| Steve Talbott is author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, which was named one of the Outstanding Books of the Year by the academic library journal, Choice. He is also editor of the online newsletter, NetFuture: Technology and Human Responsibility www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture. The newsletter is a publication of The Nature Institute, Ghent, New York, which is dedicated to the development of a phenomena-centered, contextual science. Steve has spent 19 years working in the high-tech industry. | |
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The threats to our environment are an expression of our longstanding alienation from the natural world. With its aggressive disinterest in the qualities of things (which are the things), science has led us on a several-hundred-years' abandonment of nature. A key feature of this drive is the reduction of nature to information. A companion feature is replacement of the desire to experience and know by the desire to manipulate and control. Technology is the effective instrument of this devilish substitution, and has aptly been described as the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it. By embracing technology without enough respect for its alienating and destructive potentials, environmental activists are helping to worsen the very disease they want to heal. But if we can muster that respect, then the technology will indeed bring healing. |
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