| Well, the Unabomber was wrong. Which is not exactly a surprise. The Unabomber was wrong about most things. He was a crazy mass murderer who didn't get out much. Kelly's essay points out the one thing that the guy was right about: The notion that technology has an agenda. The fact that human agendas and technological agendas are aspects of the same thing is a bit more... advanced. I'm sure the unabomber would react with horror to such an idea, but obviously that doesn't make it wrong. Of course the dictionary wouldn't define a human child as "something created by the application of science [1]", or "a material implement manufactured by a society [2]". The dictionary's job is to tell us how words are used, not to describe the nature of reality. As I said, even using the word technology to describe a cell phone is beginning to sound stilted -- kids will probably roll their eyes. Calling a wooden sailing ship high technology sounds like a joke [3], and calling a flint arrowhead technology would just be silly. Especially to the Unabomber, who was committed to the fantasy that there was some essential moral difference between wooden-shack technology and asphalt-highway technology. --- [1] Although reproductive biology is a science. And every society has a theory about where babies come from, backed by extensive experimental evidence. And even should you wish to concede that conceiving babies is more art than science, there's more to creating a new human than just having a baby. I was raised on pizza and penicillin. Pizza and penicillin are applications of science. [2] My right hand is a material implement. If you don't believe me, I can always smack you with it, while uttering the traditional ritual words: "I refute you thus!" ;) (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=670519) [3] Man, was the H.M.S. Victory high technology. For a contemporary high-level technical manual I recommend The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor, published in 1819. |
Technology doesn't mean 'impressive, complicated thing'. You can't say 'people are really special and a product of evolution' and infer that people are technology. It's like saying that red is a really beautiful colour and therefore is actually a shade of blue.
But even if you could say that it would be irrelevent, because it would be misconstruing what the unabomber meant.