Universal Insanity
If you feel unable to cope with the pace of socio-cultural change or reconcile obvious contradictions and feel social and personal injustices have grown rather than shrunk over the last 30 years of neoliberal economic globalisation with an unprecedented rate of cultural change and social engineering, then you maybe you are not mad, society is. Opinion leaders in the prosperous world herald material growth and greater reliance on immature technology as progress. Opponents of material growth are often lampooned as luddites, conservatives and green fascists somehow opposed to technological progress. Yet if the advocates of eternal material growth based their economic theories on hard science, they’d understand that what may go wrong will go wrong. It’s only a matter of time, for sixty years of mass consumerism represent just a short chapter in the history of humanity. Civilisations have risen and fallen before, but never have we experienced such an extreme level of planetary interdependence.
Clearly technologies can have good and bad applications, e.g. advances in farming, food distribution, sanitation and medicine may have reduced infant mortality and extended lifespans in most of the world, but may also increase our dependence on greedy multinationals and remote technocrats, lead to pharmaceutical addiction, weakened our immune system through drug resistance and obesity through over-indulgence as we transition from an age of abundance to an era of technocratic overreach. Information technology could be a great tool for education, research and democratic engagement, but also for unscrupulous business practices, mind control and hyper-surveillance.
Unless otherwise specified, yours truly, Neil Gardner, is the author of all articles here. My views and analysis have evolved since I started a modest blog in 2001 and I welcome any feedback.
You can follow me on Twitter at @outsider63 .