Discuss: Tending the Garden of Technology

fetishizing technology like this reinforces the idea that the richness and diversity of our experience (as well as our general quality of life) is somehow dependent on the development and utilization of physical technologies (specifically those technologies that are system dependent, ie they are made possible by certain social arrangements).

we forget and even deny the reality of the various spiritual and/or autonomous technologies (those accessible and fully reproducible on the individual level) as well as the basic nature of the universe and consciousness to make possible the infinite beauty of experience that is present and accessible always everywhere.

cuz it’s all beauty right?

so if we can see that beauty is not necessarily dependent on our technologies, or even that the technicum is not necessarily dependent on physically complex and industrial manifestations, we can be more free to honestly weigh the costs and benefits of the current technological system.

and one would have to be pretty far removed from reality to see that the spectacle of modern technology has already cost both humyns and the non-humyn community far too much to have any degree of justification.

life is beauty. it can manifest in the waste, pollution, energy use, and cancer of the laptop and the internet or it can in the moonlight, naked in the field, eating dried hawthorn berries and listening to the wind. we can either pay for the former with the lives and life of the earth, or choose and endless array of latter options, ones that require nothing more than awareness.

I’m wondering about the “we” Kelly keeps referring to in the article.  Not everyone has access to technology.  There are plenty of uneducated and or impoverished people here on earth.  Where do they fit in to this technology and evolution bit?

> life is beauty. it can manifest in the waste, pollution, energy use, and cancer

Hmm. Must have a different definition of beauty than I use. I don’t see anything beautiful in waste, pollution, energy use, and cancer. Chernobyl, anyone?

plb

peter. oil sheens can look pretty. as can rust on old industrial machinery. the experience of dealing with cancer can encompass beauty. beauty can manifest in whatever. what i am saying is that even if one can find beauty in the movies, or online, or in dealing with cancer, or in those awesome crystals that formed on the inside of the reactors during meltdown (yes, they are pretty, i have seen them), it does not justify the costs.

> what i am saying is that even if one can find beauty in the movies, or online ... it does not justify the costs.

What costs? To whom must we justify ourselves?

plb

Kevin Kelly had said a lot to his readers for decades, this latest represents an evolution of many very thoughtful observations and responses to change. I like to think scenarios like his certainly illustrate a do-able future, loaded with risk and uncertainty but do-able.  I am more frequently overwhelmed with visions our culture is creating that are clearly not do-able.  Thanks Orion for printing this interview and exchange.  Great old poem by great old Robinson Jeffers:

Bixby’s Landing

By Robinson Jeffers

  They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
here in an iron car
On a long cable; here the ships warped in
And took their loads from the engine, the water
is deep to the cliff. The car
Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,
Stationed like a north star above the peaks of
the redwoods, iron perch
For the little red hawks when they cease from
hovering
When they’ve struck prey; the spider’s fling of a
cable rust-glued to the pulleys.
The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude
Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the
rose-tipped stone-crop, the constant
Ocean’s voices, the cloud-lighted space.
The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the
rust of the broken boiler
Quick lizards lighten, and a rattle-snake flows
Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled
fire-brick. In the rotting timbers
And roofless platforms all the free companies
Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild
buckwheat blooms in the fat
Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.
Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung
nest are the voice of the headland.
Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,
Men’s failures are often as beautiful as men’s
triumphs, but your returnings
Are even more precious than your first presence.

“what costs?” pollution, habitat destruction, the rendering of individuals into “resources”, the alienation that accompanies overspecialization, absurd energy use, cancer….

“to whom must we justify ourselves?” to the community of life that makes up your own, to the species and other spirits who must suffer and die to bring use all our wonderful and empty gizmos and doo-hickies. to yourself, who deeply knows the imbalance inherent in this civilization whether your ego will acknowledge it or not.

to the bees.