So I got an email [Wednesday] with the intriguing subject line: ‘All the troglodytes in one place’. I won’t reveal the sender, but it turned out to be a surprisingly accurate description of an event to be held in New York [on October 25], grandly titled: “Techno-Utopianism & the Fate of the Earth: Why Technology Will Not Save The World”.
I invite you to read the, er, PDF. There is a rambling pre-amble, but the real meat is in the sessions – all of them dedicated to promoting various naturalistic fallacies, backward-looking reactions to modernism and globalisation, and other kinds of outdated green fantasising. Humanity’s “unquenchable thirst” for knowledge is lamented; as is the loss of an imagined past where “we once lived in contact with wild Nature, and in-close human community; connected, embedded”. (Hence the rapid progress of various plagues…)
It’s all dressed up in environmentalist language, but it’s a peculiarly Leftish dystopian discourse: “With the planet depleted, overbuilt and poisoned, wild nature and its great gifts are disappearing… For corporations, innovation solves the problem: Ignore the mess, create saleable ‘green’ false solutions, and build and market ‘substitute nature’ for uninterrupted product development and growth”. This sounds like a pseudo-religious narrative – capitalism is seen as humanity’s Sodom and Gomorrah, drowning us in consumerist excess that can only end with an apocalyptic Fall.
In my experience, few of those promoting backwardness for other people live out those dreams themselves. If Vandana Shiva, for example, really believed her own rhetoric about the noble simplicity of the lives of the Indian poor, would she be demanding $40,000 and business-class travel for her speeches to the gullible but well-heeled Western audiences who seem to have an endless fawning appetite for her particular brand of Eastern mysticism?
We’d better continue with industrial development for a while longer then, hadn’t we? Just for the sake of equality, mind you.
Read full original blog: Anti-technologists descend on New York City… by plane and car
