Technology

Technology hasn’t provided more leisure time (as anticipated), or fostered creativity, or even helped the cause of justice. It has, instead, made people more complacent, and maybe less capable of real thought and meaningful decision-making. It may well have made our lives more fragile, vulnerable and pathetic. Modern medicine allows us to live longer, but science and technology have NOT made us stronger. To think a palm pilot or global positioning device enriches life is simply mistaken.
Even in the 1960s many understood that technological society is shallow, conformist and spiritually weak. That new inventions were becoming passé. That society in the USA had become a rootless cultural void. And especially, that materialism has little, if any, viability, meaning or ability to provide real satisfaction or more than fleetingly temporary gratification. It isn’t true that people have forgotten this – though most corporate media seems to have!
Maybe we can’t smash all the machines, or the state, but we can accept that the decline in consumerism we’re suddenly facing is a good thing. We can try to buy local products, limit corporate power and to not denigrate, degrade or disparage the poor. Then, and only then, might we become more truly enriched.