Friday, October 9, 2015

Remediation


The dam holds back the river, creating temporary stillness where before existed either rapids or no water at all.

The intermittent stream flows sometimes much, sometimes none. Not in the middle, the dam's reality.

The equilibrium is not punctuated sufficiently with a dam. The locks may open when the torrent comes knocking on the door, but can they open fast enough?

The river tugs on. Begging its surroundings to come, swim down to ocean. Will we? Waiting has its virtues.

We see through the dam, to the forest waiting beyond. We know that the forest came before the dam, but can we be sure that it comes after? Technology says no in its eternal quest for self preservation and expansion. Technology does not know, it comprehends only what we feed it, and we feed it forests enough to understand that forests are expendable in the face of progress and growth.



The culture of progress demands forests, demands rivers, consumes and forgets them as the world of electricity and rectangles pervades their worldview.

The culture of forgetfulness, of moving rapidly from one technology to the next, flittering from one entertaining moment to the next. The capacity for amusement is immense. True knowledge of self forgotten for the industrial entertainment of TV and the depths of the internet anti-social media.
I OWN YOU.
Turn it off. 
Can we turn it off? Or are we too deep down the technological rabbit hole that holds an amusing depth of vice and narcissism?

Business as usual, for now. 

The question remains, if this is the path, where does knowledge diverge from progress? Where does sustainability diverge from technology?

Why?

1 comment:

  1. "...We live today in a world in which we’ve been struck low, perhaps lower than ever before. Unwitting agents of our own demise, unable to control the immense technologies we so arrogantly believed were ours, incapable of exerting the rational collective will necessary to save our civilization from destruction, we find ourselves reduced to something less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we attribute to plants..."
    -Roy Scranton

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