I am in awe of day to day miracle that modern technology has grown into. The human mind that can make possible digital communication, the internet, wifi. Now we can contribute to
better global human rights, we can connect with people all over the world, we can run our televisions through digital boxes that need no wires... I look at the phone in my hand I'm playing Block'd on, and marvel at the casual use of this high tech wonder we all hold in our hands every day.
It amazes me. Intimidates me.
And part of me thinks, isn't this an age old human story, man's fear of his own creativity, his longing for power, and the downfall it brings when the invention gets out of his own control? The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Frankenstein, Pandora, A Space Odyssey... oh. I just went searching for more examples and found
someone has written it already.
My thoughts are on the discussions of the dangers of wifi, both queried and dismissed in equal measure -of the high rate of cancer amongst the gardaí, who all work under communication masts, of children in schools beside them all day. Of nuclear waste in our seas, in our rain, epic disasters in Chernoble, and Japan, even problems in England that people understate, hush up. Holes in the ozone layer, sick children. Cancer, cancer, cancer. Could we live without plastic? Can we live with it?
I came across an excellent essay on our pollution of the world, and ensuing toxicity of the placenta and breastmilk. Life threatened at its most basic stage. I know dolphins are dying because their mother's milk carries so many pollutants - why assume this isn't happening to us, too?
Heidegger diagnosed the dangers of technology not as a problem with the tech-
nological implements, but with the basic attitudes and limitations of modern human
beings:
The threat to [humans] does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal
machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted the
human being in [his or her] essence. The truth of enframing threatens human beings
with the possibility that it could be denied to them to enter into a more original revealing
and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. Thus where enframing reigns,
there is danger in the highest degree.
The insidiousness of chemical technologies is that they operate on the substructure of visible and temporal experiences: they cannot be directly experienced and they
appear in the food chain long after their makers have died. In this respect, chemi-
cal technology functions on the “occult,” i.e., on the hidden spatio-temporal level,
of our organic being. The “danger” in Heidegger’s sense lies in the “enframing”
control that we apply to the micro-organismic level without understanding the con-
sequences of our manipulation. I am reminded of Goethe’s poem, “The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice,” in which the apprentice uses magic to animate a broom to fetch water
for him, and the broom brings more and more water into the house. Not knowing
the magic words to break the spell, the apprentice breaks the broom only to have
now two brooms carry water into the already flooded house.
In his later years, Heidegger came to understand the challenge and promise of
technology as the possibility that humans might reveal the world in a new and more
truthful way:
The essential unfolding of technology gives man entry into something which, of himself,
he can neither invent nor in any way make. For there is no such thing as a man who
exists singly and solely on his own.
keeping watch over the unconcealed and the concealed is the possibility and the call
of the project of technology. The saving power arrives alongside the danger when
human beings understand that there is a transcendent dimension beyond human
control. We don't exist singly and solely on our own. The placental imagination
challenges us to widen our scope beyond the human being and grasp our existence
as entwined with the forces of nature and the invisible web of relations between
human and nonhuman beings.
It's a good essay, worth reading if you have time, you can find it
here. It does not conclude optimistically, however.
I have been derailed by finding other people's better elaborations than mine on this topic! My basic point? We're amazing, but we're all fucked. Moving too fast, bunching priorities in the wrong places, failing, failing to notice what else we sacrificed, what we are made up of and how we're affected, in spirit, in flesh.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, children. And don't call me paranoid for being suspicious of chemical laced shampoo and pesticides.
Like the sign on the new road where I grew up said,
