-Jerry Mander
Friction Magazine has a great interview in their archives with the always insightful if terribly depressing Jerry Mander, author of In Absence of the Sacred, anti-technology activist and reigning god-king of Mad Science Haircuts.
Mander's philosophy is easy enough.
Jerry's message: Technological civilization is destroying nature and human life.
Jerry's solution: Dismantle technological civilization. Simple as that.
How he presents it is another case. After all, the likes of Daniel Quinn and William Burroughs have had much the same to say. Mander's critique of civilization is a little different, though, relying on rigorous research, richly developed insight, and, oh, coherency.
Just as other creatures co-evolve with their environment, we are co-evolving with our technologies. In nature, creatures evolve by adjusting and reacting to other creatures. It used to be that way with human beings as well. But now we are co-evolving mainly with machines. Our compromise with them is that we start to become like them -- we have to become a little like them in order to use them.
The heart of what we call civilization is the deification of the machine. The invention of the wheel, the taming of fire, the triumph of heliocentrism are all cultural myth points along the ladder taking us from the state of Mere Beasts to our proper, ascended, near-divine state of Civilized Humans. None of which looks the same after you've taken Mander's point of view: we are becoming increasingly machinelike because we culturally deify machines because we have grown up in wholly technological environments. Machines, rather than other organic life forms, are the competing and collaborating species within our completely artificial ecosystem!
If you’re going to play a video game, for example, the point is to speed up your hand-eye coordination. The better you get at the video game, the faster your hand-eye connection. What you are doing with your hands and eyes is involving yourself in the computer program. So you are creating a cycle of actions and reactions with the computer technology. As your awareness and your nervous system become tuned to the computer, you are changed accordingly.
This is true of any technology. Look at television, for example. To watch television is to take in images that are artificially created for a specific purpose. By carrying these images, you begin to turn into them. That's basic to education and to all experience: as you ingest your environment you begin to evolve with it. In the case of television, you are evolving on the basis of carefully selected and programmed images, so you are getting acted on in a very aggressive manner. Television turns you into its own images. It rearranges your mind.
That this process has such a negative impact on human participants can be linked to an incompatibility between organic life and dead machines. It is possible to think of modern technology as viral: dead matter exhibiting qualities of life only in the presence of a living host (us). As we change accordingly to our exposure to the technology virus, we begin to acquire more and more of its own qualities: unrestricted growth, increased computational ability marred by decreased intuitional ability (the right hemisphere of the brain is sometimes called the "silent hemisphere"), an unchecked, unexamined, unquestioned drive to ever greater "efficiency," and other ill adapted, negative mutations. If technology as we know it is viral, the manifestation of that technology in human activity ("Progress") is cancerous.
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