RESCUING LADY NATURE
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devastating actual people’s lives, land, and cultures. Ultimately, it becomes
immoral to separate contents of consumption from forms of production; for in
so doing, we turn our heads from the social, ecological, and political costs of
global capitalism itself.
TIhe Romance of TEcliNO-Di^cpNS: TIhe FiqliT To Sky TEcliNobq/
Accompanying the struggle for ‘pure’ commodities, has emerged the struggle
for pure technologies. Despondent about the degradation of ecological and
social life, people look to the most obvious visible tropes of modem and
postmodern society: technology itself. Noting the historical correlation between
‘advanced’ technologies and the reduction in quality of life, people create
causal connections between ‘technology’ as a general category and ecological
injustice in particular. In search of solutions, many look longingly to a past
golden age where low5 technologies did not plunder the earth’s riches; a time
before the dragon of ‘modem technology’ bore its , mechanized and treacherous
claws, destroying all that it encountered.
Yet today’s romantic discussions concerning modem ‘technology5 really
reflect crises concerning capitalism and democracy: crises in which citizens are
deprived of political forums in which to shape the forms and functions of
capital driven technologies. All around us, we see new technologies sprout up
within Newsweek or on the nightly news. Yet we play no direct political role in
determining what effect they shall have upon our social and ecological lives.
The technologies which most concern us tend to be referred to as ‘high’ or
‘industrial’ technologies, technologies whose deployment requires intensive
degrees of centralized capital orTabor, often at the expense of both social and
ecological
integrity.' Hence,
computer,
nuclear,
communications
and
biotechnologies, represent sources of tremendous concern for those concerned
with social and ecological justice. However, when we remove such discussions
from their calls to ‘go back to earlier, easier times and places, we see a
different set of problems and opportunities emerge. By exploring the social
and political context of these ‘high’ technologies, we see that they are after all,
capitalist commodities produced by corporations, regulated by the state, and
often originally researched and developed by the military.
So
often,
‘backward-looking’ discussions portray ‘technology’ as a
universal event that emerges within a social and political vacuum. We live in an
era of technological determinism in which we are told that ‘technology’ exists
as an autonomous force which determines social and political events. Today,
we become familiar with ideas of technical determinism in journalistic stories
which speak of “technology out of control,” or “computers transforming the
world” exemplified by the opening of this Newsweek article: