Tech as Addiction

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I’ve not been publishing as often as I’d like. I had a lot of fun this summer! But I have also distracted myself by jousting with the techno-optimists who are so prevalent on Substack. It is time for me to return to sharing stories about how to work effectively in community. But first, one more Elder’s warning to those who worship at the altar of technology.

The last (and agonizingly longest) paean to tech that I read caused one of my Substack acquaintances to exclaim “These people are lunatics!” She’s right.

Reading it made me feel as if I had boarded the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman (1) and been transported to a hotel conference room in Rock Springs, WY in 1971. I was so young, and uncomfortable with the events I saw around me, but I don’t think I had realized just how far off the trail we were until a day that began with the Atomic Energy Commission explaining how it intended to frack a natural gas field with an atomic bomb (2) and ended with a film showing how farms of the future would have airport-like control towers from which robotic tractors were guided through the perfectly leveled fields by computers that determined precisely how much fertilizer should be applied, how much herbicide sprayed (3).

That’s how the future was presented to us as the era of progress-is-our-most-important-product wound down (4). We were promised abundance. And we were getting it, an abundance of wasted watersheds and smog, clear-cut forests, and racial tension. Dissent was suppressed with armed troops (5). Familiar?

It seemed like we were finding a better path though, implementing legislation to restore clean air and water, protect habitat, and address injustice, cheering for Wendell Berry as he debated Earl Butz (6) about the future of agriculture. But now we’ve been dragged back, returned to an ugly time by technologies that trivialize profound issues and facilitate violent division, all for profit. Prophets warned us (please see the Inspirations! feature below), but we seem unable to hear, so I will make my message concise and as clear as I can.

To blithely buy into new technologies without understanding and accounting for their impacts is not optimism. It is, like doing drugs or gambling, an addiction to the proposition that life should be easy.

If there is a happy future, friends, it will not be virtual or convenient. There will be no idling in the control tower while robots do the work. It will be a future in which we have recognized and are living out our kinship with all living things, hierarchy has been dissolved, both leadership and the necessary drudgery are shared, and the ever-receding mirage of easy technological solutions has been set aside for a new (although also traditional and honorable) narrative in which we choose and use our tools wisely.

Good News! Meanwhile, we need more than ever to be reminded of what’s working, and I have not talked about land trusts. I will correct that today, because I’m heading out for a hike on a trail that is managed by our town’s Conservation Commission. A newsletter from the Whidbey-Camano Land Trust in Washington state is peeking out from under a pile of papers on the desk, and I need to send the annual report from Idaho’s Lemhi Regional Land Trust to the proper folder. From coast to coast, local and regional land trusts are protecting the natural assets communities find most valuable. If you don’t already know about it, you can probably find your local land trust at the Land Trust Alliance: https://landtrustalliance.org/. Some land trusts also support housing. The “grandaddy” of those is the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, https://vhcb.org/. There will be more good news re housing in the Green Mountain State in the next edition of The Practice of Community.

Inspirations! Please turn off your television and read Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death. I should’ve read it years ago. It was published in 1985, before social media and AI, but Postman is an accurate prophet and a good writer. This quotation will get you started.

“It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.”

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(1) If you don’t remember the Wayback (sometimes spelled WABAC) Machine from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, check it out on Wikipedia (a free service to which you should consider contributing).

(2) Project Wagon Wheel was part of a Cold War effort to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. See https://wyomingalmanac.com/?p=9. There was fierce opposition, and the Wyoming blast never happened. Nuclear devices had previously been detonated in gas fields in New Mexico and Colorado, but the gas produced was too “hot” to be used.

(3) Please don’t be surprised that I have no notes from 54 years ago, but I believe that film was based on David Meltzer’s 1970 imagery of the Farm of the Future.

(4) “Progress is our most important product” was the marketing slogan of the General Electric Company during the 1960s and 1970s.

(5) A refrain of “tin soldiers and Nixon coming . . .” runs through my head these days: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ohio+crosby+stills+nash+and+young.

(6) Watch Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry for a bit of the Berry-Butz debate and to understand its context: https://www.lookandseefilm.com/.

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