| > The anti-technology counter-culture is pretty widespread already. Your anti-technology example isn't really an anti-technology example. > I don't have a facebook page because of their policies and attitude toward privacy. But your not having a Facebook page isn't an objection to technology, it's an objection to Facebook's privacy policies, which isn't a technological issue. > And that is 'anti-technology lite'. Not really. If you were unwilling to have an airplane-style black box in your car that recorded your every move, would that choice be based on your attitude toward privacy, or your attitude toward technology? If you were the leader of an Al-Qaeda cell in Pakistan, would you refuse to use a satellite telephone because (a) you didn't want to be blown up by a drone strike, or (b) you were against modern technology? Not all rejections of technology are based on a rejection of the technology itself -- there are other equally valid reasons. |
I love technology! A fungophobe is someone who fears all mushrooms, who assumes they're all deadly poisonous and isn't interested in learning about them. A fungophile is someone who is intensely interested in mushrooms, who reads about them, samples them, and learns which ones are poisonous, which ones taste good, which ones are medicinal and for what, which ones are allied to which trees or plants or animals. This is precisely my attitude toward technology. I am a technophile!
Now, what would you call someone who runs through the woods indiscriminately eating every mushroom, because they believe "mushrooms are neutral," so there are no bad ones and it's OK to use any of them as long as it's for good uses like eating and not bad uses like conking someone over the head? You would call this person dangerously stupid. But this is almost the modern attitude toward "technology." Actually it's even worse. Because of the core values of civilization, that conquest and control and forceful transformation are good, because civilization "grows" by dominating and exploiting and killing, and by numbing its members to the perspectives of their victims, it has been choosing and developing the most poisonous technologies, and ignoring or excluding tools allied to awareness, aliveness, and equal participation in power. It's as if we're in a world where the very definition of "mushroom" has been twisted to include little other than death caps and destroying angels and deadly galerinas, and we wonder why health care is so expensive.