Submitted by carl on Fri, 2006-07-21 17:37.
Daily Dialogue Blog Entries
It's been pretty quiet the past few days. There's been only one persistent thread, and it's about a point that's more broadly philosophical than it is directly related to Michael's Sustainability Principles. The discussion flows from an observation by Dick Fischbeck:
Bucky talked about the Science-Technology-Economics-Politics Sequence ... He meant: Discover universal principle, invent practical application(s), commercialize it, force society to adapt." This is how I see sustainability coming about. I think it has been happening this way all along and will continue to occur this way.
There've been three participants: Dick Fischbeck, FERAL, and MissKitten.
Dick is a Bucky expert who argues that technology and design lead the way, in other words that Bucky's sequencing was and continues to be correct.
FERAL is more skeptical:
Dick - I appreciate your optimism, but I'm afraid it's awfully naive. Generalized principles don't feed anyone, stop any children from stepping on land mines, or keep the government from tapping your phone and holding you indefinitely in a prison camp.
As far as trans-nats following tech - that's a straight-up fantasy. Let's look at agriculture. Every innovation since the civil war has been initiated solely for corporate profit. The mechanization of farming, the green revolution, bio-tech crops, they all came about in order to remove farmers (the last "rugged-individualists") from the land and put them into the industrial economy. Show me any university research facility and I will show you science that is 99.9% funded by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. This wonderful tool we are communicating with was invented for the military, and the large info-tech corporations are lobbying in DC as we speak (write/read) to limit the use of the internet by non-paying types so that they may control the bandwidth. And it will probably happen.
I appreciate all you have laid out here, Dick, and perhaps this discussion is not an appropriate place for my comments. I love Bucky, have been inspired by him since I was a kid, but he stopped thinking 23 years ago. A lot has happened since then. When he was alive (and since), his/our inability to bring his concepts to fruition has stemmed from an intellectual naivety about the inherent power (or lack thereof) of technology.
This is not the last word. Dick Fischbeck responds:
About Bucky's present inability to think, he said language and books make it possible for the dead to speak to the living. I see Bucky's work is more important than ever. How can we travel back to a garden which, as far as I know, never existed. We have to work with what we have and from where we are.
Feral wrote-"Generalized principles don't feed anyone, stop any children from stepping on land mines, or keep the government from tapping your phone and holding you indefinitely in a prison camp."
It's the application of generalized principles that will reverse these and other problems. This is known as a cold revolution, aka-CADS. What's the alternative?
MissKitten's remarks suggest skepticism about technology and "progress," corporation-style.
Please name one (technical) discovery that brought us closer to the nature.
She seems to be suggesting that technology takes us away from nature, and something more besides--that technology isn't actually part of nature. But ... but ... if we humans are part of nature, and technology is a product of our, er, nature, then isn't technology part of nature too? The semiotics of technology: now there's a familiar issue, and one about which I cannot imagine consensus ever being reached.
MissKitten is the person who earlier wondered where all the women were. Dick Fischbeck wondered if this was because "the women are smarter?" Responding to this, FERAL noted:
I agree Dick - sort of - Women do tend to communicate better in formats other than the "semantic circle-jerk" as I like to call these types of discussions - they are generally to busy out actually doing something!
I find it interesting how a conversation that's supposed to be about five Sustainability Principles keeps finding its way to conundrums that have been part of the general philosophical discourse for decades, and in some cases centuries and millennia. Which comes first, spirit or matter? Is technology part of nature or a thing apart? It's hard to get away from questions like this.
And hard to answer them, too.