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Thursday, September 10, 2015

Tech's Odd Conventional Wisdom

It is odd that the proposal technodevelopment could be driven by sustainability concerns is regarded as fanciful when our survival actually depends on it. It is also odd that the assumption technodevelopment will always be driven by military concerns is regarded as realistic when it actually threatens our annihilation. With such conventional wisdom, I don't like our odds.

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

Not sure if it's ever been the case that the most advanced technology in existence was in civilian hands. I dream of such a future, of course. How do you propose belling that particular cat?

Dale Carrico said...

A battle of the titans between the insurance industry and the military-industrial complex is an obvious candidate, tho' under capitalism that offers too many out of the frying pan and into the fire prospects. If Piketty's thesis that "shocks of war" are the only structural forces outside of revolution that arrest plutocratic wealth concentration opening possibilities for social democracy/democratic socialism, and we extend his thesis as he did not to suggest that anthropogenic climate change shocks might do the same, then that initial proposal of insurance versus military becomes a battle between democratizing and militarizing responses to climate catastrophe. Again, the dystopian variations seem too obvious and too plausible to bear, but the prospect of abiding equity-in-diversity has always been the long-shot worth fighting for and dying for and living for however long the odds, after all, hasn't it?