I remember hearing Technology described as things that weren’t working properly yet.
Once they are reliable, they become part of that entire ecosystem of tools and devices we occupy and that keep us, occupied. Who questions light bulbs and electric motors? They are part of the reliable fabric of our lives.
There are still those that hanker after earlier states of mechanical being, where men tended constantly to their oily charges. Things, they moan, were repairable then. In Early days, they even walked ahead with red flags, spanners in hand.
My father recounted tales of the biggest casting, which exploded. killing a man, and the smallest syringe, sent in triumph to a rival American competitor, inside their flaunted best effort.
It is a great cultural test of a car’s design to be adopted into, and be serviceable in a poor country, where supply lines are slow, tools rare and money scarce. Where garages are concrete-block caves, black with waste oil from major surgery.
At the other end of things, there are serious attempts by manufacturers to make sealed unit engines that will Never need servicing: And practical systems exist that link vehicles to central computers, which monitor their health by satellite & send out a service vehicle in response to impending failure.
‘Never’ I mean though, is as this consumer culture understands it.
Measured in furious, machinated time.
We are comfortable with our machines.
They have reshaped our whole, global, social geography. Even our bodies, with obesity becoming a commonplace and proud condition; A token of service to their physically effort-free systems.
The sense of threat to our machines’ blood-supply, Oil, causes economic nervousness that seems set to magnify in intensity as stocks decline. What was dependence is fast becoming slavery, as if we are in service to our technology.
I remember seeing a picture in the Guardian towards the end of last year.
It was a small photograph of a devastated tundra: it was of open-cast mining. Big diggers clawed at the Alaskan earth extracting oil-shale. Huge trucks dwarfed the men in attendance.
It struck me that these were dinosaurs grazing: a new generation of them, fueled and lubricated by oil.
Oil is the concentrated essence of the original dinosaurs’ habitat. It probably contains their blood in homeopathic amounts!
I look around at the machines that dominate our lives. Our cars have developed a lizard-like look: the contemporary fashion even celebrates their metallic appearance.
No more homely paint-jobs.
Our entire urban landscape has been re-engineered to ease their movement and accommodate their rest. Millions of people now sit in them in traffic-jams, trapped in their physical, temporal reality.
We are but one commodity in their supply lines
.
Rural life is nearly impossible without them.
They are the icon of progress and status in an industrial culture. Car sales are seen as a measure, even the cause, of an economy’s health.
Feel the ‘lizard’ in yourself. In the spasms of intellect that make your tongue flicker in articulation. And in others, especially those in positions of dispassionate power and authority.
We allow the demands, defaults, and logic of machines to overrule our
compassion, intuition, and sheer willful changes of mind.
Computer derived systems keep us, guard us and guide us, from ourselves and our true authority.
This dominance affects our consciousness. It makes us increasingly remote from our intuitions and from the Earth, to our mutual loss.
I have wondered if some of us could have inherited this ‘dinosaur’ in our genes, but feel it more likely that particular areas of thought command a lizard-like response.
Languages are systems of thought and have their own wisdom and logic: they talk us as much as we talk them. There are resonances between words that often show a deeper relatedness, the most obvious being puns.
It is no surprise that it was Industrial Germany, with its language’s precise, technical resonance, that should have created such an effective war and death machine as the one that led to the Second World War.
In fact you can see the major World Wars as an essential blood-letting between rival technologies. Human beings watched in horror.
As children in the early Fifties, we were fascinated by these technologies of total war. For me and my friends, it was a fashion show of technical inventiveness, stripped to its essential nature, that of making effective killing machines. The Germans, we agreed, were coolest.
Looking back, our callous indifference to the impact that these technologies had on human lives was implicit in being attracted to their metal energy. I often see that callous indifference in later children, confronted by a cityscape that displays a pageant of inaccessibly expensive technical totems of status.
Within our language, we use our current technology to describe ourselves and our thought processes.
Our lives, dominated by disposable, material goods, rather than living, reproducing organisms, are seen to end in a failure of parts, a gradual disconnection from reality as we age, from a Present which is novel, young, and exciting.
When our world was dominated by the printed word, the essence of truth was taken to be to take something ‘literally’. It’s worth drawing on Marshall McCluhan here, a true prophet of our time, who saw radical shifts in our perception as the direct consequences of literacy: the creation of perspective and 3D, and the cult of the ego, no less.
Now the computer is the brain’s model and metaphor. We have come to see everything as interconnected, interactive systems, whereas literacy encouraged the classification of things into their separateness. Rapid interactivity has replaced logical causality.
This line of thought is heady, lizard- brain stuff! I can feel my tongue flicker... .
So much time is spent trying to portray the dynamics of interaction within the living world and in human society in computer models that we have become entranced, and feel safer, within them than outside of them.
The closer these models come to mirroring the reality they are describing, the more entrancing they are. We fear for our children, glued to computer games, while we fiddle with the biggest computer game ever devised.
This process of disengagement is devastating.
It reflects back on us as compounding mental and physical ailments.
The natural world is becoming increasingly lonely; hungry for our attention.
Once a farmer would cut a few oaks down when he needed fence posts, creating a glade. An ecological opportunity. Now his management agreement has stopped that and he buys in pressure-treated softwood ones. His woods are fenced against grazing.
Those little disturbances of the farmer had kept up a sacred and loving relationship between those woods and man.
The act of being on the land, tending to things; husbandry as it was called, is an essential and inter-dynamic relationship. There is no substitute.
So it is with human beings. Tending to, feeding, talking, and touching each other is true human dialogue. Other means of contact are gradations of remoteness.
The most advanced virtual reality we can devise will never replicate the impact that our actual presence, our love, and responses within the moment, within our own authority and spontaneous feelings, have on board this living and caring planet.
Can you feel it calling you?
