No Tech Magazine

The Religion of Complexity

"The reaction of most people when I tell them I’m a scythe teacher is the same: incredulity or amusement, or polite interest, usually overlaid onto a sense that this is something quaint and rather silly that doesn’t have much place in the modern world. After all, we have weed whackers and lawnmowers now, and they are noisier than scythes and have buttons and use electricity or petrol and therefore they must perform better, right? Now, I would say this of course, but no, it is not right. Certainly if you have a five-acre meadow and you want to cut the grass for hay or silage, you are going to get it done a lot quicker (though not necessarily more efficiently) with a tractor and cutter bar than you would with a scythe team, which is the way it was done before the 1950s. Down at the human scale, though, the scythe still reigns supreme."

"A growing number of people I teach, for example, are looking for an alternative to a brushcutter. A brushcutter is essentially a mechanical scythe. It is a great heavy piece of machinery that needs to be operated with both hands and requires its user to dress up like Darth Vader in order to swing it through the grass. It roars like a motorbike, belches out fumes, and requires a regular diet of fossil fuels. It hacks through the grass instead of slicing it cleanly like a scythe blade. It is more cumbersome, more dangerous, no faster, and far less pleasant to use than the tool it replaced. And yet you see it used everywhere: on motorway verges, in parks, even, for heaven’s sake, in nature reserves. It’s a horrible, clumsy, ugly, noisy, inefficient thing. So why do people use it, and why do they still laugh at the scythe?"

"To ask that question in those terms is to misunderstand what is going on. Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology. Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up."

Read more: "Dark Ecology, searching for truth in a post-green world", Paul Kingsnorth, Orion Magazine. Image source.

Celebrating the Luddite Uprisings

"November 2011 – January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings, in which artisan cloth workers smashed machines which were destroying their trades, undercutting wages and forcing them into unemployment and destitution. Today, the industrial system that the Luddites were rebelling against has led to climate change and huge losses of biodiversity, and its new technologies, such as information technology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology raise equally profound issues. Yet anyone who raises concern about the price and side-effects of new technologies is harshly condemned as a 'luddite', someone supposedly irrationally opposed to technology and progress."

"In fact, the Luddites were not 'luddites’ in that sense: the idea that they were opposed to all technology is a history written by the victors. In fact the Luddites opposed only technology ‘hurtful to Commonality’, ie. to the common good, rather than the narrow interests of the few. They destroyed some machines whilst leaving alone others in the same workshop. So being a luddite today means being a sceptic about the dogma of technology as progress, not about denying the real benefits of some technologies. It means insisting that the crucial decisions about which technologies are developed are made democratically, not just imposed by corporations and technocratic elites. And it means standing up for our own ideas of what progress really is."

Help celebrate 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising: Luddites at 200 website. See also: "Lessons of the Luddites".

What Technology Wants

All the modern things
like cars and such
have always existed

they've just been waiting in a mountain
for the right moment

listening to the irritating noises
of dinosaurs and people
dabbling outside

all the modern things
have always existed
they've just been waiting

to come out
and multiply
and take over

it's their turn now...

"The modern things", Björk - from the album "Post" (1995). Kevin Kelly's book "What technology wants" in a nutshell.

Judging Technology

Ran Prieur started an interesting initiative: TechJudge, in which a rating system is applied to different technologies.

"In this age, 'judging technology' means one of two things: reviewing a particular tool for how well it satisfies the consumer, or doing deep thinking about Technology as a whole. I don't think there's any such thing as 'technology'. Every tool, every system of tools, every use of every system of tools, is a different animal. And instead of judging a clothes dryer for how well it dries your clothes compared to another clothes dryer, we should also judge it for how it affects the meaningfulness of your life, the society it is part of, and the rest of life on this planet. The goal of this page is to inspire deep thinking about particular technologies."

For now, only the transportation section has been (partly) filled in. The "passenger dragon" (which scores the maximum of 100 points) left me a bit confused, but here are the preliminary results for the more common transport means:

• sailboat 85 - 74,
• horse 79 - 70
• bicycle 77 - 63
• private jet 58
• airliner 45
• passenger train 44 - 30
• automobile 25

Note that energy use and ecological damage are not the only criteria.

Characteristics of Modern Technique (3)

"The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands, in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible. A great part of modern neurosis may be due to this very fact; for the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains."

"Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all."

"All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals."

Quoted from: "Small Is Beautiful", E.F. Schumacher, 1973.

Characteristics of modern technique (2)
Characteristics of modern technique (1)

Characteristics of Modern Technique (2)

"The great feat of medieval technics was that it was able to promote and absorb many important changes without losing the immense carryover of inventions and skills from earlier cultures. In this lies one of its vital points of superiority over the modern mode of monotechnics, which boasts of effacing, as fast and as far as possible, the technical achievements of earlier periods, even though the result, as in the case of monotransport by motor car or jet plane alone, may be far less flexible and less efficient than the more diverse and many-paced system which preceded it."

Quoted from "Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II", Lewis Mumford, 1970.

Characteristics of modern technique (1).
Characteristics of modern technique (3).

The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World

"Garbage eschatology (I claim credit for this neologism) is based on the premise that our technological infrastructure has acquired too much complexity for us to fix. It will kill us not by turning sentient and (for whatever obscure reason) wanting to kill us, but by stupidly and dumbly collapsing on top of us, like a gigantic Windows Vista, while we watch, powerless to prevent our impending accidental death. Technology will kill us by collapsing into a pile of rubble, turning the planet into a gigantic landfill. (...).

My view is based on the idea that the entropy of a software system (broadly defined to include the civilization-ware that runs the planet, including the mechanically embodied computational intelligence of such things as sewer systems) inevitably increases with time, past a point of no-return. Beyond that, we cannot stop it from collapsing under its own weight, and cannot marshal the resources to reverse the aging process either. The best we can do is hide and then emerge from the rubble and build ourselves Mad Max or Waterworld civilization resurrections. And don’t waste your time agonizing. We probably crossed that threshold in the 14th century, by my calculations."

Venkatesh Rao = Joseph Tainter with a sense of humour. Read the whole thing. Via Ran Prieur.

Characteristics of Modern Technique (1)

"The one best way": so runs the formula to which our technique corresponds. When everything has been measured and calculated mathematically so that the method which has been decided upon is satisfactory from the rational point of view, and when, from the practical point of view, the method is manifestly the most efficient of all those hitherto employed or those in competition with it, then the technical movement becomes self-directing. I call the process automatism. (...).

A surgical operation which was formerly not feasible but can now be performed is not an object of choice. It simply is. Here we see the prime aspect of technical automatism. Technique itself, ipso facto and without indulgence or possible discussion, selects among the means to be employed.

The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice. Let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques. In reality, he neither is nor does anything of the sort. He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques. He does not make a choice of complex and, in some way, human motives. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency. But this is not a choice. A machine could effect the same operation.

Quoted from "The Technological Society", Jacques Ellul, 1964 / Original work: "La technique ou l'enjeu du siècle", 1954 / Picture: polygraph duplicating device.

Characteristics of modern technique (2)
Characteristics of modern technique (3)

The declining marginal return of research and development

The decreasing benefits from specialized, derivative work, viewed from the perspective of the overall history of science, are acquired at substantially greater cost. The costs to societies of early support of science tended to be minimal. Generally, as in the ancient Mediterranean or Medieval Europe, it consisted of little more than the support of individual naturalists or mathematicians and their students, or the support of religious specialists who also performed scientific inquiry. Science today, in contrast, is a costly process involving complex institutions, sophisticated technology, and large, interdisciplinary research teams.

This costly science certainly produces astonishing results, but these cannot be claimed to be more valuable than the generalized knowledge of earlier, less expensive science. As impressive, for example, as modern travel technology is, it is hard to argue that it is of greater consequence than the development of the wheel, or of water craft, or of the steam engine. As astounding as it is to put human beings on the moon, this is not of greater import than the principles of geometry or the theory of gravity. However valuable may be genetic engineering, the benefits of this complex process must always be attributed in part to the nearly cost-free work of Gregor Mendel. (...). Exponential growth in the size and costliness of science, in fact, is simply necessary to maintain a constant rate of progress.

Quoted from: "The Collapse of Complex Societies", Joseph A. Tainter, 1988 (Amazon link). Excerpts.

City Life - Lessons in Vanity

"Already in the western world and Japan millions of city-dwellers and suburbanites have grown accustomed to an almost hermetically sealed and sanitized pattern of living in which very little of their experience ever impinges on non-human phenomena. For those of us born to such an existence, it is all but impossible to believe that anything is any longer beyond human adjustment, domination, and improvement. That is the lesson in vanity the city teaches us every moment of every day. For on all sides we see, hear, and smell the evidence of human supremacy over nature - right down to the noise and odor and irritants that foul the air around us. Like Narcissus, modern men and women take pride in seeing themselves - their products, their planning - reflected in all that they behold. The more artifice, the more progress; the more progress, the more security. We press our technological imperialism forward against the natural environment until we reach the point at which it comes as startling and not entirely credible news to our urban masses to be told by anxious ecologists that their survival has anything whatever to do with air, water, soil, plant, or animal."

Quoted from (again): "Where the Wasteland Ends", Theodore Roszak, 1972. (Amazon link).

Good Question

"How much of what we readily identify as 'progress' in urban-industrial society is really the undoing of evils inherited from the last round of technological innovation?" Quoted from: "Where the Wasteland Ends", Theodore Roszak, 1972. (Amazon link).

How Far Back?

On the appeal of steampunk:

"Compared with an earlier and more thoroughly handcrafted era, a return to the late 1800s or early 1900s does not mean having to give up all the most basic modern conveniences. Most of these, including indoor plumbing, electric lighting and even air conditioning, had been invented and put into use by this time—in the main by the privileged, but then it is their lives (and not those of common men and women) that are the stuff of historical fantasy. Travel no longer meant riding in cramped stagecoaches over dirt roads or wind-and wave-tossed sailing vessels, but in luxurious automobiles and handsomely appointed cabins aboard trains and steamships."

Via Clockworker.

Smarter Technology

"No, I’m not some old hippie or off-the grid survivalist. I’m a big city guy who really likes modern technology, especially computers. But when does the heavy application of technology become overkill? The more I started poking around, the more I found others thinking along the same lines. It’s too early to pronounce this a trend, but there are budding signs." Read 1 / 2 / 3. Sponsored by IBM !

Supporters and Opponents of Technology

"Having read and listened to the arguments of technology enthusiasts and technology critics, I find it striking that different people look at the same history, the same society, the same products and services, the same jobs - and come to diametrically opposed conclusions about what they see. There is a fundamental difference in the world view of supporters and opponents of technology. It is more than the difference in seeing a glass half full or half empty.

The difference seems to be one of contrasting views of what should be in the glass. Supporters of technology see an upward trend in quality of life beginning with people living at the mercy of nature with an empty glass that technology has been gradually filling. Neo-luddites view the glass as originally full when people lived in small communities with little impact on nature; they see technology as draining it."

Quoted from: "A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet, by Sara Baase (Amazon link). Excerpts of the book.