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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When you take a really honest look at the track record of technology and innovation, it is sobering. It’s very difficult to get it all right when there are over 7 billion of us doing it. Add to that aspiring to be materially richer year after year, and we have a recipe for large-scale disaster. When you fully consider the track record, betting on innovation to keep the party going is about as rational as investing all your retirement savings on a lottery ticket.
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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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Here we devote a little attention to some of the unsung heroes of low-tech innovation that have qualitatively, and beyond measure, improved, and even saved, lives worldwide. With necessity the mother of invention, many of these innovations originated in low-income regions of the world, where a few less zeros on the budget often yields priceless results.
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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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SHIFT magazine 