What would bad technology look like?  Maybe there is no such thing.  Our modern life is immeasurably more comfortable than Otzi’s, or even than life in the 1950’s.  Perhaps our technologies are self-correcting.  The early polio vaccines killed a lot of children in their early roll-out, so we made them better.  Marxism is out of favour now as it seems like it caused more suffering than it prevented: we replaced it with consumer capitalism and a sort of democracy.  Petrol cars will be superseded (probably) by electric ones.  Good technology benefits us either individually or as a society.  Bad technology injures us individually or as a society, or as a planet.  The injury can be a deferred one, so we don’t notice it now, or we may benefit while others suffer.  This last has been described as the dishonourable harvest.  The dishonourable harvest is an inevitable part of benefits reaped from any technology but I would argue that the relationship between benefit and cost is not linear: spiralling complexity multiplies the costs, while often diminishing returns apply to the benefits.  

Further, maybe you can push that adaptable paleolithic brain of yours too far:  I’m looking at you, facebook and tiktok.  All of this means that the costs of a particular technology are almost impossible for an individual to evaluate fully, while the perception of the benefits is often relentlessly amplified via advertising and media bias towards the new and the shiny.

Madness

Theodore Kaczynski, who was a mathematics professor with a degree from Harvard set out the following four premises:

1: Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster

2: Only the collapse of modern technological civilisation can avert disaster

3: The political left is technological society’s first line of defence against revolution:

4: What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society

I don’t expect the good denizens of Bamburgh to go all the way with him, especially as he then launched a murderous letter-bombing campaign that led to him being dubbed the ‘Unabomber’ before his eventual capture.  However, I think his arguments have a certain iron logic (that’s the end of my political career) and I don’t think we can go on very long as we are without inviting disaster and ruin.  Incidentally, he didn’t launch his bombing campaign in an attempt to ignite a movement, but as an act of revenge against a society which was destroying everything good.

So, what then?

This poem is by Edwin Muir 1956:

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Well, he thought there was such a thing as too much technology and presents the picture of apocalypse following war and the rebirth being a sort of romantic new covenant with the world.  I don’t think this is the only scenario, nor do I think that dragging a rusty plough is the only desirable future for mankind.  

To reject all technology represents a rejection of humanity, since we are fundamentally, if not solely, technology makers and users.  However, we might have to start thinking a little harder about which technologies serve us well and which do not.  We can either allow an autocratic elite to do this for us with net zero, social credit schemes, compulsory medication and Great Resets, or we can collectively start thinking a lot harder about these questions and be more principled in our decisions, or if we don’t mind a hard landing, we can carry on as we are and accept nature’s solution.  

We’re doomed, captain Mainwaring, doooomed!

The Fermi paradox asks the question:  given the size of the universe and the number of worlds on which life should be possible, why have we failed to observe any other advanced civilisations?  One answer is that advanced civilisations inevitably destroy themselves as they spring the final technology trap, be it AI, war or ecological destruction.  I’m not sure even the joys of a 5G connected fridge are worth that.  Ralph Waldo Emerson stated in 1841: ‘society never advances as fast on one side as it retreats on the other.  The civilised man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet’.

Let us ask: does a piece of technology increase the aggregate of human flourishing?  I don’t even have to consider ecology or the planet as human flourishing surely depends on this.  Are we flourishing now as a civilisation?  That’s for you to answer.  If you are like my brother, you will demand data to guide your decision.  I point you as a starter in the direction of statistics around drug and alcohol dependence, as well as rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. 

I commend the following to your palaeolithic brains:

Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Confessions of a recovering ecologist by Paul Kingsnorth

Youtube: Do we live in a sick society by academy of ideas

And most of all, 

Come to the Budle Self Sufficiency Festival on the 2nd July 

Ralph Cresswell

Budle Hall