From: Kathryn Aegis (aegis@IGC.APC.ORG)
Date: Tue Dec 03 1996 - 12:53:27 MST
As an example of the kind of thinking that is becoming prevalent, I
submit Kirkpatrick Sale's explanation as to why your home PC is an
ecological disaster area and an affront to human rights:
About computers, over which much dispute rages, it suffices
to say that they have two fundamental, fatal flaws--quite
apart from the fact that a great deal of pollution and
sweatshop labor is involved in their manufacture, some real
risks to health and bodily function are connected to their
operation, considerable deskilling and job displacement result
from their corporate use, and increasing surveillance and
invasion of privacy attend their proliferation. First, in the
hands of the large centralizing corporations and bureaucracies
that devised and perfected them in the first place, and in
service to the goals of production, profitability and power,
computers are steering the world toward social inequity and
disintegration and toward environmental instability and collapse,
and doing so with more speed and efficiency with every passing
year--regardless of how many people on the Internet believe they
are saving the planet. Second, computers interpose and mediate
between the human and natural world more completely than any
other technology--they are uniquely capable of reproducing
another nature through biotechnology and many virtual ones--and
are the instruments that primarily energize the technosphere
that not merely distances this civilization from nature but sets
it at war with nature for its daily sustenance. Next to that it
is quite insignificant whether some individuals find that the
values of a technological society--speed, ease, mass information,
mass access, and the like--are served and enhanced by such
machines.
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