| That is why I had been having trouble with it. Modern high technology is a lot of exploitation. I once heard a historian described technology as a lever. A small effort has greater gains. However, we were looking at it from a different angle. What if civilization are not walls and cities — the division of labor so that peasants can support the ruling class — but rather, in _design_? When I first posed that, one of my friends went right into architectural design. (Which is fine, since we explored Christopher Alexander’s work). But an example of what I was thinking of was this discovery that one of the cave paintings was probably a hunting calendar. It allows the tribe to count the number of moons when there is sufficient deer. That’s a kind of design — a kind of permacomputing - a kind of civilization if we were to reframe it as design. I might be stretching it there. I have seen effective use of technology in permaculture. Digging up swales and basins make use technology, whether it is with a shovel, or feeding pigs in a way so that they can dig for you. So I think there is something there. |