I completely agree with that. In fact, I’m involved in a project in Brazil which is precisely about creating a technology (in this case, a software system for offline communication) in a bottom-up way, for the community, by the community. It started in quilombos (mostly rural Afro-Brazilian communities), but several Indian (rather, indigenous) communities are interested in getting this software too. Tech doesn not need “owners”, it needs to be free for people to create stuff themselves.
Here’s me and the Baobáxia project’s lead developer speaking about this at FOSDEM a couple of months ago:
Tech does not need “owners”, it needs to be free for people to create stuff themselves.
I’m hopeful but it might require active large-scale civil disobedience, ignoring patent exclusivity in a kind of Salt March. I figure India might be able to pull this off again, but maybe it requires a culture already swimming in technology, education and power.
I was always skeptical of this, but Leigh Phillips’s Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff congealed my suspicions into something much more coherent and radical. Materialism is good. Stuff is good. Intensive high-tech farming is how we save forests, by using genomics, high tech pesticides and other techniques to produce more food on fewer acres, leaving behind green spaces for the rest of the world .
I couldn’t have made a better parody of thinking in false dichotomies if I had tried.
Here’s another perspective:
Materialism and “stuff” aren’t necessarily good or bad. It depends on how you define “good” and “bad”, and on a host of other factors.
The example of organic vs. industrial farming is a good one. Let’s start with the fact that it’s a false dichotomy. There’s really thousands or more different farming techniques, not all of which can be easily classified into “organic” or “industrial”. If you graph whether and how much different farmers use these techniques in an abstract space with a dimension for each technique, you find can separate it into roughly two clusters which correspond to our false dichotomy.
Are “high-tech pesticides” good? I think we can all agree that A) “pesticide” is a marketing term for “poison”, and B) as the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. So good or bad? Well, are you using just the right amount of pesticide? How do you know if just the right amount? Does using more increase yield, but also make people more sick and also increase the rate at which pests acquire resistance to your pesticide? Is yield more important than health? Do we want to be engaged in a red queen scenario where we use a particular poison until all its targets develop resistance to it, forcing us to move onto a new poison (or, more likely, suite of poisons)?
(contrasted with low-tech-pesticide-intensive, land-intensive “organic” farming, which can’t feed the world at the current population, nor projected populations, and is wishful thinking wrapped up in unscientific nonsense)
Cory is using “unscientific” purely as a term of propaganda. Unscientific claims can be made about “organic farming”, but as noted above, “organic farming” is a loose grab-bag of techniques, some of which accomplish goals we want to accomplish and some of which don’t (note that science is inadequate to tell us what our goals should be in the first place).
For example, “no till farming” is a technique associated with “organic farms” and “organic farming”. The wikipedia article will give you a list of benefits, along with citations for scientific studies which demonstrate these benefits: No-till farming - Wikipedia Cory’s framing of organic farming as “wrapped in unscientific nonsense” is too unsophisticated to grapple with the realities of farming technology, which are that individual techniques need to be evaluated on a case by case basis relative to what goals we hope to achieve and the material realities involved in each technique (if we don’t have access to fossil fuels then we can’t use techniques that rely on fossil fuels, etc).
Any time someone starts talking about the planet’s “carrying capacity” I want to see their numbers. Why do we assume that behaviorally modern hominids, 50,000 years into their run on Earth (a planet whose species have a median duration of 10 million years) will cease our amazing track-record of massively reducing labor, energy and material inputs to our necessities and luxuries?
Because most of our amazing track record is predicated on digging up millions of years worth of bottled sunlight (in the form of fossil fuels) rather than any actual ingenuity on our part? For someone who accuses others of being “unscientific” quite frequently, Cory is really quite shit at science.
Instead of maximizing the shitty obnoxiousness of your shit ideology of collapse, why not propose science, technology, and non-attitude-based methods of improving things? All your talk about science (which even you allow shows some potential) simply betrays an irrational hatred of people. Moralize some more at us, why don’t you.
I did propose a “non-attitude-based” technology the efficacy of which is confirmed scientifically: no-till farming.
I didn’t say anything bad about science (I just pointed out that Cory is using the word “science” propagandistically rather than, you know, accurately).
Please point out where I said anything about collapse.
Please be specific about how anything I said betrays an irrational hatred of people. This is a really bizarre accusation, by the way.
It’s very interesting to me that I wrote a comment talking purely about Cory’s incredibly unsophisticated views on technology and propagandistic abuse of the term “science” and it made you so furious that you’d hurl around unfounded accusations that I hate people. And the fact that you can’t even acknowledge that I did propose a specific technology to make things “better”* – no clearer indication could be given that you’re just trying to bully me out of the discussion instead of rebutting what I say in good faith.
*As I mentioned in my previous comment, “better” has to be a function of what goals you’re trying to achieve, and science is inadequate to determine our choice of goals. If you want to maximize yield per acre in the short term, chemical fertilizers and mechanical tilling will probably be better. But if you want to preserve soil quality over the long term, no-till is better.
His rather frequent and lengthy arguments against his opponents mostly take the form of ridicule, not examining whether there are good reasons for their positions.
Because most of our amazing track record is predicated on digging up millions of years worth of bottled sunlight (in the form of fossil fuels) rather than any actual ingenuity on our part?
This is the pure collapser crap you need to move beyond. I have no time for it. [No] “actual ingenuity”? Just knock it off and read some history without preloading on condescension.
Whoah, whoah, whoah junior…let’s take a step back. I highlighted four lies you made about my previous comment. Do you want to defend any of your demonstrably false claims? Or maybe just apologize for lying?
And in this case, I can’t help but notice you had to interpolate a “[no]” into my comment to make it say what you wanted to say instead of what I actually said. You lie a bunch of times to try to bully me out of the conversation, I point this out, and your response is to lie some more?
(Yes, lie. Here’s what you’re responding to:
Because most of our amazing track record is predicated on digging up millions of years worth of bottled sunlight
Most is not due to human ingenuity. Some is. Your “[no]” is your own invention.)
Of course – you don’t have time to make legitimate arguments. You only have time to use bully tactics.
But let’s take a look at the statement I’m rebutting:
massively reducing labor, energy and material inputs to our necessities and luxuries?
Have we massively reduced labor? Relative to what? Let’s start with what we mean by “labor”. Do we mean strenuous physical activity? There’s a problem there – strenuous physical activity is actually good for us. We’re in a position where we actually pay people so that we can go to special facilities designed to help us engage in strenuous physical activity and none of that activity is used for anything useful. Or maybe by “labor” we don’t mean strenuous physical activity – maybe we mean people spending half or more of their waking hours doing shit they don’t enjoy doing. Actual anthropological studies (i.e. science) suggests that hunter gatherer societies and garden agrarian societies have more leisure time than we do. (They probably engage in more strenuous physical activity than we do, but they probably enjoy it and it’s good for their health.) But it’s probably much easier for wealthy white folks like you and Cory to suggest that our labor inputs have decreased than it is for the vast majority of the world’s population who do not enjoy nearly as much wealth and leisure as you two.
Have we massively reduced material inputs? Cory says he’d like to see the numbers – well I’d like to see his numbers on this. Perhaps he is thinking in a loose, non-rigorous way about how cars in the 50’s and 60’s weighed a great deal more (and had much worse fuel efficiency) than cars now. That’s fine, but as we have increased the material efficiency of cars, we have also made them more affordable and as a result make many many more cars. Most of these cars just sit in driveways or parking lots for most of their lives, and their utility is capped by the fact that more cars means slower commuting – so the time spent using cars is actually mostly wasted. Much more importantly, we’re producing more products than we were in the 50’s and 60’s (smart phones and computers come to mind, but of course there’s a massive infrastructure in place behind those), and using a larger volume of more diverse and rarer materials in the process. In some ways, we have increased our material efficiency. By most reasonable measures, we have vastly expanded our use of material inputs.
Have we massively reduced energy inputs? The numbers pretty clearly illustrate that we have increased energy inputs pretty much since the invention of the steam engine. As with materials, we can cherry pick particular applications where we have increased efficiency. But it’s clear that in total, we are using more energy than ever before, and increased efficiency seems (via Jeavon’s paradox) to just lead to higher energy consumption. In fact, our energy efficiency has declined by many measures because, for example, the ores from which we obtain iron, gold, and other minerals are substantially lower grade than the ones we used in previous decades. The energy efficiency of fossil fuel extraction has demonstrably decreased despite the huge technological advancements made in this area.
None of this demonstrates that we can improve our material conditions using pure human ingenuity. It implicates our use of an incredibly high-density and convenient source of chemical energy at every level. Which isn’t to say human ingenuity is non-existent or can’t improve material conditions; but to do so effectively, we need to acknowledge physical (i.e. scientific) realities. Such as our dependence at every level on fossil fuels, the use of which is doing as much (or more) to endanger our society as to improve it.
How do you personally feel about fracking and DDT? Do you have anything substantive to say on this topic, or just more lies and bullying?
The fact that the only technology you bring up is no-till means that your “most” really does mean “all”, especially since you don’t talk about what you mean by no-till. There really is a spectrum, scientifically, just like organic farming. What you are whining about at Cory for is your confusion of organic with industrial food companies’ branding strategy.
Given your predilection to ignore innovation, might I suggest the humble condom as a reduction of inputs? No doubt you would see it as too people-centric.
As far as bullying goes… I consider the worse form to be putting up walls of text that suggest that humanity is useless, and suggesting nothing credible to improve things, and denying that the original poster has any point at all… and being so disappointed in the boingboing.
