Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	July 19, 2007

Technophilia, Virtual Communities and the World of Ends A lot of my friends and readers are technophiles. They believe that social networking and other technologies can make the world a much better place. I'd like to believe it, but I don't. The industrial economy is rigged. It is not a 'market' economy or a 'free' economy. It is designed to reduce us to mere, insatiable consumers -- of politicians' promises with our tax dollars, of overpriced, imported crap products, of 'education', of packaged information and entertainment 'products', of health treatments etc. We are given just enough cash and credit to keep us addicted, and we are isolated from serious social interaction to make us compliant. No great conspiracy. That's just how the world works best when the objective is to maximize profit and GDP. We are not people in this economy. We are consumers, taxpayers, students, audiences, patients. Numbers. Demographics. The natural economy, the one we keep striving towards because it's, well, natural, is inherently social, which is one of the things we like about it. It engages us as customers, citizens, learners, participants, as peers in the collective enterprise of living and making a living. It disintermediates the robber barons, the corrupt politicians, the boring teachers, the mindless media, and healthcare professionals who profit from our illness. They are not needed in a natural economy. There is no place for them. It is not surprising, then, that we are attracted to entrepreneurship, to networked rather than hierarchical organizations, to the idea of community. Small is beautiful, and we are social creatures by nature. The idea of a World of Ends is that we don't need middlemen to do what is important. With the Internet, with social networking, we can co-produce what we need together, for ourselves, with nothing skimmed or suboptimal. It is suggested, and we would love to believe, that the World of Ends is evolving, slowly, under the corporatist radar, waiting to achieve sufficient momentum that it cannot be stopped. In a fully developed natural economy, we would all be members of self-selected, self-managed natural enterprises, and of self-selected, self-managed natural intentional communities. Natural enterprises and our natural community would be self-sufficient and self-governed, and as members of them we would look after our own learning, recreation, health and well-being. It's a great idea, and we need to work towards it. But there are two problems with how we're approaching it now: Technology alone will never get us there. Technology is a facilitator of social change, not a catalyst for it. We need to want to change, we need to have to change, before we will. And there is no indication, in history or in what is happening today, that we want or need to change that profoundly. The glue that holds natural communities together is physical and emotional, not virtual or intellectual. To make them work, and to make them sustainable, they must be part of a massive relocalization of the way we live and the way we make a living. Long distance social relationships may be pleasant and instructive, but they are not the stuff of true community. As useful as the Internet is in letting us practice social arts, it may actually be an impediment to creating real, sustainable community, something we can depend on, live on. The economics of natural enterprise and natural community are inherently local, geographically centred on physical place. I know this is hard to explain, which is perhaps why I keep putting off trying to express it. I understand the two problems above intuitively more than intellectually. We can develop software virtually, and we can undertake artistic collaborations remotely. But we cannot build a whole economy on fragile, multiple virtual relationships. Most of what our economy is about is atoms, not bits. It is quality, locally produced food and clothing and building materials. It is creation and recreation that we participate in, in person. Ultimately we will have to abandon the illusion that we can be part of a global, virtual, ever-changing 'electronic' community, that we can be citizens of the whole world, that social networks and technology can change the world. Eventually we have to come back to place, to true community, and make it work, face to face. The world we will face by the end of this century, a world of cascading crises and horrific scarcity, will not allow us to play with technology. This technology is fragile and needs huge amounts of energy stolen from future generations to work at all. We cannot afford it. This future world, a world of rust and reclamation, will force us to face hard truths. Our future social networks will be held together with flesh and sweat, not messages and VoIP. It's time we got down to the business of figuring out how our descendants will live, and make a living, when the ephemeral constructs of our rapacious, delusional age are gone. It's important to get started, with love and without illusion. Here, now, in this place. The time for toys is over. Category: Technology and Society 9:23:59 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2007 Dave Pollard. Last update: 01/08/2007; 9:29:27 PM.