CHAPTER 12.
TECHNOLOGY AND GARDENWORLD
In the flow of technology and power, money and status, in a bath of fear and insecurity,
empires clashed and millions died in the 20th century. It is hard to recall the scale of those
events, given that contemporary events, such as Iraq, Grenada, are so much smaller scale,
and even Katrina is small in comparison to the great wars of the last century. But huge
movements are afoot today, stalking in like Eliot's London fogs. The flow of digitalized
property ownership, markets, people pushed off the land, and the new promises of new
bio and nano technology are flooding our old expectations..
The human species is successful, to the point of outdoing itself. We are in a terrible
balance between the technologies of living and the technologies of war. GardenWorld is aimed at
creating the conditions for a better balance, with much less war, and a meaningful approach to
population. Technology is not going away and it will either be used to further centralize power
and authority, or to help open it up, as in the promise of the Internet, and be a major part of
GardenWorld.
GardenWorld is not an anti technology project. There are too may of us, and it is too late.
We need the smart use of technology in all forms: biotech and nanotech at the lead, with an
Internet infrastructure. One danger of the Internet is that it gives democracy for all on line, and
democracy for none in the real world of land, food, energy and services.
The issue of balancing so that the environment, and humans both sujrvive, and beyond,
do well, will require smart design and lots of tolerance. Over reliance on protecting old structures
will get in the way of needed experimentation. Needed change requires full participation, and
could be cut short by authoritarian dominance. Nature and the humans need to work together,
with their dignity enhanced, in mutual respect and perhaps even love, as in the poets visions of
man and nature.
Humanity and technology are intrinsically bound together. Early technologies are easy to
forget – language, song, fire, pottery, weaving. Much was copied from the observation of other
species – how they hunt, dwell, organize, decorate themselves. Our current advanced
technologies are easily seen as extensions and elaborations on much earlier technologies. Internet
and voice over smoke signals, rocket launchers and slings, cars and horses: roads are still roads,
after many millennia.
The use of technology to enhance daily life is often overshadowed by war and power,
profit instead of community.. Humanity is in a balance between the technologies of life and the
technologies of war. New technologies have continually threatened to upset the balance and the
deciding factor is: who gets to make the choices? Our dependence on oil has invaded a previous
society and fundamentally changed its character at just about every point. Moreover it created a
new ensemble of corporations that, through their owners and regulations, have a powerful
determining effect on what our future course can be. As that industry and all who make a living
from it is threatened we find they are fighting with everything in their power to maintain their
economic dominance. As a shell executive said when asked by a reporter about green
technologies, “When the new green industries are mature we will buy them.”
There is no question but what rethinking tech and society is under way. I have long
admired the mayor and now ex mayor of Bogata, Enrique Peñalosa, who exhibits humanity and
imagination as he forthrightly questions the role ofthe automobile ("auto" implies it goes by
itself- better tocall it the oil-mobile).
Man With a Plan
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: As a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, who won wide praise for making the city
a model of enlightened planning, you have lately been hired by officials intent on
building world-class cities, especially in Asia and the developing world. What is the
first thing you tell them? In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have
cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A
sidewalk is a symbol of equality.
I wouldn’t think that sidewalks are a top priority in developing countries. The last
priority. Because the priority is to make highways and roads. We are designing cities for
cars, cars, cars, cars, cars. Not for people. Cars are a very recent invention. The 20th
century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building
much more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness.
[fn: from the NYT
The qustion of the control of technology has beena round for along time. What is often
missed is that the poblemis not the tech but those who inveest to develop it in ways that are self
rather than socailly serving. Technoogy is part of a solution to a real problem. Writers like Erik
Erikson and Erich Fromm shared a belief that humans have the instinctual energy of animals, but
not the instinctive hardwired solutions animals are born with. For humans a rigid pattern of
inheritance of the well adapted animals gets replaced with open-ended culture: beliefs, habits and
technology, Culture becomes the “second nature” that provides us humans with a way to live,
work, mate. Obviously, technology, from pottery and speech to the Internet and genetics, forms
the core of our “second nature” capacity. But the underlying emotional integrity, the integrity of
the instinctual, remains intact, despite whatever technologies emerge. Mood and mind altering
drugs can only play on the chromatic spectrum of feelings given by our inheritance. Genetic
modification, by playing with our DNA, and all efforts so far are for profit, is the new mouse in
the inkwell of the human story.
GardenWorld raises the issue to one of policy and choice – what kind of world do we
want our efforts to work toward? The more open culture of GardenWorld should support our
rethinking the mix, development priorities and ownership of technologies. My hope is that
shifting social awareness toward GardenWorld will lead to market corrections and make much of
this happen without much interference. Simply removing existing subsidies on old technologies
would do a great deal, though it is increasingly realized that these maynot be enough tomoveus
toward graefulsustainability.. Part of the reaosnwhy such changesare notenoughis that those "old
technologies" and "existing subsidies" are a very complex web of interwoven institutional
arrangement that are getting in the way of technical innovation for human good. [fn: see the
work of the economist Carlota Perez].
Freeman Dyson (see page XX for earlier quote) argues persuasively that three facts will
take us toward a new green civiliztion: solar energy, which is vastly distributed; genomic
innovations which can create crops that otherwise could not grow; and the Internet which
connect everyone and make knowledge of solar distribution and genomic inovations more
widely available, because of access to power and money, less meaningful. Being in the flow of
relevant information and sense of participating in the leading edge of the culture(s), have the
power to create a better future through the widespread distribution of the knowledge.
This optimistic view has to be seen in the context of the difficulty of governing society.
Dyson does not touchonthis issue. The tendency is toward centralization of wealth and power
through the use of technology. How inevitable is this? Are we locked in to a move towards soft
fascism, or is open more democratic heterarchy still a real possibility? The way we use
technology, and the way we make choices, will be crucial. Dyson'sargument is typical of
technological enthusiasts:our solution,widely adopeted,willsolve the problems. But this leaves
out how and by whomit will be adopted(andmof=dified). Technicalsolutioonsaredifferent
fombiological ones in that they stres survival alonga few variables, suchas more output of
elecricity. But nature looks at all the contingencies that arepresnt in its livingfield. As a
resultbiological "evolution" is muhch slower, but more accurate, than technical "evolution."
Bringing ina grater sensitivity to the full imnplication of a new tech, what are often called
"secondary consequences", will be very important in the future, or the population will turn
against tech in destructive rage (It had happened before, from the principled Luddites to those
who murderd Lavoisier)..
Technology plays a central role in GardenWorld, but by using its understandings to
enhance, not suppress, nature. The conquest of nature, its replacement by machines and sanitized
living, is the current official future. GardenWorld moves towards a balance and integration of
project, design, and problem solving, with an appreciation for the flow of the environment, the
seasons, and growing. Bio-mimicry, from products to arts, extends the natural and the technical
in mutually compatible ways. But this requires deep understanding and involvement with nature
and technology. I have met a number of young people, say at Planetworker meetings, who have
several degrees in diverse fields, say a first degree in technical and a second in ecological
approaches, and they have traveled the world, and worked in demanding projects in the poorer
regions, inner cities, or rugged environments. They are models of what we all need to learn.
Understanding technology is one key part. The problem is for a generation that grew up
with computers, games, cell phones and cars they never thought to try to repair, technology is
treated as a background reality, not something man made and political and financially managed.
A project such as that of the Dutch Architectural Firm gets at the immensity of what needs tobe
comsidered.
Perhaps MVRDV’s most ambitious theoretical exercise was the traveling computer
installation they called MetaCity/Datatown. Predicting that globalism and an
exploding planetary population will push certain regions throughout the world into
continuous urban fields, or megacities, MVRDV conceived a hypothetical city called
Datatown, designed solely from extrapolations of Dutch statistics. (“It is a city that
wants to be explored only as information; a city that knows no given topography, no
prescribed ideology, no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data.”) According
to its creators, Datatown was a self-sufficient city with the population of the United
States (250 million) crammed into an area the size of Georgia (60,000 square miles),
making it the densest place on earth. MVRDV then subjected this urban Frankenstein
to 21 scenarios to see how they would affect the built environment: What if all the
residents of Datatown wanted to live in detached houses? What if they preferred
urban blocks? What could be done with the waste? (Build 561 ski resorts.) What kind
of city park would be needed? (A million Central Parks stacked up over 3,884 floors.)
“The seas, the oceans (rising as a result of global warming), the polar icecaps, all
represent a reduction in the territory available for the megacity. Does that mean that
we must colonize the Sahel, the oceans or even the moon to fulfill our need for air
and space, to survive? Or can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of
what already exists?” {FN: NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08mvrdv-
t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&ref=magazine }
Once we understand the dynamics of mathematics, and its appeal to the compulsive prone
mind we all share, we can better understand the problem of why and how societies chose their
technologies. Technologies are attractive because they imply a degree of control that is mostly
illusory. I hope I was helpful in the Human nature, chapter in exploring this aspect of our nature.
Let’s face it; technologies replace the complex with the simple. No human invention is
more complex than a frog or even a blade of grass. The machine is designed to be coherent
without reference to its full environment, but only to the most limited aspects necessary for its
participation in some part of current society.. But the frog or blade of grass are clearly part of a
whole system of which the foreground and background are intimately interwoven, of seasons
predators and prey.
Both technology and corporations are simplification machines, replacing complex
process with simple ones in the case of tech, or taking complex outputs and reducing them to
simple inputs in the case of corporations (skills and culture and raw materials in - product and
profit out.)
Joseph Tainter, in his powerful 1990 book The Collapse of Complex Societies shows that
those who have power misuse the technologies available to them, seeking more power and profit,
seek ever more complex and expensive solutions to the next challenge facing their civilization.
Civilizations collapse because the increasing costs of complexity overtake increases in
productivity. The elites are the elites because they own the infrastructure of the state (as in GE,
Shell, and the Carlyle Group, Conagra and Citicorp) and, when things start looking bad, instead
of trying to fix the system, they ramp up their exploitation of it, to get the cash to survive, by
cutting costs, which further degrades the systems performance and capacity to innovate.Watch
how those institutions re able to take the federal budget and bail themselves out, as has been
happening with bear Sterns and others.
Some argue that technologies are neutral, but almost all invention is done up with a
market in mind (Or, in earlier times, kings and ministers). There is a web of feedback such that
as society chooses technologies, society changes, which in turn changes its priorities for new
technologies. The result is not a clear causal chain but a true mess of feed-backs and resistances.
A few sellers, a few buyers, and a trend can be set. Take tobacco and compare the incredible
costs and the extraordinary effort that society had to take to reverse a decision made by a
minority of the population as what was ceremonial in the Native American World, became big
business, stimulating slavery and shipping and land settlement (The first slave were brought to
the US for tobacco farming) in the British Empire. So too for the car, the phone, and a computer.
Stories of their deep penetration in the society is not a story of decisions taken either in a
democratic or a more authoritarian way, but based on the small number of decisions made by
critically placed people, decisions amplified by the “ah ha’s” of multitudes seeing local
opportunities, such as having a car, a cigarette, or a cell phone, and avoiding thinking about
systemic costs. The railroad is a good example of how an invention, improved over time,
provided the opportunity, and then men with means brought together political and economic
arrangements to make the railroads happen. The outcome was social good and social damage.
[fn: see the wonderful exploration of the early observers of the railroads in Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden.]The choice was made by economic opportunity which engendered new
economic opportunity – realistically available to only a few. i[i]
In traditional societies leaders feel themselves to be part of a culture and community, and
the choices they make reflect shared tastes while also enhancing their power. The leaders and the
led remain part of a coherent culture of interdependencies. Take for example the Italian hill town
or city state such as Florence. Things cohere. The leaders can see from their windows the people,
the essential farmers and potential soldiers, all those the leaders are counting on to enhance the
city.
Industrialization maintained this pattern, because it required workers and it required
managers to hold together complex systems. Information systems weaken that connection.
Late industrialization broke apart the interdependencies of industrial owners with
managers and workers – first to be noticed were the missing workers, then the disappearing
managers, but they really lost out together, as we now see in the de-middleclassification of so
many who used to feel quite secure. In modern times, given that the economy of capital tends to
set the capitalist in the midst of his owning, choices made fit the limited sense of taste and
opportunity offered to the rich: Hamptons, Paris, Resort Islands, shopping, cars, boats, clubs and
spas. and this world of choice is not inclusive of the rest of the surrounding population. It is
remarkable how many trophy houses do not have places to create art or otherwise experiment
with aspects of culture.
The result is a continually distorted community. Cell phones on airplanes is a good
example of how the balance between economic opportunity, customers and annoyed non-users
will play out. Look at the way FedEx made us feel good by allowing us to look up a delivery on
the Internet – saved them from having to answer the phone. Much more irritating are the many
phone button choices necessary to get to a correct line and then a long wait. In these cases
corporations are passing off the costs of transactions onto the customers. Sometimes increasing
but more often decreasing customer well-being.
Tolls on highways, and higher plane fares, play into class lines. With GPS it will be
possible (London is doing this) to tax on the basis of use, but since the rich can continually move
rules and incomes to their advantage, they can cover their new costs in such a way that at the
same time increased costs are born by the middle class downward.
We do not have any democratic mechanism for deciding what technologies will dominate
society. People used to define themselves as citizens where voting was the way they made their
important choices. Today that identity is fading and replaced by that of the consumer who makes
choices with dollars. The technologies that win do so because of the dollar votes of corporations,
by their high payoff, and the manipulation of regulations, from bandwidth to building codes.
The imagination of the reader can further integrate how the quantification of society and
money, the mechanization of things, and the impoverishment of people all go together. We have
created the dominance of the economy with all that is good and distressing about its dominance
as nearly the “only game in town” in the modern world – “Machine Dreams”.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that the only reason we have not been visited by intelligent life
from other parts of the universe is because no species has been able to develop the technology to
get here along with a strong enough social system that prevented collapse through technology.
Nuclear war always precedes intergalactic travel.
The dominant image of tech is of its availability and its consumers, and the benignly
unaffected. But “choice” is limited by the many barriers, financial, regulatory, national
boundaries, and local community norms that allow for, or keep out, each technology. Home
ownership and computer access are examples of apparent openness and universality, but with
real limits. Moreover the consequences are not distributed just among the consumers. Dee Hock,
who started VISA said “The purpose of business is to separate the consumer from the conditions
of production.” That is, bad working conditions and environmental impacts are part of the cycle
but unseen.
A problem is that key trends associated with our current economy, especially the
marginalization and impoverishment of too many people and the destructive effects on the
environment, probably are not reversible under the current rules. The forces making the rich
richer and the rest poorer are systemic and powerful. Powerful because the motives to make it
this way are huge payoffs in dollars and power. I am hopeful, but skeptical, that the major trends
can be reversed without some more systemic shift in regulations (note, not “to regulate”, because
it is regulations we already have, such as oil drilling rights, import restrictions (today it is Virgin
Air that is prohibited from competing with American carriers in the US).
I think we see that we need, for our sanity, an alternative path – actually system - for the
development and deployment of technologies, a complex path large enough to be a viable
alternative to the momentum of the current system. I say “large enough” to make clear that
partial solutions are not strong enough to create a new set of rules. Government financing of
elections, rather than getting the media exposure that benefits the largest donors to a campaign,
might be one of the essentials, lessening the power of money in congressional choices.
It is not going to be sufficient to just add on mechanisms which alter the balance but keep
the current forces the same. This is the approach of many of the non-profit socially motivated
organizations – they thrive on opposition to institutions they assume will stay in place.
In the county where I live, the green progressives are against the use of “packaged waste
disposal systems” because they would allow people to develop on land that otherwise is
unbuildable (lack of septic system possibilities). The result is that progressive environmentalists
are against a technology that would help the environment. But the county manages point out that
the only people applying for permission to use the new systems are indeed those who have land
that otherwise can’t be developed. Leadership of brining the two together to work a deal –
permits only for land that would be conventionally suitable – does not emerge. Hence the shift to
a new technology that, system wide, would be an advance in terms of costs to owners and to a
better use of water which could be returned to the proximal land after processing
In face of the general cynicism of youth based on the idea that money is more important
than ideals that would move our wealth in humane directions, I think it is still true that most
engineering and science students and professionals have some view that technology and science
will be of human benefit. They also believe that the fruits of science and the great inventions of
mankind should be owned by society and not by individuals or corporations. When pressed, they
will have a hard time supporting this belief with arguments. They tend to think that individuals
are real and a society is no more than the aggregate of its individuals. So they will tend to
support the idea that, yes, if something exists, it must be owned by somebody or some group of
people smaller than that of society itself. The very meaning of "us" has shifted. If one is a
member of several generations of the well adapted middle class, " us" no longer includes a sense
of citizenship that spreads further outward into the population of different geographic origins and
economic circumstances. Newcomers, either as children born in the nation, or immigrants
choosing to come into it, align with the existing society, and adapt to living within a narrow
sense of "us".
Probably neither democracy nor a government of the expert elites can make adequate
choices about technology. Democracy does not frame the issues, and elites frame the issues for
their own career enhancing interests. Here we are on the leading edge of the need for new
thinking about governance. Many, but not enough people, are thinking about the ethics and
wisdom of technical interventions. It started with Hippocrates thinking about the ethics of
medicine and saying, “First do no harm”. We now have the “Cautionary”ii[ii] principle which is a
way of asking for more time to understand the implications of what we’re doing. “Sustainability”
is another way of saying let’s keep doing what we’re doing without rocking the boat. The shift
from “sustainability” to “sustainable development” is a rhetorical opening for a Trojan horse of
keeping things the way they are. Things have to change in order to remain the same.” The values
behind the idea of sustainability are guidelines but hard to apply in practice. What is sustainable
for a bank is not the same thing that is sustainable for a small scale organic Farmer, or for a
salmon fishermen. And “cautionary” just slows down the process which might not be the best
when facing dramatic climate change or the discovery of a severe new threat, such as bird flu.
The problem of tech is profound, and vastly limits other aspects of life. It is fair to say
that politics is the supreme form of social innovation from early empire days, through the
renaissance when authoritarian nation states came to dominate. But technology has undone this
dominance, and it may be that technology is the determining fact of our lives now the way
politics was in the past.
In fact politics now is just a tool bought and manipulated by the combination of tech and
money. The implications here are powerful and suggest that GardenWorld will come about more
by thinking about technologies than by politics. Technology, because of its interconnections, is
increasingly important to governance and hence to the combination of state and corporations.
Technology is an extension of the body. Just as it would not make sense to discuss the
meaning of a disembodied hand or eye, it does not make sense to talk about the meaning of
technology without reference to the person or persons or community of which it is an extension.
Hand and eye only take on significance when seen as a part of a person, and persons in a
community of symbols and discourse, and community in the environment to which it has adapted
itself.
But technology tends to remove us from the body and the history. The way we slaughter
an animal or make wine were and still are complex processes, but the way we interact with them
as consumers removes us from the organic, soul making (strong feelings that provoke reflection
and awe about “nature”), and experience enhancing ‘meaning” of the use. At the same time we
have created “jobs” where labor is paid minimally to do these things, not to feed a family or a
community, but working ten hour days cutting up cattle or chickens, which have been treated
badly through their life, for unseen millions.
Computer manufacturing is, so far, a very dirty business, and hence is located in parts of
Texas, Mexico or Asia, where folks like us will rarely show up.
Many people live difficult lives and their economic difficulties I like the complexity of
the socially use of technology.. A local clinic sees a mother who has five children; two by a first
marriage and three by her current husband. All three parents have different racial national
backgrounds. The mother’s mother lives with them all in a two bedroom apartment of a total of
600 square feet. The grandmother is there to help but is tense about the racial differences and
takes it out on the children. All three of the adults living in the apartment work part time jobs in
order to survive and the husband has two fulltime “part time” jobs – that is, jobs paid by the hour
with zero security in local grocery stores. His main aim is to get enough money for a down
payment on a House. Technology for them is simple: car, phone, the television, a shared washing
machine, heat and air conditioning. We need to be aware of how in the web of events and other
choices of technologies by the rest of us effect the many people whose live are like this.
In the county where this family lives population growth is predicted to be 30% by the
year 2030. Yet all existing housing is more than filled and to new permits are very few. Land use,
population, technology, and the economy set the conditions we have to cope with.
The major political issue in this century may be technology. It goes to the core of war,
economy, the environment, and poverty. Nanotechnology, hydrogen cells and biotech for
medicines, foods, and growing things like continuous wood panels, will arrive rapidly. The issue
is that these technologies will be mechanisms of money transfer to the owners, not social benefit.
They are high cost investments, and owners will seek power and rewards. In order to work these
technologies of course must attract enough customers, managers, and regulators, but that will
always be a subset of society, not the whole. Every change (and not changing) has winners and
losers.
As we face climate change we can see how hard it is to make changes because the losers
in that case, traditional lines of business, have a lot, they perceive, to lose.
During the Y2K period, much work was done inside organizations to cope. This made
Y2K a “non-event” by actually making it a big deal.iii[iii] What I learned, working as a
consultant where Y2K one of the emerging issues, was that with Y2K accountability could be
assigned internally to the organizations. With climate change, that is not nearly as possible, so I
think dealing with climate change will be much harder. We are beginning to see movement
however at the more macro political and economic levels that are beginning to address the
problem. We will see (and participate willing or no).
An image of GardenWorld as the goal, the design principle, would help clarify what is at
stake in climate change, and provide guidance and motive to make climate change innovation
more attractive and livable.
Dealing with climate change will require lots of flexibility and innovation and critical
thinking. Just recently there has been discussion of the problem of planting trees as CO2 traps –
the reality is that trees absorb heat and heat the atmosphere more than offsetting the effects of the
trapped co2 sustains cooling.
Technology and the mechanical often are seen as repressing life. GardenWorld is an
approach that highlights the organic as we learn to integrate tech in ways that enhance rather than
replace nature. The aim is a better world for all, through the use of human reason in the context
of compassion and imagination under the guidelines, the design template, of the human life cycle
remembering that technology is only part of the human condition and only partly constitutive of
human nature.
To see timelines of potential new technologies see
http://www.futureswatch.org/Timeline.htm
i[i] See the wonderful survey of early reactions to the railroads and the locomotive in the first chapter
of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden
ii[ii] See Wikipedia for a good outline.
iii[iii] I was very involved and wrote a newsletter. To see my recent thinking see
www.doug.pbwiki.com/y2k
