If anything, 2021 has shown us how technology has taken on a sacred aspect in how we let it dominate and control our lives – as much as money has become a central component in how our lives are determined. As religiosity has declined, technology has supplemented itself to become our new global religion. This has been going on slowly for many decades, but in the last 20 years it went into overdrive and technology rather being an aid to living has now become a God. We expect almost messianic powers and worship it. What I find interesting is how few people understand the various technologies and even less the power structure behind the technology that is now run by the new high priests – technocrats (think corporate technical entrepreneurs promoting scientists and especially marketers – management of society by technical experts).
If you want to build a trans-American high speed electric rail system then you probably want a federal government to coordinate it with all the states governors. In Europe much of the high-speed rail system was buoyed up by the EEC. The sheer scale of some projects requires the involvement of large systems. What becomes problematic is when the system acts without involvement of the people in which it proposes to be acting on behalf. Technology is now introduced by mega-corporations and inserted into our lives with little ethical discussion, and more recently, without real science being given such that its introduction is driven by financial expediency and financial gains for the corporations controlling that technology.
In the recent past, a technology was introduced that followed the adoption process/sequence (see earlier post Adopting a new way of thinking and living – Adopter Theory {August 2018}) to determine its success or failure within the marketplace. Innovators and early adopters set the trends for what we would see being used within society, and if we liked what we saw, we then became an early majority of users with the late majority and laggards finally getting on board. The key change seemed to begin when technocrats found a way to make technology itself irresistible and then addictive. Anything new was accepted as better and anything old was passe and to be shunned (think of the iPhone as a typical example).
We were sold the failed dream (The Green Revolution) of industrial agriculture with its GMOs and pesticides as a way to resolve world hunger, except 1 billion people are still hungry or starving every day. Technocrats still sell true believers on the yields and hence economic benefits to be gained, but the hungry still go hungry and literally tens of thousands of developing world farmers find only devastation when they buy in to the agricultural corporate nightmare. Our food is contaminated by poisons used to eliminate pests, and the ecological system in which food grows (the soil and biodiversity) is fast collapsing beyond the point of easy recovery. As one of the great environmentalists once said – ‘who thought that using poisons to grow our food would be a great idea?’ The toxic food grown is further toxified when it is processed with more chemicals never intended for human consumption. Easily grown crops with large yield capacity but low nutrition is promoted to develop an industrial food chain that benefits only profits for the technocrats while creating multiple health problems that encourage an advanced and lucrative sick-care industry. Of course, environmentalists preach about the need for ecological balance and harmony with the natural world, but their voices of reason are dismissed as heretical to the great god of technology.
We now have many alternative organic/natural agricultural techniques that build on well-tested old ideas, when we had to live in harmony, coupled with modern natural technologies. The big drawback, and again it all comes down to economics, is that modern industrial level agri-business technologies they do not readily lend themselves to simpler and more localized systems. Modern industrial agri-business has taken food control out of the hands of people and placed it squarely in the hands of corporations. In the westernized world, it used to be that 90-95% of people farmed at some level but today it is more like 2-5%. New agricultural techniques that serve everybody will also be a more central in peoples lives. It’s not that we will be all farmers again, but that we will be more involved in food production in some way or other that serves local communities primarily, with extra food surpluses being shipped to neighboring areas. I think that collaborative bartering will be seen more rather than large scale financial profit driven farming.
Our modern motorized transportation systems will also have to undergo major change. We were sold the dream of unfettered travel potential with the industrial combustion engine (barely 130 years ago) and lots of cheap, plentiful oil and gas. At the time it seemed appropriate. We never considered the problems of fossil fuel pollution nor the fat that fossil fuels would actually reach a time when they would become a limited and finite resource. Even in the 1960s it was still widely believed that these fuel sources would last centuries. The idea of exponential drawdown of resources inversely coupled with pollution was talked about, mainly by environmentalists that were ignored by most, quite happy to believe that technocrats had it all thought out, little realizing that they only had eyes on the profits not the problems.
We have several options for future transportation but as usual the financial considerations are used to denounce them. We have governments worldwide heavily subsidizing monopolies of fossil fuels and not allowing the alternate energy resources to find economic stability that involves full life-cycle costing on a level playing field. Part of our problem has to do with Henry Ford and his competitors. In the early part of the twentieth century, you could travel internationally, almost anywhere on land by train and within most cities by using tramcars/trolley cars. Henry ford needed people to buy his cars so he devised a system for producing cheaply produced vehicles and then politically oversaw the complete dismantling of the rail systems. Was this all appropriate? There were many skeptics to what Ford was doing but all were ignored as the idea of unfettered travel became appealing – more so in North America, but quickly around the world.
It is sobering to think, that had we good battery technology at the end of the nineteenth century, we would have gone forward with electric vehicles and not fossil fuels, although the electric power generation at the time would still have been fossil fuels. Yet, I have to think that if the benefits of electric as seen through the genius eyes of Nikola Tesla been invested in, instead of being financially squashed, we would be a much different (and better?) kind of technologically advanced society today, since energy would have been cheap for everyone globally. Energy is one of the primary factors that defines the developed world from the undeveloped world. As I said in my last post, technology has been a process of maximized profits and not social benefits. The difference between appropriate versus inappropriate all too often hinges on ethical human and natural world considerations, or not.
Toi Be Continued ……………..
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