Hay Foot, Straw Foot, Turning Away
Mass technology has become, in Langdon Winner's formulation, autonomous. It constitutes an implicit politics, but one so pervasive that we never think to debate it, any more than the fish debate water. Where was the mass movement demanding the blasphemous release of genetically modified organisms into the planetary ecosystem? When was the plebiscite that decided to shift the mode of discourse from the linguistic to the visual, at a dramatic cost in complexity of expression? Where are the mobs clamoring for the right to watch Star Television after a hard day in the sweatshop while their vernacular forms of subsistence are undermined and perish? My Luddite cohorts and I would argue that these radical changes of life and livelihood demonstrate the political bias of the technologies that induced them. Yet where does technology figure in politics as arrayed from left to right?
Jay Kinney
review of Turning Away From Technology by Stephanie Mills
Whole Earth Summer 2000
Jay Kinney.com
