An academic who doesn’t stake his career on pleasing the establishment, Ozzie Zehner dares to put forth a down to earth and rigorously scientific response to our culture’s obsession with technological fixes.
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Technology’s false hope can bring us only disappointment, sorrow and suffering. It’s time to learn to let it go, gradually but starting now, and give up our dreams of “smart” technologies that are too smart for our own good.
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New media has given us a freer press, but more powerful tools for state surveillance and corporate consolidation. The 24/7 connectedness of social networking has enabled us to transcend borders and map global revolutions, but to the point we’re at risk of losing touch with our local communities. Knowledge and validation has become the primary currency in which we trade, equipped with cognitive add-ons to sublimate the reality that we are lonelier, starved for meaning, and more narcissistic than ever. We have become highly innovative and advanced with our techno-visionary ideals of progress, but at what cost to our needs for meaningful relationship, holistic wellbeing and the planet?
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Humans are more than the one-trick pony our obsession with technological fixes depicts us as. We are adaptable, and have the capacity to approach our problems from a variety of angles. We also have the capacity to exercise restraint when necessary. And we can break the cycle of the labour-saving paradox, if we think outside the tool-box.
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Learning about the world’s problems and the creative solutions needed to overcome them often means searching for hidden gems between the folds of sub-cultures. For the time-poor majority in our society film is an unrivalled medium for informing and inspiring, and the movies that matter are the ones that have the potential to change minds and inspire action.
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With the fast pace of today’s news cycle it can be hard to know what to pay attention to, and information overload is often the inevitable result. Listed under the categories of Economy, Energy, Environment, Geopolitics and Culture, our selected news highlights bypass celebrity gossip and partisan politics, cutting through the crap to shine the spotlight on the world affairs that affect us most strongly.
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In truth we need to remove technology from our definition of progress. We need progress of another sort – progress in thought and perspective. Smart grids, smart cars, smart growth, and 8K televisions are not going to advance human civilization.
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This article is excerpted from Carolyn’s forthcoming book, Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: Cultivating the Relationships We Need to Thrive, to be released March, 2015.
This sneak-preview of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse is part 2 of a 3-part series of excerpts published in SHIFT.
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Geoengineering ignores a message to which the medical profession has long adhered, and which seems quite relevant in this case: “First, do no harm.” In a complex adaptive system, it is almost certain that unintended consequences will result from the application of any technological fix, and the evidence suggests that these consequences will be devastating for many; we simply do not have the control over the climate that techno-optimists would like to believe we have.
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So we all know the economy is going to the dogs, and I personally think it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Regardless of when or how though, what seems completely clear is that by the time most of us retire, our superannuation (the Australian privatised compulsory pension scheme, which is mostly invested in the stock market) won’t have held the value it has today.
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