Dead Zero is a
village in northern New Mexico that means as much to the corporate economy as
Grenada meant to geopolitics. Yet in
Chimayó, amid chile fields and weavers’ looms, we reside in the eye of
technological globalization. The expanded
freeway -- with its spanking-new casino resorts, golf courses, and gas stations
-- has long since arrived. Then came the
telecommunications plot to erect 11 microwave towers, one atop the roof of each
of the schools in the district, just feet from the brain cells of the
children. The village pulled together to
beat that one -- but a year later T-Mobile threw a tower up during the dark of
night in the heart of the village’s historic plaza. Just then we learned that the open lands to
the north of the village, under the long-time care of the Bureau of Land
Management, would soon be a 60,000-acre
international “Fun Park” for ATV rampaging.
And now Windstream is bringing fiber optic to pipe WiMAX into every poor
adobe home and trailer.
“Those who are in the grip of this myth
imagine that with an increasing budget for scientific R&D” -- Lewis
Mumford’s 1962 prophesy was dead-on -- “with a more voluminous productivity,
augmented by almost omniscient computers and a wider range of antibiotics and
inoculations, with a greater control over our genetic inheritance, with more
complex surgical operations and transplants, with an extension of automation to
every form of human activity, mankind will achieve –- what?”[i]
Dead
Zero is Everywhere.
everwhereploototproosteroockxbrookkbrantoumwhaalzzzfifuuurrwhhi
Yes, the
front has lengthened, almost to infinity.
In 1988 scientists warned that humanity had just ten years before the
ecological devastation caused by harmful technologies would be so advanced the
planet would not be able to recuperate.[ii] 1997 came and went. No one, it seems, had the courage to mention
that the time frame had elapsed. In 2006
Al Gore, backed by the research of NASA climatologist James Hansen, said it
again: we have ten years before it will be too late.[iii]
Andrew
Kimbrell got a bee under his technology-criticism bonnet coming out of that
session. He wanted to publish a
magazine, and sure enough Techné, a
beautiful rag showcasing analysis, commentary, and poetry, made its fleeting
passage across the literary sky – just the one issue -- only to crash just as
we as a group were destined to do. The
very last gathering took place in a bed-and-breakfast in Washington, D.C. in
1996.
By the
mid-2000’s, who among us could overlook that the brilliance of our collective
mind had faded before the apparently more
brilliant light behind the computer screen?
Or that many of us had not even communicated in ten years? I began to feel antsy about the demise of our
anti-tech camaraderie and its political potential. I also sensed that, even worse, the rubrics
of our analysis -- so clearly in lineage with what the Luddites had begun in
the early 1800’s -- had drifted like a wisp of cotton candy into a firmament
now over-crammed by the electromagnetic emissions of wireless technologies.
I call
Stephanie and Kirkpatrick. Stephanie is
living on her ten-acre woodland in northern Michigan, working on an homage to
fellow small-is-beautiful activist Robert Swann (published in 2010 as On Gandhi’s Path) -- and she is consumed
with the coming collapse of nature and civilization.
Why did
the Jacques Ellul Society disband? I ask.
Steph harbors a sense that the group petered out because the funding
petered out. The benefactor of the
effort had pulled his support so he could purchase tracts of pristine land in
Chile, and therefore have a direct impact on the survival of the planet. “I think intellectual conclaves are worth
doing if only to gather and tone up the widely-scattered intellectuals
involved,” she says. “But those are
expensive activities. And we were fortunate to have been
participants. Now we have to maintain that perspective in our several
settings, along with doing the homely work of surviving at the margins.”[iv]
My take
is that when the “new technologies” came on, they reconfigured the patterns of
connectivity. Communities that had made their way via land line, letters,
and meetings disintegrated. Folks like us modern-day Luddites were
confused, left behind. Or we were left striving, against the grain, to
catch up. Or we fell into new groupings connected by new means. Or
we simply became isolated in a world of near-total technology encasement.
Kirk has
yet another angle. He had gone on from his media-catching Rebels against the Future to write a
history drawing linkages between the development of steam engines and the
building of the American empire, and in terms of the marketplace, it had
bombed. His epiphany was to skip over
the technology issue that might push geeks and computer advocates away from
activism, particularly those from the up-and-coming generations who know
nothing but the digital world. From his home in Cold Spring, New York, and
later in South Carolina, he now focuses on the politics of secession from the
U.S.A.
Kirk
tells me that the computer chip has “swept over the social and economic worlds
with a tsunamic power within a decade, breezed past Y2K, and penetrated every
profession, every setting, every means of communication, every transaction,”
becoming essentially … inescapable.
“How
could any critique of technology overcome that?” he continues at a low-level
burn. “What sense did it make to go on
saying that there will be ugly consequences, that there are terrible downsides?
Even if anyone wanted to believe it -- and I think many did, or as the New Yorker said,
‘there’s a little bit of the Unabomber in all of us’ — no one, individually or
collectively, had the power to stop the technological onslaught. It was
the way of life chosen by the economic and governmental powers-that-be, with
all the money and all the laws, and it could not be stopped.” [v]
I
propose that the inevitable internal dynamics of our specific group might have
contributed to its demise as well. I use the word “inevitable” because
empire sets up a class system: some have access to resources more than others;
some have more utilitarian knowledge than others; some, more money.
In the Jacques Ellul Society this dynamic played out as a gap between a clique
that made the behind-the-scenes decisions -- and the others who came to the
gatherings to learn and share. Too, a few were working the scene to raise
funds for their own projects, which to my mind was disruptive. And
since we hadn’t laid out an ethic of respect, gossiping and back-stabbing
happened.
Kirk’s
response is quick and fierce.
“I doubt
gossiping and back-stabbing brought us down!” he quips. “The truth is … we LOST!!
The other side WON.”
He is
right, of course. We lost. Touted, even among environmentalists and
progressive governments, as the new “green” energy, nuclear power is making a
come-back – and with it, nuclear weapons.
The U.S. President who ran a campaign on a Peace-in-Iraq platform merely
redirects the U.S. military toward Afghanistan, and small countries are hot on
the trail to develop nuclear capability.
Meanwhile, genetically-engineered species have infiltrated even the most
remote corn fields in the highlands of Oaxaca, where corn is sacred. Save a few stretches of Third World terrain
in the most down-and-out countries, the world’s
military-cum-telecommunications-industry has paved the planet with layer upon
layer of microwave emissions -- and stands on the verge of placing a Blackberry
in the hands of every human being. Concomitant
to that reality, state surveillance has accomplished an in-reach so complete
that hardly a conversation by anyone on the planet is not being
documented. Truly, the “new
technologies” that sat on the horizon of our 1970’s-‘90’s Luddite-inspired visions
are now fully and completely woven into the New World Order. “Textual mind” has taken over -- and
“techno-fascism” has morphed into the accepted norm.
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Lewis
Mumford, “Prologue to Our Time.”
[ii] James
Hansen, Testimony. Washington DC :
United States
[iii] James
Hansen, “Global Warming: Is There Time to Avoid Disastrous Human-made Climate
Change?” Lecture at National
Academy Los Angeles : Paramount Classics and Participant Productions, 2006.
[iv] Chellis
Glendinning, Stephanie Mills, and Kirkpatrick Sale, “Three Luddites Talking….
On a Computer!” www.counterpunch.org,
May 29-31, 2009.
[v] Chellis
Glendinning, Stephanie Mills, and Kirkpatrick Sale, “Three Luddites.”
