I’m selling my macbook soon. And this got me weighing the benefit of liquidizing it against certain costs of diminished social negotiability.
What are the technologies we can’t do without, i.e. without overly disabling ourselves? What technologies and STUFF in general should we just get rid of to lighten the load?
I’ve reduced my books to a single heavy crate. Threw away gobs of official looking junk papers. Soon I will go thru my clothes. Nomads used to be able to carry everything they owned!
I come at it from the perspective with two premises:
Point 2 comes with a recognition and concession: The technosphere (social media and the internet, if that’s easier to discuss) is winning.
At this juncture, I believe technology has so mediated human interaction that it is likely necessary to use technology to rebuild community. In its use, we have to recognize that we will be mesmerized by its allure, and the temptation to lose sight of technology as a means to an end will seduce many into making technology an end in itself. The dominant culture’s value, that is the culture of technology, is to make technology an end. It has already become that for many of us.
My personal heruristics are:
An example of 2 is firearms. I already have hunting firearms, and currently lack the skills to manufacture an effective bow and arrows. Using them to feed myself through hunting while I increase my bowhunting skills is preferable to dependence on grocery stores.
I am also sympathetic to arguments that building community through technology is a fools errand. I admire those who reject communications technology as well.
I am similarly sympathetic to arguments that my thinking on firearms prevents me from learning bowhunting as I might if I gave up my training wheels.
Instead of phrasing the question around “technology”, I think it is more useful to consider the question of necessity and quantity. After all, all tools we use as humans are a technology some are more primitive some are digital, some were used in recent generations, some have recently been invented.
Rephrasing the question, and avoiding the vagueness of the term “technology” permits us to admit that most of our homes and communities ressemble department stores or garbage dumps. We live atop a pile of possessions that leave us disconnected from the real world. How can we simplify life, perhaps admitting new technologies that help us do that, whilst discarding certain old technologies that harm our planet, our communities, and our bodies.
There is certainly a move that some make that tries to conflate tools with technology. However, I think technology—as a system of collected techniques, and implying expertization and division of labor—is absolutely worth questioning. To my mind, the knee-jerk “technology is neutral” explanation that’s so frequently put to me is not only false, but also insidious.
We were tricked into consumerism, psychologist looked into how the human mind works and used this information against us. We were turned into consumers to benefit the monetary system put in place in the early 1900’s. It was a huge success.
I have a self bow sitting next to my desk, it still needs work. I think the arrow will be the harder part or most time consuming.
BTW I’m selling my pc because I just got a smart phone as a gift. One really does not need two computers, but arguably if you aren’t already well established in an offline community you need at least one. Even if there’s a possibility of that community ending. This may just be a huge hunch and nothing more.
I was pondering this subject the other day. Where do we stop and draw the line? Semantics says that everything is technology. Striking one stone against another to create a blade was a technological development. Then putting a stick at the end of a spear became an atlatl, followed by a bow and arrow, then crossbow, and now to the modern firearm. When the laser shooter comes out, is that something we will use to hunt so we don’t have to buy bullets anymore and just hook it up to a solar panel to charge? Or when we run out of bullets, do we go buy some from the store, or force our way back into bow and arrow?
How do others feel about this? I’m not sure where I stand. Part of me would actually prefer to downgrade my weapon. Or do you have a gun with ammo, pretend you don’t, and starve yourself until you master the bow, only bringing out the gun as a hail mary pass before giving up on the paleo dream?
I sold my gun last summer. Built my first bow with a knife I made in December and it worked really well. I gave it to a homeless kid when I broke camp. Over the last few months, I’ve been hunting with less and less. Last time I was out, I stripped down to shorts(only because of possible people in the area, otherwise, I’d have gone full birthday suit), rolled in the mud, and tried to walk up the river as quietly as possible. I got within a foot of a beaver, a huge catfish, two ducks, and a bald eagle. Just by reaching out and grabbing it, I could have fed 20 people that night. Not being desperate enough to club or strangle something, I ended up grabbing my fishing pole and caught a nice brown trout and a big large mouth bass. With both fish, I could have tied something looking like a lure to a string and just dropped it in the water right by me because both fish were caught on jacked up casts that landed 5 feet from me. In all my years of hunting and fishing, I never had as much food opportunity in one day and I attribute it to ditching the tech and becoming part of nature.
Here’s a video of my bow:
As far as computers go, I’m using a 2005 netbook that I’ve repaired the motherboard on, with a soldering iron, probably five times. I run puppy linux on it because it’s simple. ASAP, I’ll be replacing it with an odroid xu3lite, a vufine display, and a credit card sized 8 key chording keyboard I made. The reasons for the switch are weight, power consumption, and ergonomics. I feel like I need the computer because it’s my main tool for developing tech that I think could really improve people’s lives in sustainable and low environmental impact ways, and I use it to attempt to build a team to help me. When the trike is done, I’m on the road, and the projects are self sustaining and being run by other enthusiasts, I’ll probably only get the thing out once a week or so.
I’ve quit wearing shoes and clothes as much as possible, quit using heat and ac, live in a tent, quit using soap, gave up on western healthcare, and with every change moving away from civilization’s tech, I’m happier and healthier. I wear my glasses as little as possible and my prescription has improved from -6.75 to -4.25 over three years.
One of the reasons I stay in AZ or may head even further south is that it’s easier to be comfortable with less tech and resource consumption in areas that are naturally suitable for humans.
I find it a bit funny that I’m constantly designing and prototyping green tech with the goal of getting further away from civilization. Like Andrew said about communications tech though, civilization has damaged me to the point that I need some tech to survive in a free and sustainable way. If I wasn’t so busted up and worn out, and I had a tribe to be a part of, I’d be in the jungle or desert with nothing I didn’t make myself out of materials I could gather from nature.
Most critical discussions of technology seem to delineate between tools (artifacts), techniques (methods, skills, knowledge), and technology (a complex interaction and collection of tools and techniques). These categories vary by language of course, so going from Heidegger’s German to Jacques Ellul’s French to Lewis Mumford’s English to colloquial 21st century English can be clunky.
So a stone point might be a tool, flintknapping might be a technique, and a modern firearm would be technology.
Another way it’s sometimes conceptualized is the amount of division of labor and/or specialization required. So anything an individual human (and many other animals, really) manufactures by themselves for themselves, would be a tool, and anything that requires multiple levels of specialization, multiple workers, and dependency on others might be technology. The magical electronic devices requiring materials from 317 bioregions and 1.3 million employees from 96 companies and 438 patents would illustrate the complexity of technology vs. @Ernesto’s DIY bow and its use as a tool.
