I was one of the few luddites who saw that every new machine was not only a brilliant idea, but a great way to put a person on the unemployment line. Pretty soon everything will make itself and so we'll have nothing left to do except scrounge around in supermarket dumpsters for food.
this was found on Alternet
[originally on Archein, by Joe Costello]
We Just Went Through 200 Years of Radical Economic Upheaval -- The Next Economic Era Offers Us a Chance to Control It
Proposing a
'design economy' -- the more we participate in it and share it, the better we all live and the more
sustainable and stable it can become.
I. In contemporary economic discussion, the idea of the Industrial Revolution is frequently presented as something bland, neutral and inevitable. Instead of conveying a sense of historical turmoil, disruption and the overthrowing of established cultural, political and economic institutions dating back millenia, we simply throw off the term, “
Industrial Revolution” with little regard that it represented a fundamental reordering of human life. In many ways this is understandable, as the Industrial Revolution triumphed, becoming industrial rule, industrial economy, industrial bureaucracy, and industrial life -- the industrial status quo. In large swaths of the world, industrial economy is so dominant, it leaves the sense the world has always been that way and only a fool could imagine it being any different. Most amazingly, this has all been accomplished in less than two centuries -- an historical blink of the eye.
Today, we confront an era of equal historical change. Further understandings of the natural world and resulting new technologies are beginning to impact industrial society to a degree as fantastic as industrial knowledge and technology transformed agrarian society. While agrarian civilization lasted over 10,000 years, the reign of industrial society has been relatively brief; nonetheless, it is being usurped. This transformation is rapidly
intruding on our lives, yet still not quite recognized beyond a general trepidation that things don't seem to quite work like they did before. The great collective social anxiety of the Industrial era, never satiated, now confronts a new transition for which the tools, skills, thinking and institutions are little developed, if they exist at all.
Maybe the most essential understanding we can have in such a time is the simple recognition of change. The Industrial era, for many reasons, is transitory. It is inherently
unstable, and incapable of truly meeting the challenges and problems it created. For in the end, industrialism tries conforming or forcefully overwhelming life's great diversity into a few narrow homogenous environments, which are unhealthy and unsustainable for both the individual and the system as a whole.
The Industrial era's greatest strength, an uncompromising
faith in technology, is also one of its greatest weaknesses. The simplistic adoption of any given technology, without an understanding or systemic feedback mechanisms to
track its impact on society, is
the ethos of a child, an immature civic morality. To paraphrase the technology thinker
Marshall McLuhan,
first we shape technology, then technology shapes us. We still grasp to understand how technology shapes us, yet we rapidly transform from industrial technologies to a new era, for lack of a better term, of information technologies.
-Cosine67~~
[Central Barcelona 2005]
[Pantera on kart track, Athens 2001?]
[Darzak]
[motorbike, upwardly mobile]
