Over the past two centuries we have witnessed the wholesale replacement of most previous methods of conducting both business and daily life with new, technologically advanced, more efficient methods, but what exactly is progressive or efficient about this new arrangement is hardly ever examined in depth. If the new ways of doing things are so much better, then we must all be leading relaxed, stress-free, enjoyable lives with plenty of free time to devote to art and leisure activities. But a more careful look at these changes shows us that the rapidly evolving brave new world of gadgets, gizmos and constant connectivity is instead a metastasising matrix of manipulation and control in which we have become slaves to money and machines. Creeping ever closer to outright omniscience, the Technosphere is an emergent intelligence in its own right.
The harm to the environment, society, and our individual lives is plain to see, but is brushed off amid hollow mantras about productivity, progress, and the graven idol of economic growth. Shrinking the Technosphere guides readers through the process of bringing technology down to a manageable number of carefully chosen, essential, well-understood, and controllable elements. It is about regaining the freedom to use technology for our own benefit, and is critical reading for all who seek to get back to a point where technologies assist us rather than control us. The endgame of the Technosphere is total domination; the outcome will be total destruction. But can humanity take back control before digital Armageddon finally dawns?
3 comments:
Actually, between gathering and farming people invented cooking. And as people exhausted local sources of easily digestible food they had to go through progressively more complex cooking process. Australian aboriginals figured out how to cook poisonous raw ingredients into edible, but not particularly tasty food. It's not one hour a day to cover all your basic needs - more like your whole day and you still go hungry at times. So much for paradise lost. Just a different brand of misery.
Slo
Thank you for mentioning the way people who identify with the whole progressive urban mindset have been going insane about Donald Trump winning the election. What's weird and scary is that with so many of these people, you can't simply avoid the subject because they don't want to talk about anything else! And even before you started talking about the technosphere, I had this strong impression that something much bigger and more powerful than individual people was driving this, and that somehow we have to find a way to shut off "Trumpsteria", or else it will cause something terrible to happen from which there may be no coming back. As it is already, Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers and social justice warriors don't realize just how much they are separating themselves off from everybody else right now. It's as though they're that hysterical person in a disaster-movie whom the hero needs to slap across the face to stop them from making the situation so much worse.
I'm not a Trump supporter myself - being a non-partisan libertarian with no love for either candidate made it an easy choice to "waste" my vote on Gary Johnson, who I didn't expect to win. It was extremely liberating, actually.
But I am annoyed by the Democratic freak-out about Trump. He's no worse, just in a different way, than Obama was. In fact, he's better. He at least is trying to keep his campaign promises. I may not agree with all of those promises, but I applaud any politician who actually wasn't lying when they ran. Above the local level, I don't think I've seen more than two others who did that.
One of the things that frustrates me the most about the "Resistance" is that they honestly believe they're well-informed and that everyone who disagrees is an idiot, but when you did into the source of their information, you discover they absolutely trust "experts" without any sort of evaluation about what makes these people qualified to speak on the subject they're speaking on.
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