Occupying science: technology for the 99 percent

December 22, 2011

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment by Michael and Joyce Huesemann, New Society Publishers, 464 pp, $24.95.

Even to save the planet from climate change or to save the economy from the end of cheap oil, you can’t stop the march of technological progress, we’re often told. Whether it’s the personal car, industrial farming or nuclear power, once the genie’s out of the bottle, you just can’t squeeze him back in.

And anyway, we’re also told, even the most dangerous technologies are morally neutral. They can always be used for either good or evil. It just depends on who’s using them and for what. Thus, the answer to Hiroshima was “Atoms for Peace” and building out civilian nuclear power that would be too cheap to meter.

But today, the real answer to Hiroshima appears to be Fukushima. And the price for nuclear power appears to be somewhat higher, both in money and in safety, than scientists and the industry had originally led the public to believe.

Ditto for other technologies that were supposed to usher in a new age of progress beyond hunger and toil, ranging from cell phones to biotechnology to microwave ovens. If you look at all their unintended consequences, from cancer to climate change, it’s clear that all too often technologies cost society much more than their sticker price.

As people ask critical questions about more and more technologies at the very same time that Occupy Wall Street has drawn attention to the dangers of extreme economic inequality, the moment is perfect for a book like Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment.

An inside job

As the public loses ever more trust in authority figures from politicians to priests to pension fund managers, many citizens look increasingly to scientists as the last experts they can trust. That’s why it’s so powerful that Techno-Fix is written not by a humanities-type like my current favorite low-tech guru, agrarian-poet Wendell Berry, but by two PhD research scientists, husband and wife team Michael and Joyce Huesemann.

These environmental scientists know technology from the inside, and they blame scientists and technologists for serving their own egos and profits over the public interest.

The Huesemanns survey technology across society from labor savers that waste time to medicine that doesn’t heal to food that spreads hunger. And they find much technology wanting, especially cars and TV, the latter which they extend out to include the internet (where you’re reading this now!).

The authors bust the myth that science can be “pure” by showing how each major discipline today has a political or economic motivation: physics is aimed largely at enabling more advanced weaponry, chemistry serves the likes of DuPont and biology is mostly in thrall to Big Pharma. Just look at who funds the research. Then look at what they do with it.

The technologies that come out of basic scientific research are, of course, never value neutral. For example, when it comes to TV, the nastiness of the medium trumps any niceness in the message. Whether it comes to staying fit, thinking for yourself or loving your family, no matter what’s on tonight, TV won’t help. And think about this next time you’re watching Animal Planet:

Even if the message on TV is pro-environmental, TV viewing is intrinsically anti-environmental because it provides a substitute for experiencing nature first hand and because it encourages passivity, thereby undermining interest in environmental activism. In addition, because electronic media are able to make consumer products seem “more alive than people,” it is inherently biased toward materialistic consumerism, which is one of the causes of the environmental crisis.

People who love gadgets

But unlike one of those articles in Wired magazine that asks “when the robots take over, will they treat us kindly?” Techno-Fix doesn’t see new technology as unavoidable or somehow powered by its own internal evolution. Instead, the Huesemanns argue that society gets the technologies, and only the technologies, that our particular ruling elites want — those that increase the centralized power of the top one percent.

So, even after Fukushima, at least in the US nuclear power is still in, because it offers an endless supply of interesting intellectual challenges to powerful physicists while making electric power generation even more dependent on big, expensive plants that only the largest utilities can afford. Meanwhile, solar power from photovoltaic panels, which can be installed by a high-school dropout and which could give millions of homeowners control over their own energy, continues to labor against dismissive public policy and outright attacks like l’affaire Solyndra.

Even to save their own skins from eco-disaster or peak oil apocalypse, capitalists have shown that they won’t voluntarily give up profits to keep harmful technologies off the market. So the Techno-Fix authors call instead on their fellow scientists to police themselves and commit to a code of ethics where they would refuse to participate in life-destroying research like nuclear physics or genetic engineering — despite the lure of ego-gratification, prestige or grant money.

“Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action,” said Bertrand Russell. “It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions…Men’s collective passions are mostly bad; by far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry towards other groups. Therefore, at present, all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.”

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Erik Curren

Erik Curren is the publisher of Transition Voice. He co-founded Transition Staunton Augusta in December 2009 and serves as managing partner of the Curren Media Group, an online marketing company. He is also partner in a solar energy development company. He has served on the city council of Staunton, VA since July 2012.  

Tags: Media & Communications