible microwaves, satellite beams, or electricity. It’s an exercise in arrogance that breaks with our human past as violently and dramatically as astronauts break from the gravitational grip of earth.
Let your mind conjure the image of the astronaut. Encapsulated in a wholly man made environment, sealed up and surviving securely in a plastic womb of his own making—his life space, his metallic epidermis, his electronic equipment, even his wastes in there with him. Living intimately with just that shit. Always a military man. Our future dominated by soldiers—the most machine-tooled, psychically-regimented breed of human— the warrior-technician. Cushioned and isolated in a perfectly artificial environment that’s not a part of anyplace. Totally autonomous. All places becoming the same gleaming, antiseptic, electronic reproduction of him and his technological omnipotence.
What are the reactive forces being released into our psyches and the repressed natural world?
Worldwide, technological experience—all people everywhere sucked into this common fate. It burns away our deeper awareness of responsibility. We who “discovered’ the rest of the world don’t want to share, learn, or integrate. We share only this hi-tech culture, the ONE culture, and we impose it everywhere. The death of dialogue & of debate emanates from our technology, which really only communicates itself—the medium blocks every message except itself. The unities of power are trade, warfare, and technics, investment, military alliance, and commerce. That’s the core of urban industrial civilization.
While we grow fat on a smorgasbord of cultural tidbits, the whole world is steadily flattened under our appetite. The urban-industrial-global-monopoly—nothing for real or for keeps and nothing, nothing at all. The CocaCola-ization will lead to a worldwide artificial environment before it discovers anything like an authentic world culture or an ethical community of humankind. HOW CAN ANY PEOPLE BE SO SURE OF SO MUCH? The technocratic elites lead us. When the Dow closes, what is the state of our souls? This pre-eminence of science and technocratic politics is the curse and the gift we bring to history.
Who recognizes a cage for what it is? Only the most creative— the alienated artists are modern martyrs, persecuted prophets, suffering saints. The steady advance of technology is a terrifying aggression against the visionary imagination. Wasting away of transcendent energies as urgent as sheer physical survival. The next revolution is to liberate the visionary powers from the lesser reality of urban industrial “necessity”. There are dragons buried beneath our cities— primordial energies greater than the power of electricity or our bombs. Religion and science built a social order on top of their graves. We need a renunciation of power and production that will be experienced as a liberation, not a sacrifice. This is our future, subversion against the status quo of industrial-techno-alienation. Instead we seem to be surrendering to the urban tyrannical imperative with fanatical conviction. We are between a death and a difficult birth. We don’t all want social justice that means access to the same air conditioned cell-phoned nightmare.
JERRY MANDER— ‘Megatechnology’. Herein lies our condition, a condition that’s only possible because of the global interlock among new technological forms. Streaming platforms, social media, cell phones, computers, lasers, satellites, microwaves—encompassing everything everywhere. All democracy, self-determination, and all diversity—of perception, of cultures, landscapes and biological forms are under fierce assault by the unified purpose and form of global technologies. All this accelerates corporate power and invasion. The mega-technological homogenization drive requires and produces conformity, bulldozes resistance, increases police and state power, slams into us a the New World Order that encircles the globe with monoculture. T.V. is its delivery system. Computers are its nervous system.
This society was never trained to think about technology in systemic terms. Instead we’ve always been told that technology is good. Progress is good. The idea that technology is neutral is in itself not neutral. It produces passivity like technology does. We never ask the most radical questions—who does it really serve? Are we better off with or without it? We are never given a chance to say NO to technology. We can, personally, but its still reshaping our society without permission, without national debates or referendums. And then, once we’re surrounded by it all, how the hell do we get rid of it?
The great tragedy of technology is that it’s one of the few subjects that the left and right agree on—activists and corporations all view it in the same way. It’s believed by most everyone to be neutral. Now virtually all of us live virtually, inside a homocentric reality—in artificial environments—interacting at all times with objects, rhythms, and landscapes that are completely the products of our own minds. This alienation leads us farther from our senses and our judgement. The effects are to accelerate the separation of humans from nature, and from the consequences of what we’re doing, what we’re allowed the powerful to do, in our names.
The screen’s hyperactivation of images in a perceptual universe speeds up our nervous systems, until we can’t even SEE nature, if we do manage to go outside. It’s too calm, too slow, and we can no longer relate to slower systems. Just speed. Just violence. Techno-humans are becoming components of the machine—machine compatible—more simple in form and tending towards violence. Much better at following suggestions and abstractions to their “logical” conclusions than resting, than visioning, than relating to another person, off-screens.
We’ve got to learn to view technology—not from where it benefits us—but in terms of the totality of its impact on the planet. (What a concept!) We’ve been trained to view everything ONLY as it benefits us—that’s how we tend see all phenomena and all people, all the time. So, yes, the insta and facebook and cell phone helps us to connect and communicate. But they have way more benefit for the military and the corporations, for development, space travel, surveillance, nanotechnology, and all the other horrors that wouldn’t exist without computers or microwaves. The question is—what’s the least amount of technology I can use and still get things done? It’s up to you.
Kirkpatrick Sale—On Luddism WE NEED A MORATORIUM ON PROGRESS. Luddism is a historical movement that arose in response and resistance to the early Industrial Revolution. The Luddite Movement was a moral challenge mounted against huge and powerful enemies. Modern day Neo-Luddism can serve to slow the pace to give us what we need—a period of detox from science and technology. They’ve become toxic to our collective spirit.
The onrush of arcane technologies and esoteric systems bewilder me with procedures unknown last year, threaten me as machines expose us, make us useless or make us servants, create anxiety and instability as they befoul the world. Awaken and arise from the technophilic dream of industrial monoculture! Reject and resist the technocratic Cartesian approach and the laissez-faire economy.
The machines change, but the machine-ness does not. Technologies are NEVER neutral, and many are harmful. All machinery is harmful, in that it’s produced with only economic consequences in mind, and those are of benefit to only a few. Technology comes with an inevitable logic, stamped with the purposes and values of the economic system that spawns it, and obeying an imperative that heedlessly works that logic to its end. All machines serve the huge, burocratic , complex and undemocratic, secretive organizations of the industrial world. We need to ask of each one—Will this invention concentrate more power? Will it encourage or discourage Nature and the self-worth of individuals? Will it wreak havoc to the biosphere and the human species and communion?
And, he says,…. because somewhere in the blood, in the place inside where pain and fear and anger intersects, one is finally moved to refusal and defiance. No more! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the levers of the whole machine—as the Luddite movement instructed of its followers—or any part you can reach, and you’ve got to make it stop. But not just through violence, which calls down the iron fist of the law and turns away allegiance of neighbors. There are myriad ways to resist industrial monoculture and its dehumanized social order. Create a life that does not do violence to your ethical principles. Ask, what purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this level of solution? Thoreau asks, “Is this invention nothing but an improved means to an unimproved end?”
Some of the fish are beginning to see, not just the water, but that it’s polluted, world-wide. Industrialism— built upon machines designed to exploit and produce for human betterment alone, is on a collision course with earthly life. Industrialism is not superior, on any level other than physical comfort, convenience, and a problematic longevity of life. We must strive to work out some analysis of the problematic present and the desirable future and the common strategies that stem from them. Preserve the integrity, stability, and harmony of the biotic community and the human community within it—the spiritual identification of the human with all living species and systems.
Some would argue that mammals are hard-wired to compete to survive, and to fight or flight, first thing. If so perhaps we can imagine that Technology is that fight. Technology, which we’ve been taught to see as moral, insofar as it is “progress” as it keeps us at the top of the bio-heap. It is the triumph of the darkness of the scientific mind to the overcoming of chance. The job for us is to bring into the light that darkness as darkness. Bring into the light the dawn, which is the alternative. Whatever is left after the inevitable crash will need instructions in how to live in harmony with nature, and how and why to fashion their technologies with the restraints and obligations of nature intertwined—seeking to understand and obey and love and incorporate nature into their souls, as well as into their tools.
Ariel Salleh—ECOFEMINISM Eco-feminism explores the reciprocal implications of ecological and gender crisis. EcoFeminism holds both a theory of domination and a strategy for change. Feminist objectives fit with movements for ecology, against capitalist accumulation, surveillance, military power, and industrialization, but the truth is that most women can only enter politics on a capitalist/patriarchal agenda, and everywhere, feminists and eco-activists are obliged to think, talk, dress like technocratic men. (Hillary- “fiercely clashing but ultimately absorbed into the brotherhood of suits.”)And, the scientific fraternity is careful to suppress dangerous findings in order to protect free enterprise.
Gender is the lowest common denominator of all dominations— one has only to observe the unique status of womyn as a source of countercultural values. Women’s unpaid work is resourced by transnational capitalism just like the natural commons. Both women and nature are victims of men’s abuse. Both are ideological products of the culture of control that began in the witch-hunts and “The Enlightenment”. These days, while fashionable post-modernism enjoys splitting factions in a safe world of ideas, life is hurting.
One particular social group is better placed than any other to save the earth from human excess. It’s plain that the concerns of men in an industrial production system are quite different from those of womyn in a daily round of domestic and reproductive labors, our work which remains unpaid to this day.
Care, modesty, connectedness—53% of the world is already educated into these behaviors.
Since the interest of womyn as a global majority lies in challenging existing structures, we are astonishingly well-place to constitute a political force. Our inscribed gender difference has left us historically outside, and our skills provide a means of resistance to this irrational excess of a capitalist patriarchy that we have little egoic need to preserve.
Like the political status quo, postmodernisms’ practice of deconstruction is limited and cannot GO anywhere; it is ahistorical. The making of an earth democracy must take into account subsistence farmers and indigenous hunter-gatherers and WOMEN as participating citizens.
But, the terrain of ecofeminism is reduced to the feminist controversy over whether women’s politics should be guided by the principle of “equality” (modelled by men’s institutions) or the principle of gender difference, which puts us down there with nature.
Both ecology and feminism are split internally between old and new thinking— liberal environmentalists lobby for licenses to pollute and trade carbon taxes, and liberal feminists lobby for anti-discrimination legislation. Radical enviros and feminists envision appropriate technology, collaboration with indigenous movements, and communal governance.
Equality Feminists are wary of discussing woe in connection with nature because this is loaded by centuries of using this argument to keep women in their place as closer to nature. They fear that drawing any attention to biological differences will play into men’s hands: it’s a double bind, that women either side with nature and tighten their own subordination, or seek liberation by disconnecting from nature and abandoning it to its fate as a resource.
All double binds are merely problems that need re-framing: as distinct from men’s lot, women’s activities are designed to protect life. We’re not closer to nature than men in any ontological sense, but attaining the prize of masculine identity depends on men distancing themselves from that fact. They leave women behind as a hostage.
Women do life maintenance work, like nature does. While men maintain distance and separation, negotiating for their interests as they dominate, conquer, compete, extract, and accumulate, our voices are largely silenced. The maintaining of comfortable habitats and cohesive communities is the most highly productive work of society—in patriarchy, these tasks are ignored and unpaid. In our holding labors to protect and nurture life, M/Other becomes unconsciously associated with food and excrement—endlessly dealing with food and dirt—marking out the boundaries of the body–– me/not me, human/nature.
M/Other is the other side of ego, and jokes armor men from the fear and fascination with oral, anal, genital excretions—all the transitional swarming that threatens to include Him. Death becomes as problematic as birth, the other end of lived time where humanity recedes back into nature. But, against the spills and smells of birthing and dying which frame women’s lives, the church, the state, and science fail to orient men in enduring time. At childbirth, it is the man who lacks. Why else should the act be so shrouded by secrecy, hushed voices, and medical mystification. Nevertheless, paternity, basically a property relation, soon reinstates the correct order of things. The sense of dislocation in masculine reproductive consciousness is very pervasive in the western tradition, and it goes hand in hand with the suppression of women’s actual contribution.
If men cannot produce life, they can certainly appropriate it, and thus fatherhood becomes a right, and fatherless children are damned as bastards and illegitimate. Patriarchy is the power to transcend natural realities with historical, man-made realities. For men, the compulsion to produce has brought the rest of life on earth to the brink of annihilation. In an attempt to bridge this experiential fracture from the life process and ‘natural time’, the alienative consciousness of men has invented compensatory entities, such as god, the state, history, science, and technology. Men’s commercial ideas of progress and fascination with mechanical models ignores the agonies of industrialization.
Men have aggressive sports, property ownership, control of all others, and the preoccupation with personal potency to assuage the emptiness of the ungrounded self.
Patriarchal relations rest on the shocking reversal of material (maternal) reality. The unresolved violence that hovers around the memory of the original break with nature must constantly affirm itself by consuming the energy of the Other- women and nature.
Here’s Marx on historical agency and radical chains”—
A class must be formed which has radical chains; a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society. A class which is the dissolution of all classes; a sphere of society which does not claim a specific redress because the wrong done to it is not a particular wrong, but wrong in general…a sphere which cannot finally emancipate itself without therefore emancipating all other spheres.”
So much of theory and status quo suppositions beg gendered scrutiny. We look outside the personal horizon of shared masculine significances. But, the profound split between masculinity and femininity is rarely a political concern beyond the rubric of feminism. Women’s holding labors are imperative as a solution to unfettered masculinity. For example, the social position of women, the sexual division of labor that subjugates women, the exclusion of women from waged work, the mechanization of the world (which legitimized the exploitation of women and nature), and women as the machine for the production of new workers.
The witch-hunts were as important as colonialism and the theft of the land from European peasants for the development of capitalism. Marx couldn’t never have assumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation if he had looked at history from the viewpoint of women.
The feminist concept of the body is key to understanding the roots of male dominance and the construction of female social identity, as well as the consolidation of patriarchal polwer and the male exploitation of female labor.
We are the power by which the body is produced. And so they must insist that god is male, and that minds rise above bodies. For women, the body is what the factory was for male workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance. Masculine agency produces knowledge by splitting subject and oject, and then dividing the object into separate, discrete units in order to re-make it. This is “the frightened dualism of transcendent subjectivity”.
Men must strive to share “holding labors”. This will be emancipatory all around. Holding means to minimize risk and reconcile differences rather than to fight about them. Holding is a way of seeing with an eye towards maintaining the harmony, resources, and skills necessary for sustaining life in safety. It’s the attitude of world protection, world repair.
It’s also the ultimate expression of adaptability and reflexivity. Holding is exemplified by The Precautionary Principle. Holding opposes the scientific method of separation, which is the work of resisting entropy. Unlike the scientist , the mother cannot invent categories to deny what’s natural and messy. The obsessional drive for artificial principles vs a sense of place.
It negates separation and duality with enfoldment and resonance. The most urgent and fundamental political task is to dismantle ideological attitudes that have severed our human belonging to nature. If womyn’s lived experiences of conservation were given legitimacy, it could provide an immediate living social basis for the alternative consciousness that radical men are trying to formulate as an abstract ethical construct.
The most radical activist politics develop when one comes to understand the dynamics of how one is oppressed and how one oppresses others. We need connections and coalitions.
Enlightened rationalism makes interconnections invisible or unlikely.
There is no language to oppose “rationalism” or “Cartesian dualism” that doesn’t sound kooky.
This is the last domino that must fall for equality and our survival to be realized.
Our over-socialized version of dualism/ “reality” deletes objective nature or turns her into a human construct. Where is that voice to protect hollowed-out life on earth?
Economic transnational corporations need nation states the way men need wives. To service industry, pacify the underlings, and repair the territorial body. Business now milks the state to provide free infrastructure and cultural legitimization. The cost of economic justice for a masculine proletariat means increased sexual abuse, racism, and environmental assault.
Today’s conquistadors are the officers of the WTO and The World Bank. The feminization of poverty was the first effect of the development of capitalism. capitalism is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. Waged labor today = enslavement, for which women have paid the highest cost: with their bodies and their lives. A corporation is just a legal entity designed to absolve men from liability for their decisions based on greed. It’s dissociated from consequence and totally unnatural. It will never see the web of ecological relations as real. We need an international Eco-Feminism Security Council to fight the monoculture of savage corporate capitalism.
Can the rampant misogyny, sexual violence, economic poverty and cultural marginalization fracture a woman’s identity? Dissociation, annihilation, decomposition can lead to a collision with the contradictions and break through our consciousness to create new possibilities. This is our hope for the terrible future. The downside of the Golden Age. All inventions are parked on the slope of time with the hand brake off and a crumbling brick under the tire.
It will all turn to yogurt before our eyes.
But, just as our economic system and our lifestyles are unsustainable, so is the reigning social system of unprecedented anxiety. Our country is in the throes of an epidemic of clinical depression, anxiety, and attention deficit, because we are compassionate beings faced with an impossible situation. Yes, your brain is our of balance, but the source is a crisis of culture and ecology. We’re living through the 6th great extinction, a holocaust unheard of since the last big asteroid slammed into our planet. But this time, the asteroid is us.
We’re not dead of mind and heart not yet. We can nudge ourselves from the center of the world, from the screens and malls and traffic jams, and consider other possibilities. Awake from the hypnotic trance of our manufactured culture. Wake up to the moment of change.
The liberation from self-absorption comes in the battle to help change the world, help others and free our own minds. Stop repressing our natural abilities to feel compassion and have empathy for the pain of the world. We inter-exist with others, with the whole of creation, and as our pain for the world arises, so does our power.
When an organism is sick, it creates antibodies to fight the disease. When an organism is under attack, the anti-bodies grow and spread and work to destroy the poison. And activists are the antibodies. Activists inspire a more compelling vision of life, shining a light on what’s simmering just below the surface. They lead the way out of the press/oppression by showing hearts and minds attuned to a new set of values- celebrating a thousand different communities, all sharing insight and difference. What’s cool isn’t the newest app, but fighting the microwaving of the planet.
Chellis Glendinning—What Lewis Mumford calls the "mechanical order" or the "megamachine" is an entire psycho-socioeconomic system that includes all the machines in our midst— and all the organizations and methods that make those machines possible. Also included are those of us who inhabit this technological construct, and the ways in which we are socialized and required to participate in the system, as well as the ways we think, perceive, and feel as we attempt to survive within it.
What I am describing is a human-constructed, technology-centered social system built on principles of standardization, efficiency, linearity, and fragmentation, like an assembly line that fulfills production quotas, but cares nothing for the people who operate it. Within this system, technology influences society. Standardization, efficiency, and production quotas are all that matters to this system.
From our everyday experience within mass technological society, we will note that "normal" acts like standing in line, obeying traffic signals, working or shopping till we drop, all constitute acts of participation in this grand machine. Regarding our minds and bodies as disconnected in health and disease, or thinking that radioactive waste buried in the Earth won't eventually seep into the water table, are symptoms of the fragmented thinking that emerges from such a mechanical order.
We no longer use technology. We live it. Langdon Winner, in Autonomous Technology, moves the idea further, arguing that the artifacts and methods invented since the technological revolution have developed in size and complexity to the point of canceling our very ability to grasp their impact upon us. Total immersion, loss of perspective, and loss of control tip us off to the link between the psychological process of addiction and the technological system. Addiction can be thought of as a progressive disease that begins with inner psychological changes, leads to changes in perception, behavior, and life-style, and then to total breakdown. Many of us are already disintegrating beneath the weight of our alienation, and our denial. The hallmark of this process is the out-of-control, often aimless compulsion to fill a lost sense of meaning and connectedness with substances like alcohol, dangerous sports, or experiences like fame.
If the particular kinds of technologies in our midst exist to promote mastery and power, we might ask, for whom? And over whom? Windmills and tepees express democratic and ecological values because the very people who invent, produce, and maintain them are the same people who use them. By contrast, the technologies disseminated in mass society reflect a mentality of control over the natural world, space, other people, and even ourselves. As Jerry Mander points out, “running a nuclear power plant requires tight, centralized control by both government and industry, first to produce such a capital-intensive project, then to master public opinion, and finally to provide military backup in case of sabotage, accidents, or public protest.” The presence of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in a nation's arsenal not only controls that nation's enemies—it also frightens and intimidates, and thereby controls that nation's own citizens.
Likewise, survival in the technological system requires that we act cool and behave like machines. What is cooler in substance, and acts cooler in our estimation than a machine? Especially, and most dangerously, to the mind of a child? The hallmark of technological education is to learn mathematics to quantify reality, and to master fragmented thinking to function in a mechanistic world. Every subject we learn in school seems unrelated to the others. Mass technological society is structured "top-down," its fragmented nature keeping most of us from ever grasping an understanding of the whole.
Addictive behavior is not natural to the human species. It occurs because some untenable violation has happened to us. And indeed, we have undergone an untenable violation— a collective trauma that explains the insidious reality of addiction and abuse infusing our lives in mass technological society. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder defines trauma as "an event that is outside the range of human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone”. The trauma endured by technological people like ourselves is the systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the natural world—from the tendrils of earthy textures, from the rhythms of sun and moon, from the spirits of the bears and trees, from the Life Force itself. This is also the systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the kinds of social and cultural experiences our ancestors assumed when they lived in rhythm with the natural world.
In Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard describes this process as the initiation of a heretofore unheard-of tame/wild dichotomy in which all things considered tame, such as domesticated seedlings, captured animals, and the mechanical and controlling mentality required to keep them alive are prized and protected—(lawns, zoos, pets)—while all things considered wild—"weeds," wild animals, and the fluid, participatory way of being human—are considered threatening and to be kept at bay. Ultimately, such a split imprisons us in our human-constructed reality and causes all the unnecessary and troublesome dichotomies with which we grapple today, from male/female and mind/body, to secular/sacred and technological/ Earth-based.
Society is addicted to specific technologies like cars, super-computers, and satellites, all of which facilitate an unhealthy propensity to control, numb the psyche from pain, and momentarily feed a craving for power. Techno-addiction is also an addiction to a way of perceiving, experiencing, and thinking. As the world has become less organic and more dependent on techno-fixes for problems created by earlier techno-fixes, humans have substituted a new worldview for one once filled with clean rushing waters, coyotes, constellations of stars, tales of nature.
The principle claim is that all technologies are political, and should be questioned before we adopt them— in particular striving for the dismantling of nuclear technologies, television and computers which cause disease and death in their manufacture and use, enhance centralized political power, and remove people from direct experience of life. Let’s assume they gave up the fight on that one. Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage argues that automation breeds torpidity of knowledge. The more jobs are automated, the more out-of-touch the people involved in the process become, for example, pilots who supervise the automated take-off and landing of planes, factory supervisors, etc. Carr quotes the technology historian George Dyson, who asks—"What if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?"
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