Topic: Community/Culture

I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe – a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won’t even be close. I’ll bet on my optimism.

As we import biological principles into technology, we are generating technology that’s decentralized, that plays on differences, that’s irregular on demand, that’s nonlinear, and that’s very interactive. If we were stuck with having to make technology that was centralized and stupid and brute, we would be looking forward to a dismal future. But we don’t have to make technology that way … In the end, people will choose technology and civilization. The Luddites will be left behind.

How are we going use the computer?! What do you use that technology for?! Here’s how: it’s going to be used for the dominance and exploitation of nature for our benefit … I’m not asking you to worship nature. I’m asking for a regard for nature.

Newsweek magazine’s recent issue on technomania says: “The revolution is only just begun. It’s already starting to overwhelm us, outstripping our capacity to cope, antiquating our laws, transforming our mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our priorities, redefining our workplaces, putting our Constitution to the fire, shifting our concept of reality.” I think that anything that is doing that to us is something that ought to be resisted … Until we change our minds, how are we going to change our technologies?

I urge people to take a clear-headed look at what is in front of them, and not to feel guilty if they reject something, and to be able to say, with a rational explanation, This is wrong, I will not myself buy into it … There are two moral judgments against computers. One is that computerization enables the large forces of our civilization to operate more swiftly and efficiently in their pernicious goals of making money and producing things … And secondly, in the course of using these, these forces are destroying nature with more speed and efficiency than ever before.

This technology … is designed precisely to create a uniformity of production, consumption, distribution – distribution of money or ideas or so-called information. If within it you can find these nuggets of the contrary, that doesn’t change the overall nature of the industrial mechanism or the industrial civilization behind it.

I gave a very short, minute-and-a-half description of what was wrong with the technosphere, how it was destroying the biosphere. And then I walked over and I got this very powerful sledgehammer and smashed the screen with one blow and smashed the keyboard with another blow. It felt wonderful. The sound it made, the spewing of the undoubtedly poisonous insides into the spotlight, the dust that hung in the air … some in the audience applauded. I bowed and returned to my chair … It was a statement.